One of the biggest announcements to come out of Summer Game Fest today was Night Springs, the first expansion for Alan Wake 2.
Releasing tomorrow, Remedy also announced the release of a photo mode in tandem with the DLC, as well as a physical edition of the game due to hit the market later this year.
While Shadowfall is somewhat of a surprise, the expansion is not. Night Springs was revealed alongside the second DLC, The Lake House, when pre-orders for Alan Wake 2 were announced. The first expansion will see players control three characters from the connected Remedy universe in the frames of stories framed as episodes of the anthology series in the game Nightsprings.
Prior to the announcement of Summer Game Fest, GamesIndustry.biz spoke with game director Kyle Rowley, lead writer Clay Murphy, level designer Natalie Janki, and director of communications Thomas Puha.
Puha says Remedy decided to time Night Springs’ release around Summer Game Fest because the event “is a huge platform to get the news out to a huge audience.” But he also says it was for the benefit of the fans.
“Marketing campaigns tend to be shorter these days and it’s good to try to do things differently,” he explains.
“We’ve always taken a very long view of Remedy. The first few months [are not] sales focused; that’s at least the next three years”Thomas Puha
“So, together with our publisher Epic, we decided this time to announce the expansion right before it’s released, so fans don’t have to wait a bit to get their hands on it.”
The promotion for Night Springs has been relatively brief compared to the main game, but there have been hints on social media of its release over the past week.
“There are always discussions about how much of the marketing budget should be saved for post-launch, but the thinking is that especially in a single-player game, launch is the most important thing to get right, so this justifies spending at launch,” notes Puha.
Night Springs was also not in development for long. It started after the release of Alan Wake 2, but the concept was there even before the game was finished.
“We’ve always loved the idea of playing as multiple characters,” Rowley says. “In the original concept of the main game, we wanted to have more playable characters than we got. Night Springs as a concept came about while we were coming up with this. We parked it and after we finished the game we wrote some more cool, crazy stuff.”
Murphy adds, “The writing process was very free and fun—no rules, no holds barred. Just pure experimentation and trying to find the fun in each episode and push it as far as possible.”
It also highlights the collaborative nature of Remedy, as all departments working on the expansion have been involved in shaping the narrative.
“The writing process was very free and fun – no rules, no holds barred. Just pure experimentation’Clay Murphy
“We’re trying to have fun here and make it weird,” he says. “So not every idea comes from the writers, the process definitely involves the team.”
“I think everyone just sank their teeth into it and ran with it,” adds Jankie. “It was really fun to see how each department [got involved].”
Rowley says that doing this expansion was “a nice palate cleanser” for the team as well.
“Working on a horror game for five years is, you know, being stuck in The Dark Place with Alan — we wanted to do something a little more free-form,” he explains.
“There was no ‘Is this too crazy?’ during development, it was more ‘Is this crazy enough?’ That was the mindset coming into it, and it was a nice change of pace.”
There is always the challenge of determining which parts of the team to use and balancing studio resources during production, but this changes significantly when doing an expansion. Especially for Remedy, which has multiple projects in various stages of development, including Control 2 and the Max Payne remakes.
“It’s a constant challenge when you’re working on multiple games at many different stages of production,” notes Puha.
“We feel much better now than we did a few years ago. We’ve thought about how to do this, but there’s no denying that it’s a big challenge to manage teams competing for developers and other resources. Having said that, we are all buzzing about the future roadmap of our games.
“We’ve always planned a dedicated post-launch team for Alan Wake 2,” continues Puha.
“It’s a small team, but everyone on it has worked on Alan Wake 2, the technology and tools are ready, and making the expansion is easier than the base game.”
This isn’t the first time Remedy has worked on DLC content.
Control has seen two expansions since its release, as well as the original Alan Wake in addition to the 2012 spin-off American Nightmare, which is similarly styled as an episode of Night Springs.
“American Nightmare was tonally quite different from the original game,” notes Rowley. “In the same vein, we’re creating a slightly different experience. Gameplay-wise, we’ve changed it for each episode to match the tone. We wanted to make the gameplay feel familiar, but also under a slightly different stylization and context.”
The time and resources spent creating an expansion like Night Springs is a gamble, as not all players of the base game will choose it. But that’s something Remedy was aware of, notes Puha.
“It’s about having realistic expectations, market data and knowing who you’re expanding for and what business purpose it serves,” Puha explains.
It also notes the reception of Alan Wake 2, which has maintained solid momentum since launch through the release of its new game plus mode in December, various patches, developer streams, behind-the-scenes content and fan interaction.
“The response has been incredible,” says Puha. “Alan Wake 2 was a very difficult game to ship. But we’ve always had a plan after we ship her, there’s still things we want to talk about in addition to this expansion, photo mode and the second expansion we’re working on.”
He continues, “We’ve always taken this very long view at Remedy. It’s not like the first few months are focused on sales; that’s at least the next three years – that’s how we look at things.
“There are different pieces that we’re doing that will hopefully keep the game out there. But it really resonated with people in an incredible way.”
Jankie adds: “There’s just something very infectious and motivating about it [about its reception]. I’m very grateful because it was received well and now I feel like, ‘Yeah, we can do more of this.’ It feels really great.”
“There was no ‘Is this too crazy?’ during development it was more ‘Is this crazy enough?’Kyle Rowley
Like the base game, Night Springs was developed with fans in mind.
“There’s quite a bit of fan service, I would say,” Rowley notes. “We definitely wanted to make sure we were using characters that players who played our games would resonate with and want to play again in some cases.”
“It’s nostalgia for us, seeing what the fans want,” adds Murphy.
“Remedy fans are engaging with our games in such a way that it’s truly inspiring. To see what they interpret our games to mean or what they theorize we’ll do in the future.”
Jankie mentions that the team often looked at what fans were talking about online and what they wanted to see in the expansions.
“It was a really nice motivator,” she says. “We could see that we were on the right track and doing something that hopefully they would appreciate and take advantage of us like we did.”
