Thursday, October 7th 2021
Alan Wake Remastered Interview with d3t and Remedy Entertainment
Alan Wake Remastered brings the magic of Alan Wake back in a gorgeous-looking AAA title for this generation. Much like other smash-hit personality-based action titles by Remedy Entertainment, such as Max Payne (of the old), Quantum Break, and Control; Alan Wake is as much a literary experience as it is a challenging action game. You play as title character Alan Wake, a writer struggling with writer's block, out on holiday in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. Following her mysterious disappearance, Wake finds events from his unfinished novel coming to life, including its many horrors.
When it came out in Spring 2012, Alan Wake—then exclusive to the Xbox 360 and Windows PC—was already considered path-breaking in terms of its visual splendour, however, it was limited to the technology of the time, and more importantly, to just a couple of platforms. Remedy Entertainment decided to wipe the dust off the title, and remaster it for the current generation. Developing this is game studio d3t, while Epic Games is the publisher, who very kindly gave us a chance to interact with Andy Booth, Studio Technical Director, d3t, and Thomas Puha, Communications Director of Remedy Entertainment, on the technical aspects of the remaster. Boy did we learn a lot.
TechPowerUp: Why Alan Wake? What was the thought behind remastering this title for today? Do you feel the title was under-appreciated when it came out? It was visually pretty cutting-edge for 2012 already?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): There were a few reasons, but thank you for saying that the game was already visually quite cutting-edge back in 2012! We agree and that was partly why it was challenging to create the Remaster, because the old graphics on PC hold up pretty well to this day. This is because the art direction, the quality of the art and the rendering tech was so good.
However, Alan Wake was only available for Xbox 360 and PC. The game has, naturally, aged in many ways, so once we got the publishing rights from Microsoft in 2019, we started working on the remaster. We wanted to bring the game to a bigger audience and especially to PlayStation where Alan Wake was not available before.
I don't think we've ever felt that Alan Wake was under-appreciated, on the contrary. The amount of people who tell us they love Alan Wake, how it resonated with them, never ceases to amaze me. It's the fandom of the game that has kept the franchise alive and that's partly why we are making the Remaster happen.
Did we hope the original game would have sold better on the Xbox 360 back in 2010? Sure, but the game's done well over the years, people remember it, like it…so it's all good!
TechPowerUp: Is the remaster based on the Northlight engine?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): The Remaster is not based on the current Northlight engine that Control uses.
Alan Wake Remastered is running on its original engine, which was created by Remedy—it just wasn't called Northlight back in 2010. Now with d3t, that original "Alan Wake" engine has been reworked to take advantage of modern technology. So, a huge number of things were rewritten—from rendering systems to foliage. It was somewhere around 14-16 months of work to create Alan Wake Remastered.
There is some irony in how much work it takes to try to make the game look like it did originally, to stray true to the vision, yet almost all the systems are completely redone.
TechPowerUp: Could you briefly walk us through the visual enhancements that make up the remaster? The announcement press-release talks about improved cinematics. Are the videos simply upscale remastered or re-rendered from the original's motion-capture data?
Andy Booth (d3t): From a tech point of view, we've added a lot of new features, but some of the biggest ones include:
The animation in the cinematics has also been improved. The biggest issue with the original cinematics is the facial animation. The original game used a traditional skeletal animation system for all facial animation. Nowadays, a preferred option is often to use blend-shape animation so the decision was made early in the project that this is the approach we should take.
To achieve this, we had to first rebuild all the characters for blend-shapes. Some of the more important characters such as Alan Wake have over 600 individual blend shapes which really helps to add more detail and nuance to the characters. All of the content in the game was then performance captured by actors, and mapped to these blend-shape facial animation rigs. We have also touched up the body animation in various places, improving fidelity and adding nuance.
TechPowerUp: The release mentions facelifted character models. Could you elaborate? Is this a geometry enhancement? Any cloth physics or hair effects added? Improved ragdoll FX?
