Technical achievements aside, this game is delightful, particularly if you're a fan of Twin Peaks or scandi noir. Highly recommended if you have a penchant for the weird or macabre. A milestone in interactive storytelling.
I'm a few hours in, and it's enjoyable, but I'm not blown away by the gameplay as much as the graphics and sound design. It's a fairly linear affair with a lot of backtracking, and I find the Mind Place system tedious. It's a glorified menu system that blocks off progression until you've pinned some notes to predetermined places on the board, or watched some cutscenes where the character miraculously figures out what to do next. It's not engaging in any way, and just takes me out of the core game loop.
But I love the numerous references to Control and Max Payne, and how they've integrated it into the same universe. I can't wait for the Max Payne remakes, and hopefully the next installment in the series. I just wish it could be done without association with Rockstar. They ruined the experience of MP3, which was a solid game, but Rockstar's Social Club launcher is a garbage piece of software.
> watched some cutscenes where the character miraculously figures out what to do next
Some of your criticisms are fair I think, but this is actually deliberate and explained as the story continues. Saga is clearly doing more than "profiling".
I think it deserves a lot of praise, but also some criticism:
* While it may keep their creative vision "pure", the lack of lower graphical settings makes it run pretty terribly on an RTX 3080, which is very frustrating. You can brute-force this problem away with DLSS, but I like native resolution and I'm sick of DLSS being used as a crutch.
* The difficulty is all over the place. "Story" mode is likely too easy, while "Normal" varies between being reasonable and damn near impossible. A weaker enemy can take 2 bullets in Story, and 10 in normal. That's frustrating when ammo is so tight early on. In general, the game lacks a good "progression" of difficulty. It's a roller-coaster instead of a curve.
* To add on to the difficulty, the mechanics do not feel as consistent in AW2 as AW1. Why do some enemy types have a shield you need to burn away, while others don't? (Despite looking similar) For others, it's unclear which ones will vanish with a little light and which ones require an intense light - and what exactly gets them to disappear. Why can't the flashlight have a bit more grace when a target leaves the crosshair for 0.1 seconds? Why do so many enemies have extendo-reach and teleporting? Why isn't dodging timing better telegraphed? Etc.
* The story, at least so far, hasn't hit the same highs for me. It feels a little like we're doing the same thing over again, and it doesn't hit as hard the second time after the reveals and twists from AW1 are already used up.
I'm on a 3080 and it ran fine for me. Did you turn off ray-traced direct/indirect lighting? Those really require a 40 series, even at low quality levels. Is your native resolution 4K? At 4K I needed to turn on DLSS, but I was also able to set most of the quality knobs (other than RT) to medium or high, not low. I wonder if maybe you're running into some sort of driver problem.
I turned everything to the lowest available setting, except textures, which I kept on high. I checked and that setting doesn't seem to make any difference on my card.
Native resolution is 1440p.
Most of the time it hovers around 60-ish, but it dips into the 40's occasionally and is overall inconsistent. To me, at 1440p, that's not acceptable.
Drivers are the latest Nvidia offers, but I didn't scrape the old ones out with DDU - hopefully that's not necessary.
Just use DLSS. It looks great and the graphics settings are designed around it. I'm not sure if the earlier DLSS versions were crappy, but this latest one doesn't seem to have any weird artifacts.
I much prefer setting DLSS on performance and playing with medium settings and raytracing on a 3090. The game looks way better that way.
To your gameplay points, you're pretty heavily incentivized to aim for the head. I played on nightmare difficulty and most normal enemies went down in 3-5 headshots. I think being unable to tell if the shadows in the dark place are hostile or not is very deliberate, to create a sense of unease.
I don't like the kind of artifacts or presentation that DLSS creates. It's a different kind of image than one with native, but say - lower foliage density or a lower-resolution mesh, etc.
Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=309aaFblCJI, then watch the next few videos in the series until the end of Control (Control Pt. 1 => Alan Wake Pt. 1+2 => Control Pt. 2) and you will be completely thoroughly caught up
It has though. There are hints "everywhere" (not to be specific, otherwise I'll spoil it) in the game, but it's not vital to play AW2, I would add what you said about AW1, "you'll miss some details."
AW2 is a step forward to the shared universe of Remedy.
