It’s no secret that Remedy takes a lot of time to fully flesh out the worlds that their games exist within, which had a lot to do with the long development times for both Alan Wake and Quantum Break. However, despite the developer eventually settling on a more linear approach for both, they are now revealing that there was a lot of untapped potential for creating more open experiences with those games.
Remedy’s Game Director Mikael Kasurinen recently did an interview with Polygon, where he talked about how the possibilities of open-ended gameplay were not off the table for Alan Wake or Quantum Break. He said that “If you go back and look at Alan Wake ten years ago you could see us talking about it about how we dabbled with the idea of driving around in a car in an open environment. You could see even then that desire to go in that direction.”
He goes on to discuss all of the effort that goes into shaping their game worlds, saying “One way to tell a story is to create a rich world you can get to explore. When you look back at Alan Wake and Quantum Break, you can see we spent a lot of time looking at the shape of those worlds, the cities, towns, neat characters, maps. We spent a lot of time in crafting those universes, if you will. The gameplay is actually a linear story through those amazing, complicated worlds. In one way, it’s a bit of a lost opportunity.”
Kasurinen finishes by admitting that there could have been a lot more to offer with the aforementioned games, saying “I think they could have been bigger [games] easily. Alan Wake had a long history of development, but it was through years of events that it took the shape it took. A lot of concepts were created through that journey. It felt like there was this world of concept and complex storyline that was left aside. The key point that we learned from that experience is that the world building we do needs to connect with the gameplay. Gameplay needs to enable organic experiences and interactions with the world. We still want to create strong worlds, but the game should be crafted in such a way that allows this exploration.”
Remedy currently has two games in development that are being split between a team of 140 people, though they have not revealed what either of these games will be. They have previously confirmed that neither of them will be Alan Wake 2, however.
