There’s already Alan Wake 2? Unless I’m missing something here
There was Alan Wake and then there was Alan Wake’s American Nightmare which I don’t think was intended as a sequel.
My money is on a current gen remaster before they do a sequel tho.
I really feel like remedy is suddenly in a very good place right now and it’s funny because they haven’t shipped a game that was widely regarded as good since like, max payne 2
all signs point to control being the first game that won’t really wind up getting away from them in ages
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I hope they’re ok; Control is a cheap play at reusing a bunch of Quantum Break assets. Their problem as ever is that they’re so slow their budgets exceed their grasp so I think if they’ve burned through partners/publishers they need to scale down; hopefully Control gets them there and they can continue at a more manageable size.
As ever budget and scope has very little to do with the quality of a game beyond a certain point
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Ya I love the Max Payne games but the rest just… didn’t do it for me. Alan Wake just isn’t my thing at all, then Quantum Break felt like watching a move every time I sat down to play a game, just didn’t work for me, and I love MGS…
They need to bring back Death Rally
it’s getting a lot of fairly generous coverage which doesn’t hurt (and is kind of funny in the context of a press release to the effect that they’re really raking in royalties) but even on its face it seems like a remarkably untroubled project by their standards, like when arkane finally shipped dishonoured (though that was hardly really a revelation, it was at least something). If it’s even competitive with the RE2 remake that’ll be great for them. and as someone who repeatedly tried and failed to appreciate prey 2017 I like the overall look of the thing quite a bit.
here’s hoping!
They’ve been doing really interesting high-tech contract work in Finland and abroad. For example, they gave the Varjo the what-for with a voxel video capture and playback demo. Getting back to their demoscene roots. Speculation: doing highly-targeted and specific work has tightened their general practice.
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Quantum Break was good and some of the best writing in a videogame and it was a time travel story on top of that. It’s a miracle that it’s not a convoluted mess, even less of one than most videogame stories without time travel shenanigans.
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Fine I bought it jeez
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Holy shit I want to go back in time and play this instead of Uncharted 4. Thank you for recommending it so strongly. I am very excited for Control now.
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Oh I bought it and beat it and I didn’t post about it in here. I did a little thing in Games U Played I guess.
This was really extremely good. Remedy is the weirdest developer. In the popular imagination they’re still being powered by Max Payne, their first work, and considered an action developer. While that’s not wrong per se, it’s obvious that their focus is really on formal experiments in videogame plotting and formatting. From Remedy’s perspective, the comic book cutscenes and especially the dream levels were just as important as the bullet time.
For anyone who doesn’t know, because I sure as hell didn’t, here is the structure of Quantum Break:
First you play a third-person shooter section broken up into 3 acts. Your guy has crazy time powers, each on an independent cooldown timer, meaning you can do an intricate and flexible series of powers combined with the shooting to do some really stylish, fun, and effective moves. It’s at least as much of a revelatory development on the Cover Thirps as Vanquish is.
At the end of the 3 acts, you have a Junction, which is an extremely short level where you play as the antagonist and make a binary choice about how the story will proceed that affects the next 3 acts that you play as the protagonist. This opens up a crazy amount of gameplay possibilities. Do you pick the choice that you think will make it easiest on your avatar-hero? Do you roleplay the antagonist based on what you know of his personality (which changes as the game goes on and you learn more of the backstory)? Do you just pick what sounds most interesting?
THEN the game streams (which is dumb, but) a live-action TV episode of approximately TNT quality which responds to both the Junction choice you made AND little easter eggy type things you can find during the action levels that depicts the activities both of the antagonist AND of his cronies who form a bunch of shifting alliances, sometimes with you and sometimes against you, so you can see the other side of this corporate structure that spends the action levels trying to hunt you down.
All this is wrapped into a time travel plot. Yeah.
Each of the pieces of writing isn’t going to earn any awards, but the effect of all this stuff wrapped up together and presented to you serially is a real heady mix. I don’t know that this particular structure could work with any other plot and still be effective. But man! I’d never think that a game with high production values and AAA quality thirpsing could be this boldly weird. It’s real good, people.
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Also: extremely excellent face mocap tech that is not nearly as uncanny as LA Noire
Also: a hinted at creepy scifi superenemy with ultrapowers that the game thankfully never makes you actually fight (although I dunno maybe you do if you pick some other Junction choices)
Also: a game that takes places in the 20teens that exclusively depicts firearms that well funded corporate mercenaries would actually use in the 20teens
Also: Lance Reddick
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I think the junction thing just changes whether the tv show main guy is a boss fight or whether he’s just a dead body on the ground for the videogame main guy to walk past, oblivious to his story
I’m thinking about streaming to show off the game and going down the other half of the junction paths so I just might find out for sure
i think quantum break is a game pass game so you have convinced me to actually check it out! its kinda shameful i havent yet because i love remedy games so much
If by “love Remedy games” you mean more than MP 1&2 then you are 1. a rarity and 2. doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t play this
If you’re any good at shooters and using a mouse I’d recommend Hard, I started it on Hard and never thought twice about it. Any easier and it definitely woulda been too easy (it was already pretty easy)
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i like the first two max paynes but i really loved both alan wake games as well. to me quantum break literally having live action tv elements is just a continuation of the episodic format of alan wake in a really interesting way so im excited
bought this game, played 5 minutes, met the nice activist student, she asked how I’d feel if a giant corporation “took a massive dump” on my personal history, and the protagonist grinned in a way that said, unmistakably, “I like to be shit on”
gonna roleplay him as a guy who is so nervously affirmative he keeps accidentally suggesting fetishes to every NPC he tries to have a normal conversation with
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