I picked up Alan Wake for the Xbox 360 yesterday and I have to say: good lord are the textures crumby. The entire game looks “muddy” or “washed out”, depending on if you are in a light or dark scene.
What is so disappointing about this is that you can tell with the right horsepower behind it, Alan Wake at a high resolution would probably look fantastic.
Unfortunately on an Xbox 360, it does not:
The screenshot above is not zoomed at all, it’s me standing in front of my TV, with a Canon G9, and shooting what I see when I play. Notice how not only are the textures on the car, water and deck washed out and look like 128×128 resolution, but the jaggies and anti-aliasing mess on the railing?
Given how the high-resolution PC screenshots look from the media kit:
I’d have to say the Xbox 360 users are getting boned.
I’m perfectly happy to admit that the Xbox 360 is an old piece of hardware and likely cannot render the complex scenes well in high fidelity. Some games like Gears of War manage to look fantastic though, so I’m not completely on board with that reason.
Ultimately I’m just saying, if you are really looking forward to playing a good-looking Alan Wake, make sure your desktop can handle it, and then buy it for the PC for god sake.
Incase you aren’t convinced, here’s another one:
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