ALAN WAKE - WRITER MIKKO RAUTALAHTI Posted by PlayDevil.com Staff on Sep 7, 2010 14:49 (Sep 7, 2010 14:49) |
 Mikko Rautalahti, 'Writer Alan Wake' @ Remedy Entertainment talks to PlayDevil in this exclusive interview regarding "Alan Wake", the new DLC and future plans. 1. I 'm a huge fan of what you have achieved with Alan Wake, however it is hard to ignore how unceremoniously you abandoned another game I loved, Max Payne, after his second outing. What prompted you to make the move? After that, we haven’t been involved with the franchise. We spent 7 years with the Max Payne franchise which was certainly a wonderful ride, but as a studio full of creative minds there was certainly an urge to try something new. We started thinking about new things to work on, and that process eventually led to Alan Wake. Having this kind of experience is vital to a game studio. When you’re working on a big project like this, it’s of course very important that the individual team members are good at what they do, but it’s also important to have a bit of continuity there. When people know each other well enough to cooperate effectively, and are familiar with their own technology and tools, that has a huge impact on how the work progresses. It doesn’t hurt morale, either. There are other influences as well – Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, Paul Aster’s The Book of Illusions, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves were all books we read and discussed quite a bit during the writing process. People who’re familiar with them can undoubtedly see some parallels – they feature writers as protagonists, etc. But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg; it’s very hard to give any kind of a definitive list of influences. We read a lot, we consume a lot of fiction. You just have to.
4. The Bright Falls promotional shorts did a good job establishing a vibe for the eponymous town before the games release. At what point in development were the shorts conceived and what part do you see it playing in the overall experience of Alan Wake? Mikko Rautalahti: The Bright Falls series was actually conceived and shot fairly late in the process – at that point Alan Wake itself was already so far along that we were really wrapping things up. I was very happy with how it turned out, and of course it’s been received really well. I think Bright Falls is a great example of the kinds of things we’d like to do more of with Alan Wake as a franchise – it’s really well-made, it’s interesting, it’s got a little different tone and point of view, but it’s still very closely tied to our themes and the world we’re creating. 5. 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.
6. A long development cycles have been known to adversely affect some titles as trends change faster than the game can. Do you feel Alan Wake suffers from any such issues? Mikko Rautalahti: I guess that kind of thing is always going to be an issue to some degree, but I’m not sure it’s a meaningful metric, or one that applies to Alan Wake especially well. At least I can’t really think of some particular trend that our game would have really fit into when Alan Wake was first announced. That said, it certainly would’ve been a less competitive market. |
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Sep 7, 2010 16:20:49 (Sep 7, 2010 16:20)
