Yesterday, at Summer Game Fest 2024, Remedy’s Sam Lake announced that the first Alan Wake 2 DLC, Night Springs, would launch later today.
Speaking to GamesIndustry in a new interview, Remedy’s Communications Director Thomas Puha has highlighted the great fan response (despite not-so-exciting sales):
The response was incredible. Alan Wake 2 was a very hard game to ship. But we always had the plan of once we ship it, there’s still things we want to talk about in addition to this expansion, photo mode, and the second expansion that we’re working on.
We’ve always taken this very long view at Remedy. It’s not like the first couple of months are focused on sales; it’s the next three years at least – that’s how we look at it. There’s various bits and pieces we’re doing that will hopefully keep the game out there. But it really resonated with people in an incredible way.
Speaking of the first Alan Wake 2 DLC, Game Director Kyle Rowley said it would be tonally different and feature a lot of fan service. Also, the studio really liked the idea of allowing players to take control of multiple characters (in Night Springs, you play as three characters, one for each episode).
American Nightmare was tonally quite different from the original game. In that same vein, we are creating a slightly different experience. From a gameplay perspective, we’ve shifted it for each episode to match the tone. We wanted to make the gameplay feel familiar, but also under a slightly different stylisation and context.
There’s quite a lot of fan service, I would say. We definitely wanted to make sure that we were using characters that players who have played our games would resonate with and would want to play as again in some instances.
We always wanted the idea of playing as multiple characters. In the original concept of the base Alan Wake 2 game, we wanted to have more playable characters than we ended up with. Night Springs as a concept came about as we were figuring that out. We parked it, then after we were done with the game, we wrote some more awesome, crazy stuff.
As a reminder, Remedy also announced that a retail edition of Alan Wake 2 will be released at some point in the Fall season.
