In AWE, Director Jesse Faden has to enter the Investigations Sector to chase down a mysterious being that’s been stalking this long-abandoned area for years. In order to reclaim the Investigations Sector for the Bureau, Jesse will need to explore the numerous Altered World Events (AWEs) investigated here, including one from the town of Bright Falls, which concerns the missing writer, Alan Wake.
AWE, the second and final expansion for @Control Remedy, launches August 27 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
I don’t think enough has been said about how good this game’s faces are.
I dunno I don’t play a lot of AAA these days maybe it’s par for the course now. But it sure makes looking at heads talking with a little menu of dialogue choices underneath a lot more palatable
One of the joys of drawing is unlocking the form and beauty in any face. You learn to see fascinating detail in anything and the word ‘ugly’ dissolves. I sense that games that go for imperfect, more naturalistic faces share the same appeal. Control definitely had this appeal but I remember people criticising the characters for looking ‘off’. It’s a quality I’d say it shares with the Yakuza series where you want to study character’s facial features for its own sake.
Their faces are definitely generated from actor scans; the quality bar is set by the accuracy of their skin and eyeball shaders, their lighting setups in cutscenes, and the rigging and time investment on the facial animations. Scan an interesting-looking person (yo Ahti) and you get interesting results, but on the other hand, it’s an art pipeline so dedicated to reproducing a baseline ‘reality’ that artistry can’t solve any of your problems; you can’t use an artist’s perspective or their shortcuts to add any additional character.
The problem has been defined as mathematically precisely as possible: one input (artist time x skill) measurable by a single output: fidelity to the source actor performance. All the creative decisions are made in the mocap room.
That’s the thing with the criticisms, I think people are so used to a certain ‘look’ that real faces might look strange or ugly. Weirdos kept harping on about Jesse’s jawline as if it were a bad depiction rather than a natural reality borne from good casting. Personally I thought the faces looked great in Control.
I wonder what the first game to use/benefit from relatively accurate facial likenesses for 3D models was (Half-Life 2 springs to mind but I’m sure there are earlier examples).
Siren has been talked about before here but I liked the unsettling FMV game-like effect they got out of mapping video of the actors’ faces onto their character models’ faces
Yeah I guess “standard industry modeling or whatever vocab word applied to actually interesting human faces” was Control’s secret rather than the tech itself
AWE expansion completed and it was short and sweet. Just more Control basically but some notable developments.
The designers finally had a flourish of creativity with the mods and introduced unique mods that relate to the side-mission you complete to get them. They make the weapons behave in bizarre, broken ways like charge has instantaneous travel time on projectiles or pierce has 0 charge time It’s one of my favourite new additions and something I wish they played with more in the main game since it functionally changes weapons in a meaningful way.
Langston gets a bit more time in the spotlight which was unexpected and the new area is a whole new section (yet another abandoned by the central Bureau due to incompetence) and does the usual Control-y things. I personally can’t get enough of the world so was happy to read more stuff.
The weakest part of the expansion for me ended up being the Alan Wake stuff and a big part of this is that I was not a big fan of Alan Wake. Without spoiling anything, the major problem is that the narrative elements of Control are so strange and far-reaching that they make the Alan Wake stuff seem small fry by comparison. I never found Wake a compelling character and Alan Wake, the conceit of a writer being able to control reality, fits the world but its unclear why Control would focus on this beyond other cases. We know why this is, it’s because Alan Wake is a Remedy IP and the expansion never really shakes this feeling.
The ending basically suggests Remedy is working on an Alan Wake/Control sequel. This is fine but I really hope they have an interesting angle on it other than milking Alan Wake stuff (‘remember this location/character/event!?’). If Wake takes control of Jessie’s narrative to get her to help him so be it but I’d be disappointed if the next game is set in Bright Falls. This expansion also feels like less of an ending to Control than the other DLC which feels anticlimactic.
Overall good stuff and nice to wrap up everything in Control.
So I notice CrossfireX’s singleplayer hasn’t been mentioned here. Has anyone been keeping tabs on it? Was mildly curious just because of how unusual it is for a 13 year old free to play multiplayer shooter to receive a single player campaign more than a decade later by a separate pedigree studio working in a different region. Apparently it uses the Northlight engine.
