d3t: Alan Wake Remastered

Remedy Entertainment approached d3t to remaster the popular, cult classic Alan Wake. This was brought about following our previous experience of producing high quality remasters, alongside our team’s attention to detail, and passion for the Alan Wake franchise.

The brief was for d3t to remaster the game and its two-story expansions for 8th and 9th generation consoles - allowing it to be experienced by new audiences and platforms that were unable to access the original game.

The Challenge

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 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:

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.
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.
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.

The Results

With each addition or change we were conscious to ensure that they all added value to the overall experience, without detracting from the original intent Remedy had set out to achieve. The end result is a product that both d3t and Remedy are extremely proud of.

A testament that is also echoed in the positive critical reception the game has received, with key publications such as TechRadar (scored 4.5 stars out of 5), GameInformer (scoring 8/10), GameSpot (scoring 8/10), and IGN (scoring 7/10) commending the remaster through a combination of high praise and scoring.

Alan Wake Remastered also managed a top 5 showing in the UK All Format Chart, with 84% of its sales coming via PlayStation platforms. A platform that was previously unable to access the game when it originally launched, highlighting how we had met Remedy’s brief in successfully remastering the game and bringing it to new audiences and platforms.

It also performed strongly on Metacritic with scores of 80 on Xbox Series X, 79 on PlayStation 5, and 80 on PC. The positive reception amongst critics and fans alike is something that we at d3t are extremely pleased about, and we are delighted to have met their expectations.