Posts Tagged ‘Remedy’

Thanks in part to the glowing review I recently gave Alan Wake at Playdevil.com my editor chose me to conduct an email interview with Remedy’s Mikko Rautalahti, one of the games writers. I jumped at the chance and the results are now online. I think it came out pretty well, though as with all email interviews I curse the lack of follow up to some of his responses. On the site the interview is accredited to ‘Staff’, but I assure you it is me, so here is a snippet with the rest available here.

DoFuss: Originally Alan Wake was originally intended to be a more open world title. Why was this initial vision abandoned? With this shift were any cuts or changes made to the narrative?

Mikko Rautalahti: Well, there were many factors in it, of course, but it mostly came down to what we wanted to do with Alan Wake. We knew we wanted it to be a moody, atmospheric game with palpable tension, one that took us halfway into the head of the protagonist and kept the player guessing. And that’s not really the kind of a thing open world games are best suited for.

I’ll give you a practical example of what I mean. Let’s say that Alan Wake is going deeper and deeper into a dark forest to meet someone who has information about his missing wife. Now, we have certain tools that are very effective at creating a creepy atmosphere: we can have the fog roll in, throw in a lot of foreboding audio effects, etc. We can throw in some scripted events as well – maybe there’s a glimpse of a shadowy figure, or you hear ominous whispers. This is familiar ground to those who have played the game – it sets a certain mood for the scene, and we can escalate in various ways until things get nasty.

But in an open world game, the player can just suddenly change his mind – you know, “oh, hey, I think I’ll go do that another mission instead.” That’s great in terms of player freedom, but for our purposes, it’s poison to the atmosphere, because is really emphasizes the fact that this is a game and conveys the message that what you’re experiencing isn’t really very unique, you can always come back, it’s no big deal. And that’s not a bad thing in itself. But for our particular purposes it is a problem, because when you’re trying to create a thriller that really rests largely on the atmosphere, when you’re dealing with questions like “what’s real and what’s fantasy or insanity,” and “what’s really behind all this?” it’s vital to control the pacing. You can’t keep breaking the mood like that. The player has to feel that pressure, and it’s incredibly hard to maintain it if they can just constantly veer off course.

And yes, of course this necessitated changes, but fortunately they weren’t as major as you might think. We didn’t yet have a scene-by-scene script for the game at that point, and this wasn’t a change that had a big impact on Alan Wake’s core story concepts.

There is some magic woven in to Alan Wake’s fabric. Every other game I have played that has attempted blend horror and action has invariably ended up skewed in favour of action. By giving the player the ability and recourses to fight, the tension is removed. Yet despite Alan Wake’s focus on combat it manages to provide constant anxiety though it’s narrative and atmosphere.

Alan Wake is perhaps the first game to offer the experience of a horror movie’s final act. Tooled up, desperate, it forces me to fight for salvation. Strong enough to emerge victorious if I am wise in my approach, but knowing any slip will result in failure.

There is down time, but the threat is constant.

But, though I love it, part of me is furious at Alan Wake. It is my own fault, my own gaming proclivities, an obsessive nature to hunt every collectable scattered throughout a virtual world. But I also blame Remedy, surely they know the plight of many players to lust after every shiny trinket.

I find myself distracted from the narrative to enable my search for insignificant baubles. I am compelled to hunt, venturing far from the intended path. A glint on the horizon will see me abandoning my quest exploring for these irrelevant items, rather than savouring the fantastic atmosphere and story.

My love of Alan Wake is not stifled by this distraction, but I can’t help but curse the developers for dangling this pointless carrot in front my weak willed, obsessive nose.

An extended view of Alan Wake is available here.