ALAN WAKE REMASTERED

The Challenge

A key factor to this project was preserving the original’s artistic intent. This meant looking at what Remedy wanted to do 10 years ago but couldn’t for technical reasons.

However, a lot has also changed since Alan Wake originally released. Not only is the hardware different, but also the tools and technology used to make games has evolved.

To make sure that our Art team were able to use tools they were familiar with, we had to move the toolchain and pipeline to modern art creation packages. It was a similar process for the Engineering team, which meant moving to a modern compiler.

One of the more interesting parts of this was moving from 32bit to 64bit, as this presented challenges throughout the code base. However, the trickiest area was porting the scripting system. The game uses a custom scripting language, and a bespoke virtual machine that processes the scripts, which required some quite extensive changes to be 64bit compatible.

The move also to modern rendering APIs was also a significant technical challenge. The original game is DX9, and from a rendering point of view it’s basically single-threaded. Modern rendering APIs require a more multi-threaded approach, so this required a lot of engineering effort to move large parts of the rendering code to run asynchronously.

The complete overhaul of the original cinematics was also a prominent challenge, as the original used a traditional skeletal animation system which required a new solution to achieve the required final results.

The Outcomes

Artistically, every asset has had some work done to it – over 1,500 of them. This ranged from texture and material improvements on more minor background assets right the way through to fully rebuilding the geometry and materials ground up for the hero assets.

From an engineering point of view, our team added a lot of new features, but some of the biggest ones include:

• Implementing new motion blur.
• Integrating a blend-shape animation system.
• Replacing the legacy Screen Space Ambient Occlusion for Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion+.
• Adding new volumetric lighting system, which is layered on top of the existing fogging system, helping to add further depth to allow scenes within the game to feel more dynamic.
• Adding a new tonemap.
• Creating a whole host of new materials, including an anisotropic hair shader and sub-surface scattering skin-shader.

• Adding in temporal anti-aliasing and upscaling, which improves the softening of hard edges and allows the game to be up scaled to higher resolutions.
• Improving the wind simulation.
• Improving the shadow quality.
• Improving the tessellation and draw distances.
• Implementing DLSS on PC.
• Utilising the PS5 controller haptics and activities.
• Making quality of life, controls, camera, and accessibility improvements.

The cinematics for Alan Wake Remastered were also re-rendered. We have now gone from the original 720p cinematics all the way to 4k and have coupled this with the new blend-shape animation system, re-captured facial animation, new materials, alongside all of the other tech improvements. The end result has meant that over an hour’s worth of cinematic were created in 4k.