Remedy Entertainment has dealt a knockout blow to the chops of Windows XP users eager to get their hands on Alan Wake.
"It is best to consider Alan Wake to be a Vista exclusive game", Remedy's director of development Markus Maki has said.
Maki refused to be drawn on the developer's plans for DirectX 10 implementation in the game.
Neither is Remedy committing to a release date for Alan Wake yet, although Microsoft has previously promised we'll see it this year - well, on Xbox 360 at least.
"We haven't announced a release date yet - we are a small team that is focused on delivering an amazing game experience, and that requires time and patience", Maki said.
Alan Wake relates the tale of a horror writer who loses the love of his life and moves to smalltown America to start again - it's promising to be the next classic videogame terrorshow. To find out why, go to our Alan Wake gamepage.
Yay let's just cut down on our potential customers...I mean wtf!? I certainly won't be installing Vista just to play this game. I'd rather buy it on my 360.
"It is best to consider Alan Wake to be a Vista exclusive game",
seems to me to be an incredibly clumsy statement for someone such as the Director of Development to come out with.
It implies that they know that Vista's less than popular (i don't have figures) but Microsoft see Alan Wake as a tool to drive Vista platform adoption, although Remedy would rather more people actually buy their game - which they need the XP support, for. (to whatever standard it might be implemented...)
So, the question I'm left with, is: It's best for whom for Alan Wake to be considered a Vista exclusive?
I'd expect more and more announcements like this over the coming year. I appreciate it's not the be all and end all, but Vista is required for DX10 functionality so if you're a PC gamer you're gonna have to make the switch eventually.
Not too fussed about the PC version, will get it for the 360. Just really looking forward to playing this game in the dark, on the LCD with suround sound blasting.
This is my top game of this year(thats if it gets released). Come on MS and Remedy lets see some gameplay.
I think it's just another eaxmple of p**s-poor programmers if this doesn't get a 360 release.
Seems obvious to me that the programmers are behind schedule, and can't be bottomd spending time to optimise the 360 version so it'll run smooth on the hardware.
So they'll conveniently say "Oh sorry, this game wont run on 360 afterall, so we're going Vista only", when what they really mean is "We can't be bothered to spend more time getting this optimised to run on consoles, because we're behind schedule and over budget. So we'll make it vista only, and if it doesn't run right we'll just say the game was made for future technology and the PC to run it properly hasn't been developed yet."
Well, if it's Vista only, I won't be buying it. I've just wiped Vista and gone back to XP again, and am now getting around a 25-50% speed increase in everything (not just games).
Tend to do all my gaming on the 360 and PS3 these days anyway...
Well there is a hack which lets you run DX10 on XP, e.g. Crysis you could do this.
There isint, the hack for Crysis is to set very-high in DX10, save the cfg file and add it to Crysis in XP( or get someone elses ), basically Crysis supports very high in XP its just not in the options. Its not DX10, its just the ability ro run very high. Youll see it in the volumetric clouds etc at the start, theyre still much better looking in DX10 on Vista.
They'll end up releasing it on XP too, i have Vista Ultimate 64 and the performance with DX10 games is abysmal, my 8800GT gets 20% knocked off its performance
Well there is a hack which lets you run DX10 on XP, e.g. Crysis you could do this.
There isint, the hack for Crysis is to set very-high in DX10, save the cfg file and add it to Crysis in XP( or get someone elses ), basically Crysis supports very high in XP its just not in the options. Its not DX10, its just the ability ro run very high. Youll see it in the volumetric clouds etc at the start, theyre still much better looking in DX10 on Vista.
They'll end up releasing it on XP too, i have Vista Ultimate 64 and the performance with DX10 games is abysmal, my 8800GT gets 20% knocked off its performance
Took the words right outta my mouth (except that bit about having Vista Ultimate - I don't have Vista yet, so they were all your words)
Its simple m'soft want as many people to get vista therefore they are trying to make games vista only. This won't make much of a difference to the developers really as pc game sales are p**s poor at the moment (just look at figures for crysis and UTIII) The bulk of this games sales will come from 360 owners anyway, even if it was compatable with xp.
