Remedy looking to improve facial animation for Alan Wake DLC

Zombies may have been the scariest things in (the truly excellent) Alan Wake. No, we're not talking about the shadow-infested Taken but rather the main characters themselves. While Remedy Entertainment's Markus Maki admits in a forum post that "it's a complex problem trying to dodge the Uncanny Valley," many of the characters in Alan Wake's cutscenes land squarely in the Valley, giving them that just-this-side-of-creepy zombie death mask that we all know and love.

Now for the good news: Remedy "definitely learned a lot doing Alan Wake" and is "using some of the improvements in the DLC production already." And, in case you think it's as easy as checkin off the "make less zombie-like" box in GameDeveloper 7.0, Maki says, "It's not alone a matter of the method how or where the facial capture is done, it's about the run-time animation techniques available, skeleton setup and so on."

Skeletons, too? We told you Alan Wake was creepy!

[Via G4]