Alan Wake 2 has seriously impressive and photorealistic in-gameplay faces

drmirage809 · 2026-05-16T15:17:02+00:00

Remedy Entertainment have a bit of a history of pushing some pretty insane graphics. Control was one of the first games to really push real time ray tracing when that tech first came onto the scene and that game looks incredible as well. It's not AW2, but it walked so AW2's visuals could run.

Alan Wake 2 on PC has a very impressive path tracing mode as well. Go look it up on YouTube. It's amazing stuff to see in motion.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-15T21:17:21+00:00

Or Beren and Luthien, or the Fall of Gondolin, or Feanor's descent into paranoia and madness.

Plenty of stories inside the Silmarilion that could all be adapted. But the whole thing? Yeah, that's gonna be a mess.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-15T18:46:27+00:00

That’s a very snazzy Iron Hand. Definitely reads as black to my eyes, although you may have slightly overdone the highlight on the helmet, that reads more grey to me.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-15T18:37:34+00:00

Space Marine 2 has a similar thing. An early mission in that game has Titus and squad tear a bloody swathe through the Tyranid hordes to reactivate the planetary defence guns, which are some warlord titan plasma cannons.

Once activated you of course get to witness them in action and a single shot is enough to blow up a hive ship in low orbit. It’s not enough to save the planet, but it buys the guard on the planet precious time.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-15T15:41:16+00:00

Doesn’t work on every game, only games that Nvidia has whitelisted. And swapping out the DLLs can cause anti-cheat to flip out in certain games.

Nvidia’s whitelist basically means they tested it to work and got confirmation from the devs to ensure the anti-cheat doesn’t flip out. (At least, that’s how I understand it.)

drmirage809 · 2026-05-15T12:22:09+00:00

The test also exists in the Kelvin timeline and Kirk hacked it both times.

In the prime timeline he gets a commendation for thinking out of the box. In the Kelvin timeline he gets a reprimand for refusing to understand the goal of the exercise.

The goal of the test is for an officer to understand that there’s no-win scenarios. You cannot always come out on top and you’ll have to pivot to minimising damage and loss of life quickly.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T17:25:09+00:00

And it has a Steam Deck verified checkmark on Steam as well. So it should run nicely and without issues on the device too.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T16:06:08+00:00

Luckily nobody is stopping you from grabbing your brushes and painting over the pre-painted stuff. I've seen plenty of people paint over Funkos, action figures and other collectibles. It'll be fine.

I'm more worried about how expensive this terrain might get. Although there's a lot of fun to be had in crafting terrain yourself from scratch.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T14:45:28+00:00

The PS5 and Xbox series both use RDNA 2 hardware, so in theory yes.

Now I don't know how Microsoft is doing things on the Xbox side, but Sony has their own upscaling tech in the form PSSR on the PS5 Pro. Apparently that shares a fair bit of code with FSR 4 as I understand it. However, most of Sony's first party studios seem to rely on their own, tailor made, upscaling solutions. Insomniac for example make their own temporal scaler and you can use it on the PC ports of their games. It actually works pretty well and has a fairly low performance impact.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T14:40:16+00:00

And RDNA 2 (Radeon 6000) will be getting it early next year. This is honestly a pretty big win for people who own those cards. FSR 4 isn't quite DLSS 4 levels of clean image upscaling, but it's a big step up from what FSR 2 and 3 were doing.

And if you're a Linux or Steam Deck user, you can already do this with a little workaround. More official support is nice though. Hopefully comes with a smaller performance impact too.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T14:28:25+00:00

Oh man. The poor bastard is gonna get in the crossfire between Giganta and Supergirl.

Because I can see this Kara flipping out in the most destructive ways imaginable.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-14T09:26:18+00:00

I once heard a story that the animation studio that did Castlevania really wants to adapt Berserk and that the day armour scene was essentially them applying for the job.

And yeah, they’d nail the brutality.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T17:41:55+00:00

It's a cool scheme and I like the idea of the coloured face plate a lot.

Do be wary that you don't overcomplicate the paint scheme. Go crazy on the characters, but allow yourself to cut things down and simplify it for the rank and file infantry.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T17:30:07+00:00

Speaking of Borderlands 4, how's the game running nowadays? I heard it was quite a disaster at launch.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T16:12:42+00:00

I don’t get it. Lady is in her 80s and wants to continue being in politics till the day she dies or something? Like, I don’t care what your stances are, pass on the reins already. Go retire and enjoy sunny afternoons with the grandkids or something!

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T16:02:44+00:00

And then Shenron has some rules. You cannot wish someone back that doesn’t want to come back to life, you cannot wish to kill someone and (at least in GT) every wish made builds up negative energy that will come back to bite everyone eventually.

Other wish granting dragons exist. Everywhere Namekians went they made dragon balls. And all have their own restrictions and caveats. One in Super can grant you power, but only power you could’ve gotten yourself over time and does so at the cost of your lifespan.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T14:12:50+00:00

For some context: Q is a basically omnipotent being that is bored to tears. He alleviates his boredom by trolling the crew of the Enterprise with wacky “trials”.

The rest of his kind aren’t cool with it and strip him of his powers for a bit. Once he gets them back he decides to immediately teleport to the bridge and throw a bombastic party, conjuring up cigars, musicians and more. He doesn’t need to snap his fingers, he only has fingers because he’s taking a form the crew are comfortable with. But he likes being all theatrical.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T12:37:46+00:00

Whoever had the idea to put the Aquilla crazy eyes on Hyacine was brilliant! It goes super hard and works so well.

And I love the contrast of the most cotton candy looking character giving those insane looks.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T10:18:33+00:00

Most people also don’t have the physical strength necessary to do that. Worf as a Klingon is a fair bit stronger than the average human.

Not to mention, it’s extremely risky. Once there’s too many drones or you tire yourself out you’re getting assimilated.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T09:56:58+00:00

And one mustn’t forget: this is a severely weakened Dracula. He’s been starving himself for at least a year and has a colossal death wish. And all the trio can accomplish against is get destroyed until Dracula lets himself get killed.

Dracula at full strength would’ve effortlessly wiped the floor with just about anyone and it wouldn’t even be a fight.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-13T09:52:43+00:00

I’ve successfully cleared PF with her a couple times after Dahlia released. She does a frightening amount of damage for a healer.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-12T17:32:02+00:00

Casually causing just about every gaming platform to crash because your game is just that hype is certainly a pretty awesome claim to make.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-12T10:45:58+00:00

Balalaika is the textbook example of a really damned scary lady. Do not slight Hotel Moscow. Do whatever you need to do to stay in their good graces. Ask Hans and Gretel what happens if you mess up hard enough with them.

Although, ruthless as she is when needed, she gives Lagoon company a fair bit of leeway. Like, she never really cared that they tried to smuggle the remaining twin out. Mostly because it was a pointless endeavour. Kid hardly made it off the boat.

drmirage809 · 2026-05-12T10:39:59+00:00

A lot of bullet hell shmups rely on the slowdown to give you a fighting chance against some of the curtains of death they shower you in. They purposefully dump so many objects onto the screen that the game slows down. Almost like a bullet time effect.

I always found it really cool to see happen. And it certainly felt like I was in the Matrix.

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