Alan Wake (360)

[ThaGenecyst]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

http://www.eurogamer.fr/videos/presentation-alan-wake-exclusive

New Developer Walkthrough with some new cinematics (no real spoilers though)

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Nice video and it's narrated by the Max Payne writer. The atmosphere is awesome.

Also, Remedy says the game is done, and it's all about polishing from here. Roll on Spring 2010.

Joystiq

Remedy Managing Director Matias Myllyrinne tells Joystiq that Alan Wake is finished and getting all gussied up for its release next spring. After a GDC Europe presentation on how Remedy handles intellectual property, we asked the executive if the long-in-development title would be ready to wake when the snow melts. Myllyrinne noted, "It's all done, we're just polishing at this point."

Wow, great! With something like six months to go before its "spring 2010" launch, Alan Wake should shine by the time it's released. Considering the title has been in development since 2005, it's good to know that the game is "done" and just trying to become its very best.

[allBthere]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Nice video and it's narrated by the Max Payne writer. The atmosphere is awesome.

Also, Remedy says the game is done, and it's all about polishing from here. Roll on Spring 2010.

Joystiq

I hope it hasn't become irrelivant by the time it releases...that's a big problem for titles that take a very long time imo. Silicon knights knows that now i hope.

The perfect time to release a game like this is in the fall - it suits it, you have halloween and christmas on the horizon. spending a cool night inside in the dark going through the game is great.

just like I think the perfect time for sci-fi is the winter.

anyway, I'm hyped, but I think they're just sitting on it now which I don't agree with.

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Remedy Talks Max Payne, Alan Wake

Max Payne took four and a half years to create. The sequel took about 18 months to develop. Alan Wake has been in development for five years so far. "We had something that we believed in, bet the farm on, and put all of our eggs in one basket, and that was Alan Wake," said Myllyrinne. He indicated that Remedy takes some time to develop the initial concepts and then is able to more rapidly produce games, as illustrated by the development cycles behind the original Max Payne and its sequel.

There are seven pillars to Remedy's intellectual property creation, according to Myllyrinne. First, it relies upon a strong lead character. Second, it utilizes the third-person perspective because that puts the focus on the lead character. Third, its titles must possess mainstream approachability and by that, Myllyrinne explained that Remedy's titles should be intuitively played and easy to understand and jump into. Mainstream approachability also encapsulates avoiding niche concepts like WW2 dragons, etc, and also side-stepping traditional mature descriptors, which are oftentimes more crude than anything else. The company's fourth pillar is that its games must provide cinematic experiences -- smart direction, well-placed cameras, and more. Fifth is real-world believability, which means that the game premise and setting must be familiar to a wide audience. Sixth is story, depth and atmosphere. And the seventh pillar is action.

Myllyrinne demonstrated a short video meant to showcase story, depth and atmosphere in Alan Wake. The footage spotlighted all the areas seen in the E3 demo of Wake, including the hero's exploration of the small town, interaction with non-playable characters and combat against the dark enemies using his combo of flashlight and handgun. As always, the game looked fabulous, but those hoping for a glimpse of something new were disappointed. The trailer-esque featurette ended by promising the game's release in spring of next year. Remedy asked that attendees refrain from filming the trailer, which is why it is not featured in this article.

Couple new screens:

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

New Screens

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

TGS 09: Alan Wake on the Run

What happens when you don't have a protective light? We found out today.

Alan Wake's arrival in Bright Falls kicked off a series of unfortunate events and that coincidence was not lost on some of the local authorities. One FBI agent named Nightingale thinks Wake is responsible for the whole ordeal and so he has marked Wake as a fugitive and instructed the deputies to fire on sight. Today's demo picked up with Wake in the woods and on the lamb. The fog is thick and the path is rocky, but surrounded by a pine forest. Search lights are scattered in the distance. While it normally is important to stay in the light, these ones are carried by people hunting for you and they spell doom.

For the opening moments of the demo, it actually looked a bit like a stealth action game. Wake moved deliberately through the woods, avoiding flashlights as they swept back and forth. At one point, he went under a bridge as lights cast down from above filtered through eerily. It all seemed to be going well until a flare lit up a tree, illuminating the entire area and giving away Wake's location. Gun fire began to rain down and there simply was no choice but to run into the darkness once again.

This is where Alan Wake started to earn its designation as an action thriller. The dark presence began creeping through the woods around Wake and the mood turned seriously sinister. It almost felt like the woods were alive and they truly became their own distinct character. I don't want to spoil what happens next because it really is looking like this story is one that will be worth the wait, but I will say that things end on a massive cliffhanger. Remedy clearly has an excellent grasp of what it takes to make a game thrilling and spooky.

