Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Making of Alan Wake Remastered

The original Alan Wake is a game close to the hearts of many people, including us here at Remedy, as well as the myriad of dedicated Xbox fans who picked up the original release on Xbox 360 in 2010. So when we set out to remaster this unique and beloved adventure, we knew We were going to have to work hard to deliver an experience that not only lives up to that legacy, but also presents it to a whole new audience by bringing graphics up to modern standards.

To that end, we partnered with the talented folks at d3t, a team with a lot of experience and technical knowledge when it comes to remastering modern classics. The core team that created the original Alan Wake at Remedy worked very closely on this remaster with d3t.

So take a moment to watch the comparison trailer, and then we’ll talk a bit about the remastering process and give you an idea of ​​how the project came to be.

Ready? Excellent. Hopefully you will agree that Alan Wake It looks better than ever! So the first step with a project like this is called “cataloging.” This means breaking the game down into its components, going far beyond simply listing all the things that make it what it is. To properly remaster a game, you have to really understand how it all fits together and how each element relates and interacts. Data structures, code and asset reuse, naming conventions, tools, plugins … everything! Think of it as a group of scientists putting something under a microscope to examine cells.

When you develop a game from scratch, this happens very naturally as the project progresses, but remastering a game requires learning before starting. Overall, when you consider environments, props, textures, sound effects, UI elements, cinematics, and a wealth of supporting data, it’s easy to see around 100,000 individual elements. It is no small thing. Once this was done, the development of the remaster was divided into five main areas: coding, setting, characters, animation, and cinematics.

The coding side of the project started with creating a baseline, which essentially means converting all old systems, the skeleton of the game, into a new version that is compatible with new platforms and behaves exactly like the one did. original, but that allows more development.

The original release version of Alan Wake was developed exclusively for Xbox 360 and only later moved to PC, which meant that it only supported one rendering API: DirectX 9. Technology has, of course, advanced since then, so a crucial first step was to update the renderer and engine support. systems to support modern standards. Then there are all the other modern systems to think about: new drivers, updated audio standards, achievements, saved games, and more. It is also important to keep in mind that we are talking about a remaster, Not a Redo. This means that we are using the original engine, which can make implementing new modern features very difficult when working with an engine that is over a decade old.

So what’s new in Alan Wake Remastered? For starters, the game runs in 4K at 60fps on Xbox Series X, and 1080p at 60fps on Series S. You can expect to see reworked scenes with improved facial animations and lip syncing, richer environments, and improved character models than They have updated hair and skin shaders. There have also been improvements to materials and textures in general, as well as smoothing, shadows, wind simulation, and increased draw distances.

Being such a story-centric game, Alan Wake RemasteredThe cast of 30+ characters is a huge part of the overall experience, and naturally it was an area that we focused much of our time on. An entire team of character artists reverted to the original reference materials to help make the characters more like the actors they were based on. In the comparison trailer, you should be able to spot the vast improvements to the characters themselves and the materials used in their costumes, adding even more realism and detail.

Aside from character models, animation teams transformed the game by making significant improvements to facial animations, the game’s main movement, and more. This involved creating new platforms for the characters’ faces, an entirely new motion capture for dialogue, and the creation of over 600 additional poses to give the performances more expression. Look closely and you’ll see a ton of little extra details like hand animations and idle motions. Additionally, we also had a dedicated cinematics team updating every scene in the game (for over an hour of footage in total), integrating everything from the new motion captures mentioned above, to more advanced post-production effects.

While the characters themselves are a central part of the game, the setting is just as important and demands as much care and attention as Alan himself. With that in mind, we had a dedicated sub-team working entirely on trees and foliage. The forest is a deeply complex environment. The team brought it to life by adding all the new details like ferns, moss, fallen leaves, and other ground cover, along with improvements to animations like trees blowing in the wind.

The environment team worked closely with the programmers to improve the terrain itself, adding greater complexity and fidelity to different materials, from dirt and rocks, to mountains, and more urban materials like concrete and asphalt. Then a team of artists went to work adding more detail to the buildings, vehicles and other objects to ensure that Bright Falls is as compelling and dramatic as it deserves to be.

So there we have it. This was just a quick tour of the work that has been done on Alan Wake Remastered, but we hope it gives you an idea of ​​the scale of a project like this, and the love and respect that everyone involved has for the source material. We think the game is easily in the best shape it has ever been, and we want to give a huge thank you to our friends at d3t for all their hard work and for sharing the insider information on this blog. Lastly, thanks to all of you for the incredible support of Alan Wake Remastered. We really hope you enjoy exploring – or visit again – this remastered experience on Xbox One and Xbox Series X | I know when it comes out on October 5.