It’s been almost one year since Alan Wake 2 released, and the developers at Remedy Entertainment are celebrating with a large update that makes the game more accessible thanks to options to greatly reduce the difficulty.
In a post published Monday, the studio announced a series of quality-of-life updates, along with more features in the Gameplay Assist menu. These assist options can help you to, if you so choose, reduce difficulty on combat to almost nothing. You can toggle on player invulnerability and player immortality, so that you’ll never die. If you want to turn down the survival horror loot aspects, you can set it so you have infinite ammo and flashlight batteries. There’s even a one-shot kill feature if you want to steamroll over enemies.
Turning these features on diminishes the scares by quite a bit, but they could be excellent options for people who were either too scared to pick up Alan Wake 2 or can just use some basic gameplay to experience what the story, visuals, and music have to offer.
Beyond combat, Remedy has added a feature that lets you invert the X axis with mouse and controller instead of just the Y axis, which it says was a highly requested feature. There’s also now a quick turn and an option to auto-complete quick-time events.
In addition, the studio announced PlayStation 5-specific updates. DualSense users can now use gyro aiming (although you can turn this off) and will receive haptics support for healing items and throwables like grenades.
In a separate announcement, Remedy also revealed how it has enhanced Alan Wake 2 for the PlayStation 5 Pro. A lot of the premium console’s appeal has to do with its improvements to performance modes, which allow for 60 frames per second (fps), but typically at the cost of graphics quality. The PS5 Pro utilizes Sony-specific AI upscaling technology called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which Remedy took advantage of.
The Quality Mode, which targets 30 fps, will now have ray tracing, which wasn’t available at launch on the regular PS5. Meanwhile, the Performance Mode will be targeting the same image quality settings as in the Quality Mode from the base console, and can potentially output to 4K.
The update will be free and will launch on October 22. This is to coincide with The Lake House DLC, which is Alan Wake 2‘s final planned story expansion. Players got to see a first look at gameplay, new monsters, and connections to Control at the October 2024 Xbox Partner Preview last week.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.