So why can't they release this on XP? It is nothing to do with DX10, because the 360 doesn't support DX10 either. This will be down to pressure from MS (who are publishing the game) to increase the catalogue of Vista-only games and encourage upgrades. Until now, the only two Vista-only games were rubbish (Halo 2 and Shadowrun) and were hacked to work with XP eventually anyway. This artificial platform limitation by MS is just a way to get gamers to buy bloated vista pigware.
It will take more than Alan Wake to get me to upgrade to Vista.
Go shoot yourself in the foot, see if I care.
If Vista has had any positive effect on PC gaming, then it's the opportunity it has afforded Independant gaming labels to give PC gamers what they really want.
To me this doesn't sound like an anouncement that it will be vista exclusive - just that it will be so much better with dx10 you won't want to play it without! I don't mind either way - had Vista for a while now and have had no real problems with it (no mroe than when I moved to XP).
"Vista Exclusive" is the PC version of "Straight to DVD" movie.
Expect to see Alan Wake in bargain bins soon.
I think it's Vista that may be heading to the bargain bucket!!
Also, is it only me that thought this was Vista only all along? I'm pretty sure that PC Format/Gamer all stated this ages ago! Maybe I just had a premonition
How long did it take for games to be made exclusively for XP? Sure I remember a similar thing happening meaning I couldn't play Thief: Deadly Shadows or Deus Ex: Invisible War according to the back of the boxes as they were XP exclusives (although I think Deus Ex still worked.) Deus Ex: IW was released 2 years after XP.
This game probably won't be released this year, as no date has been announced and the developers sounded quite non-committal about the hopes of getting it out before the close of the year. So, it will be at least 2 years after Vista release, if they manage to finish by Xmas this year.
This is good news for Vista users. This means they will spent more time optimising the game for Vista, where as developers at the moment have still had to accommodate XP users.
Remedy won't lose a bean on this game as Microsoft will have paid them handsomely to produce it as a Vista only product. With the amount of money they've invested in Vista to date, I think this could well be the first of many games "wearing" the Vista only label!
If i remember correctly, Alan Wake was always a Vista exclusive, I remember reading the story and thinking 'well I'll get it on 360 then'... and that must have been a year ago.
I also remember Alan Wake being a Vista only title so what I think this news release is really saying is that it's going to be a PC game only.
Also, like it or not, Vista is the future PC OS. I've ordered a new laptop with Vista on it and am looking forward to exploring the new OS. I remember when XP was released, nothing but complaints. Today it's rock solid. Same with Vista, it's having issues but SP1 is in the works and should be out soon and I'm sure it will iron out a lot of issues. Also, when support for XP is dropped this summer, that will be the start of its way out and Vista's role in.
Indeed. We have no choice to accept Vista as the future.
What has me stumped is why, when MS are pushing Games For Windows and Vista, they didn't make a Gamer version of Vista; one with all the crap disabled right from the start.
Eventually it will become better, and by that time we'll all be expected to have 4Gb RAM minimum etc...etc...etc...
Until then though, it would take something really special for me to upgrade my OS as I've ŁŁŁŁŁŁ's of software that isn't Vista compatable.
Youre right about the vista / crysis thingy but look back at halo 2 which is vista only
after about 2 weeks there were hacks all over the web allowing people to run it in dx9 and xp so no matter what they say people will hack it and convert it to dx9- the only issue for remedy is that people will download instead of buy it - talk about forcing customers to piracy !
It seems a bit silly to me to release Vista only stuff. Its only been a year and most people don't want to change, and dont punnish them for not shelling out Ł100ish on something they dont really want that much. I had vista from pretty much day 1, and I've got to say I love it. I suppose I take a bit of a performance hit with 'not-quite-new-anymore' games, but as games are getting optimised for Vista, its getting better. ...Please dont hate me *Hides*
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they're probably coding right now 
How dense can you be
