That being said, I do hope we get an opportunity to work on Alan Wake 2. “The thing that made this idea of releasing this prototype demo OK is that it is very much on a high level,” Lake said. When Remedy first told me it was going to let me look at the prototype, my first thought was that Alan Wake 2 was completely dead.īut that’s not why Lake and the rest of the developers at Remedy were so comfortable releasing it. My first thought was that Alan Wake 2 was completely dead Narratively, Lake said, the idea was to continue Wake’s journey and his struggle with the rising force of evil in the sequel. “Those were new things that we started prototyping and working on.” “You can see a glimpse of rewriting reality in the video,” Lake said. The prototype also shows off enemies not seen in the original game, new settings and a new mechanic that the team was excited about. “Clearly in the prototype we see Alan Wake himself as a more experienced player in the secret war against the forces of darkness.” “The high-level thematic elements of what’s there. Lake said the video is not meant to be the opening of the sequel, but a taste of what was to come. It used that prototype to create a pitch video to shop around to potential publishers. But Remedy has a working prototype, one it created about five years ago to show off Alan Wake 2. Even planning the story out for a sequel isn’t that surprising. It’s one thing to want a sequel to your game.

“We feel this is a big universe to develop and explore in many ways.” The prototype Alan Wake is a very central character, but we have other characters around him like and his wife Alice and Sheriff Sarah Breaker and other characters there. “In many ways, we see the universe as a bigger thing.

“Definitely what we have mapped out is a longer thing than the first game and a sequel there is more to it,” Lake said. “More or less straight from getting Alan Wake shipped, we were working on a sequel and planning on a sequel.”Īnd it’s not just Alan Wake 2 that Remedy was planning on. “Near the end of Alan Wake, we were sitting down and talking about the sequel and where we should be taking it, on a detailed level,” Lake said. We knew we would have to iterate and refine, but there was always a rough road map there.”Īs Alan Wake neared shipping in 2010, the team started focusing on making those rough plans more concrete. “For Alan Wake, from the get-go, we assumed there was going to be a sequel and we mapped things further out when it came to character, story, details and focus changes. That taught us that with Alan Wake and everything we do, the idea of a sequel and sequels has to be there from the beginning. “That proved to be a challenge when making the sequel. “I, for one, happily killed almost every character in Max Payne,” said Sam Lake, Remedy’s creative director and head writer, in a recent Polygon interview. As Wake digs deeper into the story, it becomes clear that things aren’t exactly normal in Bright Falls and that elements of a novel he doesn’t remember writing are coming to life.Ī concept sketch of a Bear Boss Taken. In Alan Wake, players take on the role of the titular antihero, a bestselling thriller novelist who is trying to figure out what happened to his wife during a vacation in Bright Falls, Washington. But then the game, like its fictional protagonist, simply vanished. Remedy even created a functioning internal prototype. It sold more than 3.2 million copies, and its story concluded with a confounding cliffhanger that launched many theories and extensive analysis. Back at Kotaku, I wrote that the game helped to redefine interactive storytelling. Writers from publications like the Associated Press, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph praised the game’s pacing, its look and its storyline. It showed that episodic gaming could be compelling when released as a package, that narrative was important in games, and that violence and gore aren’t the only way to scare in an interactive experience. In 2010, the original Alan Wake, published by Microsoft, hit the Xbox 360. Alan Wake 2: For a passionate, perhaps not big enough, fan base, just hearing the name of that title can’t help but kickstart a jolt of excitement.

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