Andy Booth (d3t): The character geometry has been completely reworked, with a roughly 5x increase in polygons. In addition, all the textures have been remade at a much higher resolution.
We've also added wrinkle maps to simulate the wrinkling of skin as it moves during animation. Finally, the character materials have been completely re-engineered. We've added a sub-surface scattering skin shader which simulates the translucency of skin, and an anisotropic hair shader which accurately models the reflectivity of hair. All these things combined help make the character look more realistic and ensure they light correctly within a variety of situations.
TechPowerUp: The release also mentions support for newer display formats such as 4K@60. Any word on ultrawide (21:9) formats, given that Alan Wake is an immersive, ambient horror title that would look incredible on a curved ultrawide?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): The PC version supports 21:9.
Alan Wake is possibly the juiciest subject for a remaster with real-time ray tracing effects, given that the scenes are mostly in the dark, with scope for ray-traced shadows, reflections, GI, and AO. It's also the perfect title to implement variable-rate shading. Is any of this part of the remaster? If not, why not?
Andy Booth (d3t): Early in the project we evaluated ray tracing for inclusion within the remaster, but ultimately, we decided it was better to spend the time available on all the other new rendering features that would be visible to all players.
Adding ray tracing to this engine would not have been a trivial piece of work - remember that we're still using what is fundamentally a 10+ year old engine so adding new technology carries a range of additional challenges that wouldn't be encountered if you were adding ray tracing to a brand-new engine.
Performance was another concern. Alan Wake was a beautiful game at the time it was released, but that came at a cost. The original Alan Wake shipped on Xbox 360 at 540p - lower than a lot of other games released around that time. The truth is that an average Alan Wake scene contains a lot of layers and a lot of full-screen effects. These don't scale so well with resolution, so rendering costs get high very quickly.
Because we wanted to maintain the original artistic vision and look of the game, we weren't ever planning to fundamentally change the renderer, so we knew that we'd carry these costs in the remaster. Our projections showed that adding ray tracing on top of these costs would become quickly impractical for most gamers' hardware.
Thomas Puha (Remedy): On top of what Andy said regarding the technical challenges, there is always a limited amount of time, money and resources.
Our main goal was to ship Alan Wake Remastered on previous and current-gen platforms, make sure the game is as optimized as possible within our constraints on all these systems…building ray tracing capabilities would have compromised this.
TechPowerUp: Any other performance enhancements such as NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FidelityFX Super-Res?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): We are currently supporting NVIDIA DLSS which is generating noticeable performance improvements. We do not currently support anything similar on AMD GPUs.
Any VR mode included or planned? This game would look awesome in VR.
Thomas Puha (Remedy): No.
Are the game's default controls the same, or mapped similar to "Control"? Any cosmetic touch-ups to the menu UI and HUD?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): Same controls and the UI layout is the same, but refined to take advantage of higher resolutions and we tweaked it a little here and there to make it look more fresh.
[Interview Concludes]
That was a great chat, and we thank Remedy Entertainment and d3t for the technical rundown. It reveals the tough technical choices studios have to make, to remaster their titles for the day, particularly resisting the urge to use tick-box features such as ray tracing, or at least sincerely evaluating the cost against what they'd like to accomplish within a reasonable time and budget.
If you like what you see, get Alan Wake Remastered on the Epic Games Store.
When it came out in Spring 2012, Alan Wake—then exclusive to the Xbox 360 and Windows PC—was already considered path-breaking in terms of its visual splendour, however, it was limited to the technology of the time, and more importantly, to just a couple of platforms. Remedy Entertainment decided to wipe the dust off the title, and remaster it for the current generation. Developing this is game studio d3t, while Epic Games is the publisher, who very kindly gave us a chance to interact with Andy Booth, Studio Technical Director, d3t, and Thomas Puha, Communications Director of Remedy Entertainment, on the technical aspects of the remaster. Boy did we learn a lot.
