#waiting for aw2 though

[quaddmgd]

we managed to finish Alan Wake. tbh i expected more of a psychological survival horror, and not a tps action thriller but that's on me i guess. we enjoyed it but there was some raging due to enemy ai, stunlocking, physics and weird checkpoint placement at times. and man, the psychological horror potential this story had... the creative block, Alan's alcoholism and violent outbursts and the game made nothing out of them.

[pan0ramy]

so

i'm officially into alan wake now

[tsuyoshikentsu]

ever wondered why dming is so hard and why your players just sit there staring?

The reason is the same for both, and it's also why players never learn how to play their characters. This is long, though, so the answers are after the cut.

Okay, this is the "How to Play" section from the introduction of the 5E Player's Handbook. I cut out a small bit listing some examples, but otherwise this is almost all of the section.

HOW TO PLAY The play of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game unfolds according to this basic pattern. 1. The DM describes the environment. The DM tells the players where their adventurers are and what's around them, presenting the basic scope of options that present themselves (how many doors lead out of a room, what's on a table, who's in the tavern, and so on). 2. The players describe what they want to do. … The players don't need to take turns, but the DM listens to every player and decides how to resolve those actions. Sometimes, resolving a task is easy. If an adventurer wants to walk across a room and open a door, the DM might just say that the door opens and describe what lies beyond. But the door might be locked, the floor might hide a deadly trap, or some other circumstance might make it challenging for an adventurer to complete a task. In those cases, the DM decides what happens, often relying on the roll of a die to determine the results of an action. 3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers' actions. Describing the results often leads to another decision point, which brings the flow of the game right back to step 1.

This looks totally fine to most of us, until you notice something. Let me rephrase this a bit:

1. The DM describes every single thing that happens in or around a given scene, up to the point where they prompt the players for input. 2. The players state an input. 3. The DM describes all of the consequences of that input and all other events until it's time for another input.

Do you see how much work this is?

And look, it's work we're good at and used to. Especially now that I use Mike Shea's techniques, my prep is down to practically nothing. But it is a learned skill. Not everyone knows how right away.

And this leads to the other problem I mentioned: players are, by and large, trained by D&D to passively wait until a prompt comes up and then respond accordingly. It's to the point that the D&D community even reacts aggressively to the idea of players rolling skill checks that the DM has not explicitly called for.

DMs in D&D are expected to create entire worlds, plotlines, dozens of characters, and more while also arbitrating a woefully incomplete rules system and managing the personalities of the people at the table. That's a lot to ask. Meanwhile, players are explicitly instructed by the book not to do anything until the DM asks them to, and the mechanics themselves discourage active play. Yeah, you can houserule around this, but that just adds the hat of "game developer" to everything else the DM is doing.

Compare this to--and I'm going to the classic here--Apocalypse World. In AW2E, you are explicitly instructed by the book to create a character that has a vision for a better world. If your character doesn't have a clear idea in their head of what they're doing next when nothing else is going on, you're not doing it right. Many moves also resolve themselves without the MC's input, meaning that players can proactively move the game forward by choosing moves that already do so. In that world, an MC doesn't have to carry so much of the load. The players can help out too, and are frequently incentivized to do so.

This also touches on the cultural permissiveness towards simply not knowing the rules of D&D. Why bother? The DM will just tell you what you need to roll, when you need to roll it. There isn't even much of a point in learning your character, because in most cases the DM has to tell you what to do in order for the game to work anyway.

And again, this also is why many players that start with D&D consider other games to be harder or more effort despite often having one-tenth of D&D's rules and complexity: because in those systems, they're expected to actually know the rules and actually help the game advance. They can't just wait until something happens, push the appropriate button on their sheet, and then go back to being passive observers.

Can you have better experiences than this in D&D? Sure! But you're fighting against the most basic assumptions of the system the entire time.

[prototypelq]

Hi there!! I just saw your post about dragon age and preordering in general, and I appreciate the info, I didn't know that!! I had a question for you, idk if you'll have the answer or if this is a little too in depth?? But I was wondering about games who have already had full digital releases, and are getting hardcopy releases like a year or so after full release, does the same still apply? I'm thinking of Alan Wake 2 specifically, which just announced preorders for the hardcopy of their game, would it be a bad idea to preorder that for the same reason? Again, sorry if this is a dumb question or too in depth, but thank you again for sharing the info!!

Thank you for the question! I do not work in this industry, but I will do my best to explain this with the knowledge I've acquired over the years.

Short answer: No, preordering works differently for physical goods, and in the case of a digital release game getting a physical copy - you can preorder if you want to.

