Alan Wake decides to lie in a bit
Vole-sponsored alarm clock hits snooze
ALAN WAKE is due to go back to sleep until 2009, with Microsoft apparently resigning itself to the delay.
Due to be released in 2008 on the Xbox and PC, Alan Wake was supposed to be a mystery story about a guy who wakes up with no memory and lives in a ghost town, etc, etc, etc. More interesting was the fact it was from Remedy, the chaps behind Max Payne, and who are supposedly going to base the game on a version of the 3DMark engine, with all the spectacular graphics that that entails.
The game was scheduled for its first major outing at GDC this year, which it missed - and there is no sign of it this week at Microsoft's Gamers Day in San Francisco, the Vole's showcase for its top 2008 titles.
For his part, Microsoft's Xbox man Shane Kim said that, "We're managing that project with Remedy very carefully... Alan Wake is pretty ambitious. It's taking a very different approach to both story-telling and gameplay." Which we suspect is code for 'it doesn't really work yet'.
Gamers eager for a taste of the anticipated game have little to do except go download 3DMark Vantage and hope for some news before the Roman year is out. µ
Comments
Scripting, gameplay
I noticed earlier this year that Remedy was looking for new (additional) gameplay designers for Alan Wake. From which it was absolutely obvious it wouldn't be out this spring, as some gaming sites listed it.AW uses Remedy's own tech
While Remedy's certainly close to Futuremark in many ways, the technology behind Wake is completely different from 3DMark Vantage's tech.Wake is also a Xbox360-title, and is a fully streaming engine. And it's targeted to run at 30fps unlike the benchmark :-)