One of the biggest announcements to come out of Summer Game Fest today was Night Springs, the first expansion to Alan Wake 2.
Tomorrow, Remedy will also be releasing the photo mode along with the DLC, as well as a physical edition of the game that will hit shelves later this year.
While the shadow drop is somewhat of a surprise, the expansion is not. Night Springs was revealed alongside the second DLC, The Lake House, when pre-orders were announced for Alan Wake 2. In the first expansion, players control three characters from Remedy’s connected universe within stories framed as episodes from the in-game anthology series. Nocturnal springs.
Prior to the announcement of the Summer Game Fest, GamesIndustry.biz spoke with game director Kyle Rowley, head writer Clay Murphy, level designer Nathalie Jankie, and communications director Thomas Puha.
Puha says Remedy decided to time the release of Night Springs around Summer Game Fest because the event is “a huge platform to bring the news to a mass audience.” But he also says it was for the fans’ benefit.
“Marketing campaigns are often shorter these days and it’s good to try to do things differently,” he explains.
“We always looked at Remedy for a long time. The first few months [are not] focused on sales; It’s at least for the next three years”Thomas Puha
“So, together with our publisher Epic, we thought we would announce the expansion close to release this time so fans won’t have to wait a while to get their hands on it.”
Promotion for Night Springs has been relatively short compared to the main game, but hints have been popping up on social media over the past week hinting at its release.
“There’s always debate about how much of the marketing budget should be reserved for post-launch, but the thinking is often that, especially with a single-player game, the most important thing to get right is the launch, so that justifies the spend at the launch,” Puha notes.
Night Springs hasn’t been in development for very long either. It started after the release of Alan Wake 2, but the concept was there before the game was even finished.
“We always wanted the idea of playing multiple characters,” says Rowley. “In the original concept of the base game, we wanted to have more playable characters than we ended up with. Night Springs as a concept came about when we were figuring that out. We parked it and after we finished the game, we wrote some more great, crazy stuff.”
Murphy adds: “The writing process was very loose and fun – no rules, no restrictions. Just pure experimentation and trying to find the fun in each episode and push that as far as possible.”
He also emphasizes the collaborative nature of Remedy, in that all departments working on the expansion were involved in shaping the story.
“The writing process was very loose and fun – no rules, no restrictions. Just pure experimentation.”Clay Murphy
“We’re trying to have fun here and make it bizarre,” 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,” Jankie adds. “It was very nice to see how each department was doing [got involved].”
Rowley says creating 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 freeform,” he explains.
“There was no ‘Is this crazy?’ during development it was more like, ‘Is this crazy enough?’ That was the mentality that came with it, and it was a nice change.”
Determining which parts of the team to use and balancing studio resources during production is always a challenge, but this changes significantly when creating an expansion. Especially for Remedy, which has numerous projects in various stages of development, including Control 2 and the Max Payne remakes.
“That’s a constant challenge when you’re working on multiple games at very different stages of production,” Puha notes.
“We have a much better feeling about it now than we did a few years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to do this for a long time, but there’s no denying that managing teams competing for developers and other resources is a major challenge. That said, we’re all excited about the future roadmap of our games.
“We always planned for a dedicated post-launch team for Alan Wake 2,” Puha continues.
“It’s a small team, but everyone has been working on Alan Wake 2. The technology and tools are ready and making the expansion is easier than the main game.”
This isn’t the first time Remedy has worked on DLC content.
Control saw two expansions after release, as did the original Alan Wake alongside the 2012 spin-off American Nightmare, which is framed similarly to an episode of Night Springs.
“American Nightmare was tonally very different from the original game,” notes Rowley. “In that same spirit, we create a slightly different experience. From a gameplay perspective, we shifted these 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 base game players will pick it up. But this is something Remedy was aware of, Puha notes.
“It’s about having realistic expectations, market data, and knowing who you’re doing the expansion for and what business purpose it serves,” Puha explains.
He also notes the reception to Alan Wake 2, which has maintained solid momentum since launch through the release of the 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 always had the plan that once we release it, there are still things we want to talk about besides this expansion, the photo mode and the second expansion we’re working on on .”
He continues: “At Remedy we have always had a very long vision. It’s not that the first few months are focused on sales; it’s at least for the next three years – that’s how we look at it.
“There are different bits and pieces that we’re doing that will hopefully keep the game on the market. But it really resonated with people in an incredible way.”
Jankie adds: “There is just something very infectious and motivating [about its reception]. I’m very grateful because it was well received and now it feels like, ‘Yes, we can do more of this.’ It feels really great.”
“There was no ‘Is this crazy?’ during development. It was more like, ‘Is this crazy enough?'”Kyle Rowley
Like the main game, Night Springs was developed with fans in mind.
“There’s quite a bit of fan service, I would say,” Rowley notes. “We wanted to make sure we were using characters that players who have played our games would resonate with and, in some cases, want to play again.”
“It’s nostalgic for us to look at what fans want,” Murphy added.
“Remedy fans are engaging with our games in such a way that it’s really inspiring. To see how they interpret what our games mean or what they think we’ll do in the future.”
Jankie says the team often looked at what fans were talking about online and what they wanted to see in the expansions.
“That was a really nice motivator to have,” she says. “We could see that we were on the right track and that we were doing something that hopefully they would appreciate and take advantage of, as we did.”