Remedy Defends Alan Wake Changes

Alan Wake developer Remedy has defended its decision to remove the open-word sandbox elements from the game.The developer recently revealed the news to Finnish mag Peelaja, stating “we’ve tried everything, including the sandbox gameplay.”“It’s not a good mixture with storytelling. For it we would have been forced to make such compromises in the game that we at Remedy don’t want to. The most important thing for us is a compelling story and so we decided to go in that direction”Following the news, a thread appeared in the game’s official forums in which some fans expressed their disappointment at Remedy’s decision. A spokesperson for the developer, screen-name MarkusRMD (presumably Remedy’s Markus Maki), responded to fan concerns in the same thread:“It’s always tough to change big things in a game,” he wrote.“Max Payne was originally to have a multiplayer, but we dropped it. It certainly made some people sad, but the game was better because of the hard decision.”“It’s natural that new game IPs evolve over time. To avoid any kind of design communication changes, we would need to start talking about them only 6-12 months before release,” he added.“This increases the publisher side risk tremendously and raising any awareness for a new brand in a short time is difficult. We could perhaps start talking about the game late if we were an internal team for a big publisher, but the rules are a bit different for independent developers….”What do you think about the decision? Let us know in the comments section below. You can find a translation of the Peelaja interview here.