When the demo finished, Remedy discussed a bit about what to expect in the daytime sections of the game. These portions of Alan Wake are designed to counter the high tension of the night with some humorous and twisted character development and a little exploration. Of course, we were told you can expect to be forced into dark caverns and buildings even when it is light outside, so the daytime can still present some danger. We also were told to expect things done during the day to be reflected on the game later on, perhaps when you revisit a section during the night.

While many horror games have shifted towards action or grotesque imagery to attract players, Alan Wake is reminding us how cool a focused thriller can be.

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Eurogamer Preview

For all its cinematic and televisual influences - Hitchcock, Lost, Twin Peaks, The X-Files - Alan Wake isn't just another action game that wishes it were on the big screen. Light, its thematic motif, is woven inextricably into the gameplay itself; as well as a stylistic visual technique, it's a combat device, your means of progression, your guide through wide-open environments. Alan Wake tells its story like only a videogame can, deftly fashioning its narrative themes of light and darkness and subjective and objective reality into essential gameplay elements. Instead of feeling like the actual game is just getting in the way of the story, as is so often the case with such plot- and character-orientated videogames, Alan Wake's integration of an emotionally-engaging thriller narrative into a third-person action template feels entirely natural.

It's clearly not a happy accident that Alan Wake looks and feels so polished. It's been in development a long time now, and finding the correct balance of explorative gameplay and the linear structure necessary for effective storytelling has been a matter of trial and error. "The game is still built on openworld technology, but we consider ourselves storytellers, and in order to deliver that well it has to be a more linear experience," explains Remedy's ever-charismatic MD, Matias Myllyrinne. "We don't want the player to feel like they're being pulled by a string all the time - we want them to feel like he's making his own decisions and choices, even though we're delivering the story in a certain way."

In short, then, Alan Wake drops you into tightly-scripted cinematic set-pieces, but it lets you determine your own way of making your way through them. You can see a lone, abandoned farmhouse in the distance with the light left on, and figure out how to get there yourself - it doesn't force you along an arbitrary path between lovingly-rendered cut-scenes. The game's environments are miles wide, encouraging you to dig further into the fiction and really explore Pride Falls rather than follow a set path.

Behind closed doors at TGS, Remedy unveils a scenario that completely turns the tables on Alan Wake, robbing him of his torch and sending him fleeing through the woods from searchlights. Convinced that Wake is behind all of the ugliness and sudden deaths in Pride Falls, police suddenly turn up in search of him - information that you glean from snatches of speech from police radios and overturned cars, running from the beams of light that pierce the morning fog. As Wake flees through the woods, diving between trees to hide from the light, things start to get distinctly supernatural again - crouching behind a rock on a clifftop, we see a police helicopter taken down by a swarm of blackbirds, and the trees below bend out of the path something vast and horrible that starts extinguishing police flashlights.

"For this scene in particular, our director took the photo from X-Files where you have the flashlights in the woods and used that iconic image as inspiration - that and the Harrison Ford in The Fugitive," says Myllyrinne. "Visually and emotionally, that's where we want to go with this sequence... We're all film buffs, we were brought up on that stuff, so for us it's really easy to communicate that way. We take inspiration more from other forms of entertainment than games, really - we try to take things that are familiar to a wider audience, but that haven't yet been done in games."

We've fled from police before in games, obviously, rather more than we care to remember, but the way that Alan Wake works its scripted thrills and scares into the gameplay is genuinely new, and impressive. Admittedly, what we've seen so far have been prepared presentations, but if Wake guides you cleverly and intuitively enough through its scenarios it will all flow just as smoothly in the final release.

Remedy is committed to building its game's fiction. Adrenaline and fear, as both Myllyrinne and David Cage pointed out at their GDCE keynotes this year, are easy emotions to play with, but if you want to go deeper than that, there have to be peaks and troughs, time for character development and opportunities for players to ground themselves in the game's world, not just an endless sequence of explosions and fights. In Alan Wake, the daytime gives you the opportunity to get to know the locals of Pride Falls and develop more of an attachment to the setting. Remedy has already shown its prowess with pacing in the Max Payne games, and it looks like Alan Wake will be even more accomplished.

On the surface, it might not seem that Alan Wake and Heavy Rain have all that much in common, but though they differ wildly as actual games, there are concurrences in their respective creators' vision that makes them exciting for the same reasons. Both draw their influences from outside the gaming sphere, both are committed to the creation of a whole and believable fiction, and both value the characterisation of strong leads above all else. Everything that we've seen so far suggests Alan Wake is going to be a great videogame thriller - but there's a chance it could stand shoulder to shoulder with classics of the genre in other media, too.

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

See what happens after the E3 demo starting at 4:30.

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[CMH]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

This game just looks amazing.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

I've been waiting for this game forever - its looking awesome.