P.S. Addition regarding specifically your case: First off, good choice. Second - AW2 is heavy on the hardware. If you are a console enjoyer, or have already tested how the game runs on your pc - absolutely go for it. Remedy are technically indie studio, cause they self-publish everything, and I don't know how many disks they are planning to print, so this is very likely a case of limited in quantity product. Also, AW2 is a damn amazing game, so you don't have quality issues to worry over (except hardware reqs).

btw, for this I don't know exactly How it works, but I do know that physical copies make more money per copy for the developer, and it is still very profitable to have a physical edition. So yeah, it's a good purchase for you, it's a well-deserved money for Remedy, and it could be a case of limited print so the preorder is a valid option to consider.

Now, for a more elaborate answer

From my understanding, preordering start out as an option for the consumer when the good you wanted about to purchase was printed in limited amount and it was in very high demand. For example - a comic of a less known series, it wouldn't get as much copies printed cause the expected demand in numbers would be low. However, if you are a fan of said comic, and there are only 100 copies per print - you enter a competition with all the other fans of this comic, and you enter that competition worldwide.

This is where preordering became a thing - it allows the consumer to legally book a copy of the limited product they really want to purchase. In the sense of physical media, preordering is not that bad of a practice. It still exists for board games, physical comics and hardware (remember how every console generation release date has lines of people outside the tech stores waiting to storm the shop?).

Yet, even at it's most pure sense, preordering has always had a big flaw - you reserve a copy of the limited product you want, and you'll be one of the first people to get it, great. Do you know what's not great? Untill you receive the product, you're paying for a cat in the bag, literally.

First print/series/hardware build of Anything can be buggy just because quality control department couldn't catch the issue before the sales started. There could also be complications during the production/development process, which wouldn't let quality control do their jobs properly. Your chosen controller parts could fall apart after six months of extensive use - quality control can't catch that. Same with print and paper quality, or maybe you Really need some balancing tweaks for your factions in the tabletop.

Either way - the first people to really test the product will be consumers, and the First Line consumers, the ones that preordered the product and got their hands on it early, will be the one to suffer the most from these quality control oversights. This is a natural occurrence, though an unfortunate one.

There could also be more malicious mistakes, such as Ultra-Megaman-Super-Hyper Deluxe editions of games, which promise additional physical merch. There have been a number of stories where the final merch has been made from dirt cheap plastic.

Thing is, either way - you are betting your money on a product that doesn't exist yet. Imagine buying clothing through listening to a description of it from your coworker or smth. That's pretty much what you're paying for when preordering.

Now, with digital releases this issue has been made...extensively worse.

Thing is, if the main benefit of preordering is getting a copy of a limited product, and digital games are, by definition, an unlimited product - then what's the point of it? Why is preordering such a big thing is current industry, some of the new releases even have these little tables detailing which preorder edition does what. How ridiculous is that?

Simple - money, investor dependency and nonexistent quality control.

Modern gaming development budget can be Lower Than The Marketing Department Budget.

Games are extremely easy and available for purchase, so the only logical thing for you, as a consumer, to do is to buy Skyrim. Buy Skyrim, Todd is No Longer Asking.

I'm sure you have at least remotely heard of the actually hell that is working in this industry. Cancelled projects that had been mid-development, layoffs and forced staff migration between projects, non-existent long-term development schedule, all that very good stuff. It's no wonder many new releases are buggy badly designed messes. Optimisation and quality control phases of development time have basically been forced into post-release hotfixes, that is IF the head of the studio is graceful enough to not cut support after the first month.

That was a very long way of saying that games are extremely easy to buy, and exceptionally easy to mess up in current development circumstances. It's not just a possible oversight you can be wary of, these days your release build may just Not Be Playable. May is actually not a verb I should use, when talking about this. I mean, last year had plenty of botched releases, I don't think I even need to name anyone. It's Very Likely these days, that the release game could just not be playable.

Modern development culture (aka slavery) is so bad, you can be literally preordering a .jpg at the moment of your transaction. I am not even exaggerating that much. The developers will be forced to do whatever they can in the months before release, but that release date is not moving cause publisher needs that quarterly financials report, and the game will release is whatever stage of will be released in. That's what you could be spending your money on.

Thing is - this scheme is extremely fuckin profitable, so it's not about to stop.

Let me put it another way:

when you preoder your money goes directly into the marketing and shareholder pockets.

Their product is not yet out, but they are already receiving money.

This is how games can be profitable Regardless Of Their Quality.

