Alan Wake
Preview
Breathes Next Generation
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on X360
Next generation graphics
Alan Wake breaks every boundary when it comes to graphics and special effects. The developers were unable to find an existing engine that they could use for the game and had to make their own from scratch. And when you see the gameworld in motion, you will understand why this is. The gameworld is a fully realised area of 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles) representing the town of Bright Falls, in the state of Washington. The graphics department report that they took over 40 000 photos of different areas around the north-western Washington, USA, in order to achieve the level of detail and realism in the game, and that they will still need at least as many more photos until they are finished.
This level of commitment really shows in the game. The town and the nature around it are more realistic that anything we've seen to date. The draw distance of 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) ensures that buildings and trees will not just pop up out of nowhere as you cruise down a mountainous road and admire a view of a beautifully rippling lake surrounded by mountains on your left. Try to imagine this scene and add to this a realistic movement of the sun on the sky (and resultant shadows cast by the mountains and every other item in the landscape), sunsets and sunrises as well as eerie night-time lighting from street lamps and flashlights. Now, try to throw in ultra-realistic fog effects and twisters that rip apart houses piece by piece, sucking them up to the sky and throwing them around the landscape. If you cannot imagine anything like this being achieved in a computer game, then you have to think again. The screenshots accompanying this article are but a pale imitation compared to what these scenes look like on-screen, calculated and rendered in real-time. And all this with no load times as you move around the gameworld and perfectly smooth rendering whether you are inside a room, or standing on a hilltop, with a great vista on the background.
Killing you softly... with my specs
After reading all of the above, I'm sure you are beginning to suspect that this game will not run on just any computer. And you would be right. Alan Wake pretty much breathes Next Generation. The developers have stated that the game will not run on any single-core platform, although it might just about work (with reduced graphics and physics, of course) on a Pentium-4 with Hyper Threading enabled. What the game has been thus far demoed on has been a heavily overclocked 3.73 GHz Core 2 Quad system. This is simply because in the most intensive sequences, such as when a twister is running through a trailer park, the real-time physics calculations alone will use one of the processor cores, leaving the rest of the necessary simultaneous processes to the remaining processors.
But rest easy. You will have time to buy that over-the-top computer, or an Xbox 360, before this game is released, probably some time in 2008. Even the year has not been confirmed by Remedy Entertainment, however. Rather, they have stated that they will not hurry this game out to meet any deadlines, but work on it until it is ready.
