AestheticGamer1With mystery still shrouded around this new Alan Wake title that is supposedly coming out this year, Remedy recently has an interview with Edge Magazine on the mistakes of Alan Wake, and what they have learned from it for the future of the franchise.
Finnish studio Remedy has pledged that its next project will benefit from a slicker development process – following the hiccups it experienced making Alan Wake.
Wake was in development for a giant seven years, and was originally intended to be a fully open world game, but Remedy eventually elected to slim it down to a more linear action adventure.
Remedy boss Matias Myllyrinne told the latest issue of Edge that his team had learnt a lot “about how to get faster from point A to point D without necessarily going through point B and C” during the creation of the title.
“We’ll continue to make mistakes, but I think we won’t make the same mistakes,” he added. “You’re supposed to f*ck up every now and again, and if you’re not making mistakes, you’re pretty much not taking enough risks. I think that’s perfectly fine and we want to embrace that: everyone’s allowed to fail here at what they do, and I think that’s part of the safety net that allows people to try harder and push themselves…
“It would be very, very sad if we made the same mistakes again [as we did on Alan Wake with Remedy’s new project]. We’ll find new mistakes to make, but they’ll land us in a cool and interesting place once again!”
Myllyrinne commented that “scaling down” was the key lesson Remedy had learnt from making Alan Wake, and from tempering its ambitions original intentions.
“We tried to combine a sandbox design with a tightly paced thriller,” he said. “We could have made [that] game, but it wasn’t the game we set out to build; those moments just don’t work. And with 20:20 hindsight it’s clear that we should have gone for more of a tightly-paced thrill ride to begin with, which I think we then delivered.
“Those moments that we had in development when you’re supposed to have a dramatic moment, if you’re not controlling the pacing, the player’s turning up to a scene in a monster truck and you’re going: ‘Okay… it’s supposed to be a dramatic love scene, the characters are going through serious marital issues’, and yet the player comes jumping over logs with a frigging monster truck.”
Cryptic as ever, Remedy. It seems the lesson learned is to have a clear vision and go for it in development and to learn from mistakes and to not make the same mistakes again, instead make new mistakes that come with trying to do something new. There are a few complaints many had with Alan Wake, likely most notable and one we echo here at Rely On Horror being a very limited variety of enemies which, while not game-ruining, would have been nice to face more than a surprisingly large army of lumberjacks and the occasional kitchen sink flinging itself both homicidally and suicidally at us. Hopefully this is a sign Remedy is listening and whatever this mysterious new title is, they’re working to make a better and more ambiguous game. Assuming we’re not looking at, “Alan Wake Chess,” or something of the sort, we don’t know what Remedy is up to either. Those sly dogs.