This one time I will name a specific game, and this what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. That game was profitable even before release, cause the fixed development budget has been overshadowed by the money received from preorders and all the advertising. The opposite side of this coin was that CD Project legally bound themselves to different companies and their licences to release the game in whatever state it had been at the moment - they could not delay the game anymore, and I guess you know how it went from there.

I hope this illustrates the point about preorders well.

Now, what do you Gain from Not-Preordering?

You can have an informed opinion about the actual product you're about to buy. Game reviews, essays, absence of news of console lighting itself of fire after three months of playing, no battery dying, etc etc. The actual product is out, and other people have already tested it out and voiced their opinions about it, which gives You a range of data to think your possible purchase through.

Even if you don't really want to wait that long and wanna go in fully blind into a game on release date - go for it. You can easily just buy the game on the release day, and this purchase delay a few hours long will still count in the financial reports. The money you give for the product After release date - is the money that has direct ties in with the quality of the game.

btw this is why long sales tail (aka when you buy a game years down the line on sale) is one of the best metrics for quality of it. Only good games survive their post-release years and will get talked about which is likely how it got on your radar in the first place. Cyberpunk 2077 also fits this category, despite its disastrous launch.

Hype can be easily artificially generated and you can be manipulated through it. I wish the situation were different, but as it is - preorders are only harming the industry, and the games that make it. Even more importantly - they harm the people who make the games that make this industry. Vote for quality with your wallet, don't feed the financial pyramids that are trying to prey on everyone - buy games on release date instead of preordering.

[thrilly24]

Game Complete #6: Alan Wake 2

I bought this game as a Christmas present for myself even though I wanted to wait for the physical release initially. All the praise and my enjoyment of the first game's story changed my mind then, though - and I couldn't be happier about it. First, I beat the original AW DLC episodes and American Nightmare, so I could go on to AW2 as well prepared as possible. I had my gripes with the gameplay of 1 but AW2 does everything so much better and I loved it from the very first minute. This game was everything I had hoped Twin Peaks - The Return would be. Not only is the story amazing, but it is also one of the few games of the current console generation that actually feels "next gen". I can't remember the last time I've played a 10+ hour game from start to finish without a break, or even a game where I felt like I don't want this to end most of the time. At some point though, everything has to end, and I'm glad it didn't overstay its due. Now we wait for the DLC!

[autumn0689]

My Semi-Alan Wake 2 Review (featuring my crazy ramblings)

I’m having severe Alan Wake brain rot help me I just think about Alan and Zane and Scratch and Alice (ABSOLUTE GIRLBOSS) and Barry and Pat Maine and Rose (she’s delusional, just like me fr fr) and the Anderson brothers and THIS GAME I LOVE IT I NEED MORE!!!!

I feel bad for anyone who follows me for something else because let me tell you I’m going to be gushing about Alan Wake for A WHILE!!! I love Alan so much he’s my blorbo I want to squish him like a bug I want to give him a blanket I adore him!! He’s such an asshole and I love him.

I can’t wait for the DLC’s and New Game Plus I am going to play the FUCK out of it. I’ve completely abandoned playing any other games (poor Spider-Man 2 is just sitting there, waiting for me to continue) and I’ve been playing AW2 for hours on end. To me it’s such a good game. I love the characters and I’m emotionally attached to so many of them!

Saga my love my life I love her puns and how kind she is and how she cares so much about her daughter and Casey and how fucking badass she is and how powerful she is!

I adore Casey and I love the short film Yöton Yö and my gosh I adore Ahti! I feel so bad for Cynthia and she deserves better than Tom, speaking of Zane, pop off you absolute whore of a man. Scratch was just… he’s Scratch what more is there to say about him?

Gosh this game- I can’t elaborate on why I love it, it’s just so much to dive into, there is so much of it that I love.

Bright Falls is so different and also just how we remember it being! It has so many of the OG Cast (Rose, Pat, Cynthia, Anderson Bros) while also bringing in new characters (like Saga, Casey, Koskela Bros, Agent Estevez) and how Deerfest is still being celebrated. The townsfolk living there have really experienced it all.

Watery is such a cool place to explore. I love Coffee World and the atmosphere, like how the Ferris Wheel played music and how it made it sound so creepy I LOVE IT!! I love how big Coffee World feels and how abandoned it feels even though it currently isn’t. It gives Abandoned Amusement Park vibes and it’s not even abandoned I love it!