Thomas Puha (Remedy): There were a few reasons, but thank you for saying that the game was already visually quite cutting-edge back in 2012! We agree and that was partly why it was challenging to create the Remaster, because the old graphics on PC hold up pretty well to this day. This is because the art direction, the quality of the art and the rendering tech was so good.
However, Alan Wake was only available for Xbox 360 and PC. The game has, naturally, aged in many ways, so once we got the publishing rights from Microsoft in 2019, we started working on the remaster. We wanted to bring the game to a bigger audience and especially to PlayStation where Alan Wake was not available before.
I don't think we've ever felt that Alan Wake was under-appreciated, on the contrary. The amount of people who tell us they love Alan Wake, how it resonated with them, never ceases to amaze me. It's the fandom of the game that has kept the franchise alive and that's partly why we are making the Remaster happen.
Did we hope the original game would have sold better on the Xbox 360 back in 2010? Sure, but the game's done well over the years, people remember it, like it…so it's all good!
TechPowerUp: Is the remaster based on the Northlight engine?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): The Remaster is not based on the current Northlight engine that Control uses.
Alan Wake Remastered is running on its original engine, which was created by Remedy—it just wasn't called Northlight back in 2010. Now with d3t, that original "Alan Wake" engine has been reworked to take advantage of modern technology. So, a huge number of things were rewritten—from rendering systems to foliage. It was somewhere around 14-16 months of work to create Alan Wake Remastered.
There is some irony in how much work it takes to try to make the game look like it did originally, to stray true to the vision, yet almost all the systems are completely redone.
TechPowerUp: Could you briefly walk us through the visual enhancements that make up the remaster? The announcement press-release talks about improved cinematics. Are the videos simply upscale remastered or re-rendered from the original's motion-capture data?
Andy Booth (d3t): From a tech point of view, we've added a lot of new features, but some of the biggest ones include:
- New motion blur
- Blend-shape animation system
- HBAO+ (replacing the legacy SSAO)
- New volumetric lighting system
- New tone-map
- Subsurface-scattering skin shader
- Anisotropic hair shader
- Material improvements across the board
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing and upscaling
- Improved wind simulation
- Improved shadow quality
- Improved tessellation and draw distances
- DLSS (NVIDIA PC)
- Haptics and Activities (PS5)
- Controls, camera and accessibility improvements
The animation in the cinematics has also been improved. The biggest issue with the original cinematics is the facial animation. The original game used a traditional skeletal animation system for all facial animation. Nowadays, a preferred option is often to use blend-shape animation so the decision was made early in the project that this is the approach we should take.
To achieve this, we had to first rebuild all the characters for blend-shapes. Some of the more important characters such as Alan Wake have over 600 individual blend shapes which really helps to add more detail and nuance to the characters. All of the content in the game was then performance captured by actors, and mapped to these blend-shape facial animation rigs. We have also touched up the body animation in various places, improving fidelity and adding nuance.
TechPowerUp: The release mentions facelifted character models. Could you elaborate? Is this a geometry enhancement? Any cloth physics or hair effects added? Improved ragdoll FX?
Andy Booth (d3t): The character geometry has been completely reworked, with a roughly 5x increase in polygons. In addition, all the textures have been remade at a much higher resolution.
We've also added wrinkle maps to simulate the wrinkling of skin as it moves during animation. Finally, the character materials have been completely re-engineered. We've added a sub-surface scattering skin shader which simulates the translucency of skin, and an anisotropic hair shader which accurately models the reflectivity of hair. All these things combined help make the character look more realistic and ensure they light correctly within a variety of situations.
TechPowerUp: The release also mentions support for newer display formats such as 4K@60. Any word on ultrawide (21:9) formats, given that Alan Wake is an immersive, ambient horror title that would look incredible on a curved ultrawide?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): The PC version supports 21:9.
Alan Wake is possibly the juiciest subject for a remaster with real-time ray tracing effects, given that the scenes are mostly in the dark, with scope for ray-traced shadows, reflections, GI, and AO. It's also the perfect title to implement variable-rate shading. Is any of this part of the remaster? If not, why not?
