starcraft said: DMeisterJ said: starcraft said: Wow. I didn't know there would be no multiplayer. Thats awesome. There arn't enough great single player experiences these days. @DMeisterJ. It's ok, I forgive you You forgive me! I should be forgiving you. How praytell is this game shaping up to be a great game and there hasn't been a preview yet... According to you, this game will be mediocre [talking about your thread for the relative lack of info/previews of Killzone 2] Lol.  But this game actually has a moderately interesting premise, and the developers have a history of success. Killzone has a horrible predeccessor, and a stock standard people vs non-people story.

You're correct. 

I should have thought about that.

It is quite possible this game will suck. It's just unlikely, and there is nothing we know yet that would point to this game being bad.

 "With the approach that they are taking" - The only approach that I see being taken is that they're not talking about the game. Now, I'm not implying that the game will be bad (infact, I believe quite the opposite); but, usually, when a devloper/publisher keeps quiet about a game... the game sucks (read: Lair).

Microsoft bought exclusivity on this game based on the concept, possibly a tech demo, and the studios previous
titles. They had no idea at that point about the quality of the games final release. 

All fair points.  I guess we'll wait and see.

This is an interesting faq about the game.

http://brightfalls.net/alan-wake-faq/

This game is shaping up to be one of the consoles best games.

Remedy has four main design goals with Alan Wake:

1) Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller.
2) Alan Wake introduces lighting as a new field in game mechanics.
3) Alan Wake has a cinematic story that takes place in a vast, open-ended environment.
4) Alan Wake is a game that has to earn 90+ scores.

“First three of the goals have never been attempted anywhere in the form that we’re aiming at” according to Alan Wake’s producer Lasse Seppänen. “The final item, quality, is still the most important. Nothing else matters unless we can put together an excellent game.”

In reference to the exclusivity of the game, it appears the developers want to produce the game for Vista and 360 so they can concentrate on making the best possible game.

Taken from http://brightfalls.net/alan-wake-faq/

Is Alan Wake exclusive to Windows Vista? If so why? #

Petri Järvilehto had this to say on the official Alan Wake forums (18/05/06):

“I’ll confirm that Alan Wake is Vista and 360 exclusive. I know some people have reacted strongly to that, but for us this was one of the key decisions that will allow us to create the best possible game.

We’ve locked this down a while ago, and being able to focus on fewer platforms means that the game is going to kick more ass than ever before. By going with Vista, we don’t have to compromise everything to the lowest common PC denominator and since we’re not doing a PS3 version we can go all out with PC and 360 multithreading, HDR rendering etc. This focus benefits the tech and game design immensely.

We’re really sorry if some end up missing the game because of our platform choice, but in the end of the day we *must* base our decisions on what will let us create the best possible game. That’s just how Remedy as a team works: we’re passionate about creating something unique. Alan Wake is still our IP and we drive the creative control, but working with Microsoft gives us unprecedented levels of development support, testing resources and so on.

But… as they say, the proof is in the pudding. You guys are going to be the best judges on whether the calls we’ve made have been the right ones. We haven’t really shown anything on what we’ve been up to in the past year. Once we do, it’ll be up to you to see whether our work has been worthwhile.”

DMeisterJ said: starcraft said: Wow. I didn't know there would be no multiplayer. Thats awesome. There arn't enough great single player experiences these days. @DMeisterJ. It's ok, I forgive you You forgive me! I should be forgiving you. How praytell is this game shaping up to be a great game and there hasn't been a preview yet... According to you, this game will be mediocre [talking about your thread for the relative lack of info/previews of Killzone 2]

To be fair, the studio behind Alan Wake did produce Max Payne, IMO one of the most underrated games of the past decade.

On the other hand, Guerrilla Games produced... Killzone... Not so good. 

And Guerrilla Games was an independent developer, but Sony saw something they liked enough to buy the company (not that i'm suggesting KZ2 will be better than AW, just making a point).

OT:  As a fan of Max Payne's style, I was reasonably interested in this game, but if it is going to be Vista only then they can f*** right off.

"By going with Vista, we don’t have to compromise everything to the lowest common PC denominator "

Bulls***. They have obviously been paid by MS to make it Vista only as an incentive to upgrade. It didn't work with Halo 2 and it won't work with this. What "compromises" would they have to make for it to run on XP? The "compromise" of having the game run much better due to XP not suffering from Vista's memory hogging requirements?

No games run better on Vista. Games that run perfectly with 1GB RAM in XP need 2GB to run at the same level in Vista. As a gaming platform, Vista has proved itself to be utterly worthless.

@ rocketpig

I don't know why you say Max Payne is underrated when it was a massive commercial success and got 90%+ from all the major review sites/mags (it has a rating of 89% on gamerankings and metacritic, but was brought down by a ridiculous review that gave it 30%).

Lets wait until the embaro is gone, before we make negative comments. Alan Wake is one of the most anticipated games this year, and even this gen by alot of Survival Horror fans out there, and if it does pull off what it's setting out to do (Psycological survival/horror in an open, sandbox world), could be revolutionary. Or it could be Two Worlds.

But lets wait to make bad comments, shall we? It's not like Remedy is a bad, unknown company that everyone should love to bash.

I call Max Payne underrated because, while it received good reviews when it released, it never seems to get any mention nowadays. It's almost as if it dropped off the map entirely.