The Fate of Alan WakeWords
Matt Williamson
"When it’s done." Lasse Seppänen, the producer for Alan Wake, has been saying that since the game was announced. Many of us have seen this language before; sometimes resulting in a fantastic but long awaited game, yet others faded away never to be heard from again. Now that the legendary when-it’s-done game—Duke Nukem Forever— is looking like it may have finally been laid to rest, the time is ripe to look at other titles that could fall into a sinkhole of vaporware.
So what do we really know about Alan Wake? When the title was announced, months before the Xbox 360 even launched, it was one of the reasons I wanted to purchase the console. But what are the real chances of the game still being released? We hope next month's E3 will shed more light on the project, but in the meantime let’s look at the facts and see what we know so far:
1: The Story
Inspired by the works of Stephen King and cult TV show Twin Peaks, Alan Wake explores the darkly cerebral side of a writer’s mind. World-renowned horror novelist Alan Wake, who can’t escape his fame or nightmares, needs to get away from a stressful urban lifestyle. For the past two years Alan hasn’t been able to write anything, and in an attempt to pull himself out of this creative slump following the disappearance of his fiancé, he checks into a clinic in the small town of Bright Falls, Washington. Fighting insomnia and nightmares has worn Alan out, but the quaint town miraculously relieves these problems. That is, until his nightmares begin manifesting themselves in reality.
The story, like a TV series, will be broken up into seasons: each game release containing that season’s episodes. Future Alan Wake seasons are already planned for release. While the story will be doled out in an episodic format, Bright Falls will be available to explore as the player sees fit from the onset.
2: The Location
The small town of Bright Falls, WA is designed to mirror the mysterious Alaskan village of Twin Peaks from David Lynch’s hit TV show. Weighing in with approximately 36 square miles of in game area, Bright Falls should prove to be a sprawling environment for players to explore. While Alan Wwake is a free roaming open world experience, creative director Petri Järvilehto points out that “Alan Wake isn’t a Bioware RPG. The storytelling doesn’t advance if the player wonders aimlessly around the woods.”
3: The Actors
The character of Alan Wake is modeled after Finnish actor Ilkka Villi. Whether or not he’ll be used for anything besides a model is unknown.
4: In-game Perspective
The game will be played from 3rd person perspective. It is unknown if combat and driving will remain 3rd person, or switch to another perspective.
5: Multiplayer Aspects
With the development of Alan Wake focusing heavily on plot and storytelling, Remedy has no plans on including multiplayer support. According to the creative director "We’d much rather give the players a great single-player game, than a mediocre single and multiplayer game." This doesn’t mean that when players finish the game there’ll be nothing to do. As lead writer Sam Lake pointed out, "we have all kinds of ideas related to replayability, but we want to prototype them further before we’ll talk about them."
6: The Developer’s History
Before starting on Alan Wake, Remedy Entertainment developed both Max Payne games. The Finland based developer was, ironically, a partner company to ill-fated 3D Realms (a reason for concern in the first place). In 2002 the rights to the Max Payne series was sold to Take-Two Interactive, and after the publication of Max Payne 2 Remedy was free to peruse any new games they wanted.
7: When Development Started
According to the creative director, Petri Järvilehto, Alan Wake has been in development for about 5 years. "Once Max Payne 2 shipped [in Oct. 2003] we spent a little while recovering from the crunch, and then started working on different concepts […] and after several drafts we found something that we really liked… and that concept was Alan Wake."
8: What Systems it’s in Development for
Alan Wake will only come out for the Xbox 360 and Windows PC because of the publishing deal with Microsoft Games Studio. Even though the initial announcement stated that AW would be released for "the next generation of consoles," Markus Maki, the director of development, has since clarified that there won’t be a PS3 release.
"PS3 development was a big unknown to an independent 3rd party developer in mid 2005 when this decision was made," said Maki. "We have absolutely nothing against PS3, far from it, and in fact we are still a registered Sony PS3 developer. It was a big decision for us to go with a console first party publisher with Alan Wake, but looking at it in hindsight I still think it was the right one for the game and for the company. We get a better game for you to enjoy and have less technological risks while making it."
9: Reasons for Development Length
The main reason that Remedy Entertainment has given for the length of development is "quality." To achieve the quality of game that they want it will take time. It doesn’t help that the development team is comparatively smaller than other companies with only 31 people working on the title. Alan Wake also spent a lot time in the pre-production phase fleshing out the story ideas and building a brand new engine to power the game. All of this will hopefully result in "quality," but at what expense?
10: Projected Release Date
Currently unknown. The original projected release for Alan Wake was late 2008, but the only thing released from Remedy Entertainment last year was a new Alan Wake trailer preceding the premier of the Max Payne film. In an interview early last year Markus Maki was quick to point out that "we haven’t announced a release date yet - we are a small team that is focused on delivering an amazing game experience, and that requires time and patience."
This leads us back to the starting point, that the game will be released "when it’s done." So what happened to the game? Is this simply a case of Microsoft pushing undercooked ideas to the public to gain pre-launch support, or were there unspoken development problems. We just don’t know, and Remedy is keeping their lips sealed. When E3 rolls around next month you can bet we’ll do everything we can to get more info, and hopefully there will be some official announcements about the release of Alan Wake.
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