Huge Alan Wake 2 Patch Brings Over 200 Improvements And Fixes A Really Annoying Bug
by
Thiago Trevisan
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Thursday, November 02, 2023, 01:51 PM EDT
Alan Wake 2 has been impressing gamers since its release, with its gripping story and visuals. PC gamers had to rummage through a rough year of gnarly, unoptimized titles such as Arkane Studio's Redfall. The subsequent release of patches and apologies seemed to follow an alarmingly familiar pattern after a few duds came to market. Alan Wake 2 is a great game, but it too has had its share of early bugs to deal with. Thankfully, we have a massive patch inbound that address over 200 issues.
Alan Wake 2 has been notoriously difficult to run even on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 at 4K - as I recently found out. With maxed out graphics settings, including ray tracing and path tracing on high, native resolution saw a meager 24 FPS average. Only when one uses NVIDIA's impressive DLSS 3.5 with Frame Generation do we see the FPS go over 60. That's a feature, not a bug, as the developer Remedy is pushing technological boundaries.
Remedy has a list of all fixes on their website for Alan Wake 2
The new November update is 1.0.8 on PC, and also available on PlayStation 5 (1.000.008) and Xbox Series (1.0.0.8). One particularly annoying bug that was fixed pertains to the Room 665 bug fix: "-Fixed an issue that caused the Oceanview Hotel Lobby Echo not to align correctly (this one was really annoying; we apologize)"
We also have various improvements related to the experience of the game. Starting with audio, improved lip sync and similar fixes help to keep gamers engaged more realistically. There's also a laundry list of graphical improvements and tweaks to the overall visuals, such as in the various environments.
Path Tracing is brutal on hardware, but beautiful.
Fixes addressing the lighting in the game are also here, with improved lighting. This should not be understated, since lighting is such a critical part of Alan Wake 2's appeal. Lighting can bring even the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 to its knees with its implementation of path traced indirect lighting and the impressive ray tracing preset.
While these are demanding technologies, seeing items such as lighting fully optimized will be one less item to worry about for your graphics card. Other fixes to game stopping bugs have also been applied, especially when it pertains to certain missions. Some bugs may cause progress to come to a screeching halt, such as in the Deerfast mission. Those are key to get resolved for the gaming experience, above even graphics. So it's certainly good see these fixed.
