Coelacanth

I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! It’s a damn shame BG3 took the world by storm last year, as I felt AW2 truly deserved more awards, including Game of the Year. BG3 is good and all but at the end of the day it’s just a really well made RPG. AW2 is doing something bold and interesting with the video game medium in a way that deserves to be celebrated. It topped Jacob Geller’s yearly list for a reason, and I think he put it the best in his video:

“Is Alan Wake 2 the best game I’ve played this year? No. But it’s the most excited I’ve been to be playing a video game this year.”

Also it should have won the Game award for best soundtrack and I’ll hear no arguments.

Mods are already out to fix it, but it’s not unlikely they tied a bunch of functions to timescale so that longer days screw up AI/Emissions/Quests etc.

The keybinds are absolutely atrocious and I was staggered that so many were unable to be re-bound. Quick Melee is “V” and you can’t change it??

The beefy mutants are absolutely a problem and made me actually switch from Veteran to Stalker difficulty simply because those bullet sponges are not fun gameplay. Otherwise in the long sequence of inane design decisions the absurdly fast timescale (24h in game in a single real life hour!!!) is pulling me out of immersion a lot as well. I hope it can be modded without breaking everything because I just want to be able to savour these beautiful areas and weathers for a bit while exploring without weather changing and night falling every 5 minutes!

Lastly, and I haven’t gotten far enough to see much of it yet, but most importantly will be the A-life implementation and how much of it is actually fixable with patches. That was what made the other STALKER games feel alive, and the devs have at least acknowledged that it’s not working at the moment. Hopefully that means the engine for it is actually there though and can be patched. Unless they’re lying to save face, I suppose.

I have a 7800X3D and a 4070TI, running the game at 3413x1920 with DLDSR on my 1440p monitor with everything on Epic and DLSS on Balanced. For the most part, I’m sitting at 65-85 FPS. However both frame drops and stutters are pretty bad, and performance tanks in the populated first town area (forgetting its name), regularly hitting 45-55 FPS. To note also, frame gen doesn’t seem to work for me. It works for a couple of minutes, then it starts behaving like a memory leak: getting me down to sub 10 FPS until it crashes or I reboot the game. This doesn’t happen with frame gen off.

On that subject though, I’m getting frequent crashes anyway. The first two hours yesterday were fine, but I’ve had 4 fatal error CTDs today. Very disappointing.

It breaks my heart to read about all the bugs and performance issues. Not that they were entirely unexpected - especially since it’s a STALKER game - but I was hoping for a miracle. I really, really want this game to succeed and the game itself sounds like they hit it out the park. I just hope launching in this state doesn’t ruin the game’s reputation and sales.

Could be, could be. I think your suggestion would make for a better game with less conflict between what the main story is saying and what the game is presenting in the open world. Having the story emphasize how fast V is dying, only for the player to then fuck around with car races and random merc contracts and whatnot really doesn’t work all that well as far as immersion goes.

Jackie’s death would have also been much more impactful if we’d have spent all that time with him playing through those six months.

I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase.

That’s my take on it too. The story they wanted to tell does not mesh well with an open world game, but since the people loudly wanted something like “RDR 2 but Cyberpunk” they felt obliged to attempt to shoehorn it in.

The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.

Completely agree. I think having you play through that part would have made a huge impact on how you connect with Jackie. Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?

I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.

They’ve added some touches to the open world, but I think it was too fundamentally broken to be easily patched. The new skill tree from 2.0 is actually good though and I think the combat is pretty fun in its current state, even without going to mods.

It’s inspirational what they’ve done. I really hope the launch goes well.

Are you working on the STALKER 2 team?

Already pre-ordered the Ultimate edition. Goes against my usual principles but I don’t care in this instance. I hope the game is a massive, GotY contending success.

Unity is flawed, but somewhat of an underrated gem. It’s such a shame that it released in the state it did and got the reception it did because that’s pretty much what caused Ubisoft to pivot into the style of the Origins and onwards style games.

Imagine what could have been if they built on what they had in Unity? The free run up/down system had so much potential and - while janky - the Unity parkour can produce some of the most pleasing, slick and stylish sequences. Just look at the stuff people are pulling off!

Also, revolutionary Paris is the best realised city they’ve ever made for an Assassin’s Creed game.

All I want is a final proper send-off Splinter Cell before he dies. Sam Fisher’s final job type vibe. I think there is some cool potential there - not that I trust Ubisoft to pull it off, mind.

Same. It depends on the game though, obviously. If I’m playing Deadlock or something similar (fast paced and competitive) I’m not going to go for graphics fidelity. But anything single player? 60 FPS is perfectly fine and ray traced lighting can make a huge visual impact. Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk looked great with RT and well worth forgoing 100+ FPS.

I think that was supposed to be an attempt at an accent?

For sure, STALKER is just not the same without Cheeki Breeki!

I still can’t get over how “wrong” it sounds and feels to have native English speaking accents for the voice work instead of the heavy Ukrainian and Russian accents. This is one to play with Ukrainian VA and English subtitles for sure.

Love this game. Ever since trying the VR mod though I’ve been dying for official support. Imagine using the proper VR controls to pop handbrake and steer the car, would be the most immersive thing!

Still, even with that said if you like the game and have access to a VR headset It’s still worth giving it a go, it really fits the game I think.

Totally. And between stuff like the stage fight in AW1, the Ashtray Maze in Control and We Sing in AW2 Remedy has gotten so damn good at integrating music and gameplay too.

I personally was blown away by POE - This Road as well. The track is mesmerising and every time a new variation on it played after an Alan chapter I had almost goosebumps. I still regularly go back and listen to the whole 9 minute track on YouTube.

I really really hope they don’t get discouraged. They would have done so much better had it only been on Steam, please Remedy don’t change your ways.

Also it should have been GotY last year, fight me.

One thing I forgot to ask last post was the music, in particular the between-chapter songs. They were all written specifically for the game by various artists based on poems about the story Sam Lake gave them. I’ve seen lots of streamers just immediately skip and go to the next chapter, but I really recommend listening through each song. They’re all amazing, and it kind of makes me sad it didn’t get the award for best music.