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

<div style="width: 480px;"><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="gtembed" width="480" height="392"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=58983"/><param name="quality" value="high" /> <embed src="http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=58983" swLiveConnect="true" name="gtembed" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="true" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="392"></embed> </object><div style="font-size: 10px; font-family: Verdana; text-align: center; width: 480px; padding-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; background-color: black; height: 32px;"><div><a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com" title="GameTrailers.com">Video Games</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/game/alan-wake/1608" title="Alan Wake">Alan Wake</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-police-alan-wake/58983" title="Exclusive Police Escape Gameplay Part I">Exclusive Police Escape Gameplay Part I</a></div><div style="padding-top: 3px;"><a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://xbox360.gametrailers.com/" title="XBox 360">XBox 360</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://ps3.gametrailers.com/" title="PS3">Playstation 3</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://wii.gametrailers.com/" title="Wii">Nintendo Wii</a></div></div></div>
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[greenegt]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

GREAT vids!

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Report: Alan Wake to arrive in May

Long-anticipated 360 title set for release in spring/summer season next year

MCV can reveal that 360 action title Alan Wake will be released globally in May 2010.

A source close to the game told us that the Microsoft-published adventure – developed by Finnish studio Remedy – will be promoted “in the style of a Hollywood movie”.

MCV understands that Microsoft is aiming for a global release late in the month.

The long-awaited title has been in development for five years, and got its most comprehensive showing at E3 this year.

The psychological action thriller stars a writer whose wife has gone missing.

[frostbyte06]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

Good stuff, I can't wait for this game it will be a great change of pace game!!!

[Flawless]

Re: Alan Wake (360)

1UP Preview

Remedy has succeeded in keeping many of Alan Wake's narrative specifics under lock and key, but as previously detailed, the game focuses on the titular novelist, who finds himself searching for lost pages of one of his thrillers after his wife goes missing on a trip to the Pacific Northwest. While Wake cannot recall writing the novel, the pages he finds indicate that the paranormal events held within are unfolding in his real life, with a "dark presence" possessing both objects and living beings to thwart his quest. So of course, light becomes an essential tool.

"The darkness protects those that it possesses," explains Lake. "They cannot be harmed with conventional methods before the protecting dark presence has been destroyed with light. In some cases, the possession is so strong that the dark presence regenerates in darkness, and you have to keep your light on them long enough without interruptions to be able to destroy it. In addition to people and animals, the darkness can also take over vehicles, machines, and other objects, all of which it uses as weapons against you. It can also take over doors and gates that block your way until you can find a source of light to destroy them."

While the recent press demo of the game at the Tokyo Game Show showed Wake hiding in the shadows to evade human pursuers, most of the game will find you seeking or creating light to protect yourself from possessed foes and open them up to attack. And though one of the game's many flashlights may be bright enough to remove the darkness from a human enemy, the amount of light needed for larger subjects will scale with their physical size. According to Remedy, Wake will find himself in the midst of a "surreal bullfight" with possessed farm equipment during at least one point in the game.

Additionally, some light sources will not only remove the darkness from a possessed attacker, but also serve as the weapon used to destroy the being. Wake will have access to a flare gun, which can cleanse and kill an enemy with a single shot, trigging an explosion of screen-filling special effects in the process. He can also command numerous vehicles, and use their headlights to remove the dark presence before the front bumper takes out the unlucky roadkill in front of it.

"The primal fear of the dark is something that has attracted me as a writer for a long time," says Lake. "It seems so fundamental and pure in a way. It's almost as if the whole concept has been programmed into our DNA as people. It's something that has been with us for a long time and has been explored in the works of fiction from theater to books. Also, the symbolism of light as a savior and a safe haven is so cooked into our collective subconscious that it offers a lot of interesting fiction to work with."

More than half of the game will take place at night, but the daytime segments also hold a lot of significance, and most of the game's "episodes" -- inspired by television serial dramas like Twin Peaks and Lost -- will include both daytime and nighttime gameplay. While most action will be relegated to the darkness, Wake has many important tasks to complete during daylight, including interacting with the locals and investigating (and learning the layouts of) the environments. Lake is keen on avoiding spoilers, but teases that the daylight segments will also see Wake driving to meet contacts, and turning the power on so the lights will work when night sets in.

The idea is that these segments will help unravel the mysteries in the game, and also help structure the experience so that the nighttime events hold more weight.

"The daytime scenes are definitely more about character development and story progression than combat," says Lake. "More often than not, they are there to give contrast and to foreshadow the horrible things to come when the night falls. Just as with any thriller -- be it a book, or a movie or a TV series -- you need to pace things right. If you are constantly hurdled forward at a hundred miles an hour, it all gets exhausting, and you become numb to it all."

New Screens