My two favorite locations are the Valhalla Nursing Home and The Oceanview Hotel. Valhalla has just a haunting vibe with it being a nursing home, and the basement section fills me with so much dread due to the environment. The Oceanview Hotel seems so grand and like a maze that I often get lost in that section. It seems so grand, especially considering we only go to three floors at most.

The map system is also cool, in my opinion, I like how you are able to see if any Collectibles are nearby and where it shows you when a certain location can’t be accessed. I love exploring and how vastly different it is from the beautiful forests of Cauldron Lake to the Noir Style New York.

The Dark Place is just a perfect mix of being frightening while also having moments of hilarity. It seems so vast, and Alan is basically trapped to a small location, and wandering too far will suck him into pure darkness. It’s such a bending world that going one way can lead you to a completely new direction. It’s such a moldable location that Alan has been trapped in, stuck in a loop (metaphorically and literally) of remembering and not remembering and basically dealing with his personal demons. The ‘We Sing’ section is such a fun one! It’s so fun to play and funny in how almost safe it makes you feel, well, until you fight enemies, of course. The graffiti gives so much to the environment, especially in the Subway section, in which it seems like it has so much history to it.

I adore the way that Alan literally rewrites scenes. I love Sagas Mind Palace and how we can solve things. I love Rose’s Zombie Apocalypse fanfic and how the Angel Lamp also changes environments, and honestly talking about the Yöton Yö short film and how amazing it is deserves a post of its own.

I just- I love the Remedy Games! I’m so excited to see what is coming up in the future! I love these characters, and I can’t wait for more content to come out in the upcoming months.

To anyone who has read all this, here, have a picture of Alan

[yllowpages]

so what is scratch? alan's doppelganger? the dark presence itself? just a manifestation of alll of alan's faults, flaws, and shortcomings? a version of alan that descended further into destruction, further into the dark place, in the process of the spiral?

frankly... all of the above. with the way i see it at least. some concepts are so vague in this universe. they pull from different sorts of things (especially jungian beliefs) and they're never given clear-cut answers. which is certainly by design and encourages audiences to interpret as they want — which is very fun.

so, for me, i think scratch is all of it. he's this twisted version of alan, fueled by rumor and rage, that wanted to take over alan's life in american nightmare. but he's also very much the dark presence personified, latching itself onto alan. as well as all of alan's insecurities and his darker side (arrogance, ego, anger — even scratch's party-hard attitude in american nightmare can be an echo of alan's partying, rambunctious habits prior to bright falls) coming together to form this monster of a thing determined to ruin alan (read as: imposter syndrome). all of this lends itself to the idea that alan is scratch and scratch is alan. they are separate (different goals, wants, and characteristics) but also innately connected. there might be a little bit of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde mixed in as well. but i do think it is entirely dependent on alan's path for whether or not he is haunted by or directly connected to scratch. if he ascends the spiral, escapes the dark place in the way alice led him, he's free of scratch (read this as: defeating his fears and doubts and making peace with his dark side, growing as a person — as he expresses multiple times in wanting to get back to alice because he know he'll be a better husband now). if he finds destruction in the spiral, destruction of the self, he'll become one with scratch, consumed by the darkness inside him (the dark side we all have — jungian beliefs again). there's also the option to read a difference between scratch and mr. scratch. the [mr.] scratch we see in american nightmare has a much different disposition than the scratch we see in aw2. awan scratch is a little more lively, more mischievous and conniving. he really enjoys directly interacting with alan and taunting him and hanging threats over his head (you can even read this as alan's self-loathing, his self-sabotage, etc.). aw2 scratch is simply darkness. he's playing with his food like awan scratch does, but seems to prefer lying in wait in the shadows and striking at the right time. he's much more calculated than awan scratch. whether they're separate entities or aw2 scratch is simply an evolution of awan scratch is completely up to interpretation though.

[thrilly24]

Games Complete #1+2: Alan Wake Special Episodes / American Nightmare

#1 Special Episodes

Two DLC episodes that continue where the main game left off. I wasn't looking forward to playing these since I wasn't the biggest fan of Alan Wake's gameplay, but since they're relevant for the story, I played them. "The Signal" continued my disdain for the combat, but I got back into it quickly. Boss fight was a bit annoying though. "The Writer" was much better and I felt both looked great despite its age. Worth playing for the story. American Nightmare next, then AW2.

#2 American Nightmare

Somehow better than the original game? I'm not sure. Combat felt way more satisfying but also makes me wonder if this killed the 'horror' for me. Gonna be interesting to see how it affects my playthrough of AW2, which I'm now finally ready for. Not sure if I'll jump into it right away, but it's there. And it's waiting.