Andy Booth (d3t): Early in the project we evaluated ray tracing for inclusion within the remaster, but ultimately, we decided it was better to spend the time available on all the other new rendering features that would be visible to all players.
Adding ray tracing to this engine would not have been a trivial piece of work - remember that we're still using what is fundamentally a 10+ year old engine so adding new technology carries a range of additional challenges that wouldn't be encountered if you were adding ray tracing to a brand-new engine.
Performance was another concern. Alan Wake was a beautiful game at the time it was released, but that came at a cost. The original Alan Wake shipped on Xbox 360 at 540p - lower than a lot of other games released around that time. The truth is that an average Alan Wake scene contains a lot of layers and a lot of full-screen effects. These don't scale so well with resolution, so rendering costs get high very quickly.
Because we wanted to maintain the original artistic vision and look of the game, we weren't ever planning to fundamentally change the renderer, so we knew that we'd carry these costs in the remaster. Our projections showed that adding ray tracing on top of these costs would become quickly impractical for most gamers' hardware.
Thomas Puha (Remedy): On top of what Andy said regarding the technical challenges, there is always a limited amount of time, money and resources.
Our main goal was to ship Alan Wake Remastered on previous and current-gen platforms, make sure the game is as optimized as possible within our constraints on all these systems…building ray tracing capabilities would have compromised this.
TechPowerUp: Any other performance enhancements such as NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FidelityFX Super-Res?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): We are currently supporting NVIDIA DLSS which is generating noticeable performance improvements. We do not currently support anything similar on AMD GPUs.
Any VR mode included or planned? This game would look awesome in VR.
Thomas Puha (Remedy): No.
Are the game's default controls the same, or mapped similar to "Control"? Any cosmetic touch-ups to the menu UI and HUD?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): Same controls and the UI layout is the same, but refined to take advantage of higher resolutions and we tweaked it a little here and there to make it look more fresh.
[Interview Concludes]
That was a great chat, and we thank Remedy Entertainment and d3t for the technical rundown. It reveals the tough technical choices studios have to make, to remaster their titles for the day, particularly resisting the urge to use tick-box features such as ray tracing, or at least sincerely evaluating the cost against what they'd like to accomplish within a reasonable time and budget.
If you like what you see, get Alan Wake Remastered on the Epic Games Store.
26 Comments on Alan Wake Remastered Interview with d3t and Remedy Entertainment
Money always talks. If the economy can't support it, it will die, and RT is on that trajectory while we haven't seen the worst of mid/post-pandemic stress yet. And then there's climate. Efficiency is going to be front and center everywhere sooner rather than later, and efficiency is extremely well developed rasterized tech.
This outlook is supported by AMD's late to market approach with RT. They're clearly in wait and see mode, using minimal hardware to get maximum output for RT while doing no damage to their raster perf. In a market under pressure, this is the lower risk approach. The fact is current console gen doesn't really support it for it to make any kind of waves the next 3-5 years. So Nvidia is fighting a growing console market share with a dwindling PC dGPU market with highly expensive technology. Devs are first going to develop for consoles, and ports are supposed to be money makers.Its like fashion, all wheels have been invented and any new wheels are also going to be round, most likely, so why not improve upon the older wheels instead? New generation of people can be fed the same shit easily. That's what we're getting. Its no coincidence you see 90's fashion pop back up in the exact same way.
We all go through phases that are frighteningly similar in our lives and the market adjusts to that.
And in gaming... even if the market is highly innovative by nature, you do see that even in new IP the same concepts are reiterated, tweaked and just 'done differently' for the sake of being different, and many attempts are just worse than what came before in terms of gameplay. The simplifaction of interfaces and controls in games is a good example - stuff gets boring that much quicker because its all been done before, we want things done quicker and we're in fact on 15-20 minute dopamine cycles of gameplay by now, because we've seen it and we want results faster now, because maybe there's a new carrot behind them. But there's really not. The carrots taste the same. That is why at some point its more attractive to look back at older games and rediscover what made them tick.