- Resonant control Lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos and art director Elmeri Raitanen want players to engage in side content alongside the story.
- Grönroos says: “We want the player to get lost in the world in a good way”
- The game will also feature linear “dungeons,” which Grönroos says are a “really nice contrast” to the overworld.
Remedy Entertainment has placed a lot of emphasis on exploration in Resonant controland wants players to discover and engage in side content in the game’s open areas alongside the main story as much as possible.
This is according to lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos and art director Elmeri Raitanen, who discussed how Remedy created the game’s ambitious open world after ControlThe interior environment, in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at a preview event in conjunction with this year’s Summer Game Fest.
Raitanen explained that the team stands “on the shoulders of an aesthetic giant”, thus surpassing the award-winning ControlThe level design and amazing concept were a challenge.
“From a design point of view, well, we made the first Control, [and] I think we were a little naïve back then, we didn’t realize how big a leap it could be. [you] could go from Quantum breakupwhich was like a completely linear game, to something [Control] where you’re actually supposed to backtrack, and it’s more open, and it has a main quest, it has side quests, etc.,” Grönroos said.
“So, we definitely learned a lot of things there, but it was impressive what we did back then, but there were still a lot of things out there that we really couldn’t do in the first game, so in this one, now we’re out there.” [in] Manhattan, so the world is much bigger, the areas are more distinct from each other, they have more of this identity that’s been thought about.”
He added: “It turned out that a lot of people just played the [Control] main mission and I didn’t even find the secondary content”, but with Control Resonantthe team “really wanted to try harder in this game.”
“We want the player to get lost in the world in a good way,” Grönroos said. “And force them to have fun,” Raitanen added.
In ControlPlayers were limited to the interior of the Oldest House, but in ResonantThe open world of a supernaturally warped Manhattan will be fully explorable.
This means finding many more visual landmarks that “can draw someone’s curiosity in some direction,” which Raitanen explained “might not have been possible to do” in the first game “when we go from one interior space to another interior space.”
“Inside we couldn’t have those landmarks from very far away, and we couldn’t have them visible from other sectors at all, but here now… the game is not completely open, it’s separated on a disk, similar things to the sectors, but the sectors themselves, the city zones, are much more open than the sectors where the Oldest House is, and in fact, like that big red building, for example, you can see it from three other zones, you can see these big global landmarks from many other zones,” he said. Grönroos.
Raitanen hinted at what players can expect when exploring Manhattan, and while the world may seem full of supernatural threats, the team didn’t want to “spread paranatural and weird stuff a little bit all over the place.”
Instead, Remedy has built the environments with the intention of being explored and you never know what you will find.
“A key thing has been that we want the city to not necessarily be your enemy, but to actually be able to look deceptively nice,” the art director said. “[It] occasionally it invites you to explore, but then there can be this layer of paranatural threat and chaos that is overlaid on top of the normal city, so it’s definitely been one of those key tools to make the zones feel like they have an identity, and if you take screenshots of different places in the game, you can immediately say that, hey, that’s from the Evacuation Zone, and that’s from the mold park, or a hearty part of the oldest house, something like this.
Beyond the main story, Grönroos also hinted at additional sequences and “linear levels” that Remedy called “dungeons,” which he explained are a “really nice contrast” to the world players see from the beginning.
“These spaces, which are not in the overworld part, [are a] “More linear experience of content, and not a lot of other things to distract you,” he said. “It’s about the story. [in this area]although when the story is finished, we may be doing something different than there.
“There may be a side quest that opens up where you’re about to go and actually later in the game,” Grönroos added, but said Remedy wants to get the first experience playing. Resonant control “be highly qualified at a very similar level [way] to how we did the main quest in the first game.”
Resonant control launches on September 24 for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PC.
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