– Control: Resonant is Remedy’s first melee-focused game, with protagonist Dylan Faden using no firearms.
– The game is set in a warped, open-world version of Manhattan with anomalies like gravity shifts and time fractures.
– Development followed a two-to-three-year production timeline after extensive early prototyping and engine tweaking.
– “Vision propagation” workshops with cross-disciplinary leads bridged the gap between concept and full production.
– Kasurinen emphasizes that team cohesion and honest reassessment are critical to avoid losing design harmony.
New Sequel to Control Announced
Creating a game with otherworldly mechanics in a bizarre setting has been a focus for Remedy over the past few years, with notable examples such as Alan Wake 2, Control, and the upcoming Control: Resonant. This new sequel to the 2019 original will expand upon Control and Remedy’s interconnected Universe with a new protagonist, Dylan Faden, who relies entirely on melee combat instead of firearms this time around. The game will be set in a bizarre, warped version of Manhattan, featuring anomalies such as gravity shifts, time fractures, and unpredictable enemies and events. Typically, development teams taking on such ambitious, over-the-top projects risk unintentionally losing design harmony.
Interview with the Director
Game Developer had a brief interview with Mikael Kasurinen, the director of Control Resonant, at Gamescom LATAM, where they discussed Control Resonant’s development and design process as Remedy’s first melee-focused game. He stated, “Control was always a franchise that’s not about a single character. It’s about a world that has its own story, one that’s wide and complicated. It’s also the biggest game Remedy has ever made.” Kasurinen explained that as soon as Control came out, he promptly began work on Control Resonant and simply referred to it as the sequel to Control. The team went through numerous prototype stages and tweaked the game’s engine to accommodate the open-world concept of Control Resonant.
Development Timeline and Process
According to Kasurinen, early experimentation and testing allowed the official production timeline to fall between two and three years. In the interview, he explained, “The early portion was more about concepting and thinking through what we were going to do and how we would do it. In the meantime, we were building processes, we were building our technology, we were creating tools, and basically preparing to go into pre-production and then full production with the game in the last two to three years.” Kasurinen described a process of “vision propagation” between the two phases, bridging the gap between production cycles. This was accomplished through brainstorming workshops with a group of leads from different disciplines who were envisioning the game’s fundamentals and high-level concepts.
Team Communication and Challenges
Kasurinen continued, “Once we’re done with the early phases… they are committed.” After that, the leads return to their respective teams, gradually instructing them, communicating the game’s milestones, and adjusting their workload and tasks as needed. Kasurinen concluded: “If a team faces a wall and I can see the issues, I need to be able to step back and say, ‘Yep, it doesn’t work.’ We can let it go and find another way. But that thinking, that commitment, that investment, needs to work within the team, vertically all the way to the top. If it doesn’t, the team will start to fall apart and lose their sense of what’s true and what’s false.”