Since one of the biggest gameplay elements of Remedy Entertainment’s upcoming title, Control Resonant, will be its more open approach to level design, lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos and art director Elmerie Raitanen have spoken about how they want players to get lost in doing side content. In an interview with TechRadar, Grönroos and Raitanen spoke about the challenges of moving on from the Oldest House as the setting for the original Control, and into an entire city in Control Resonant.
According to Raitanen, the fact that the Oldest House had its distinct visual identity certainly helped, and when it came to designing the open world of Control Resonant, he said that the team is “standing on the shoulders of an aesthetic giant.” However, Grönroos noted that the jump from the linear level design of Quantum Break to Control’s Metroidvania styled design that included backtracking, and now the more open design of Control Resonant, has been a challenge.
“From the design side, well, we did the first Control, [and] I think we were a bit naive back then, we didn’t really realize how big of a jump it could be, [you] could go from Quantum Break, which 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 mission, it has side missions, and so on,” Grönroos said.
“So, there definitely was a lot of stuff in there we learned, but it was impressive what we did back then, but there were still a lot left out of out of there that we couldn’t really get done in the first game, so this one, we are now outside [in] Manhattan, so the world is much bigger, the areas are more distinct from each other, they have more of this identity that has been thought of.”
It is also worth noting that, according to Grönroos, Control players primarily just focused on wrapping up the main story and didn’t engage too much with the side content. The team “really wanted to push more for in this game,” she said, referring to the side content in Control Resonant. “We want the player to get lost in the world in a good way.” Raitanen added, “And force them to have fun.”
Making the act of navigating around the Manhattan setting of Control Resonant fun has also been a major focus for the team, and with its larger map that isn’t simply constricted to the insiders of a building like the Oldest House, the developers have been able to add visual landmarks that “can attract somebody’s curiosity into some direction,” according to Raitanen.
“In the indoors we couldn’t have those landmarks from very far away, and you couldn’t have those visible from other sectors at all, but here now… the game is not fully open, it is separated in a disc, similar things to sectors, but the sectors themselves, the city zones, they are a lot more open than the sectors where the Oldest House, and in fact, like that big red building, for example, you can see that from three other zones over, you can see this big global landmarks from a lot of other zones,” Grönroos explained.
“One key thing has been that we want to make it like the city is not necessarily your enemy; it might actually feel like deceitfully pleasant,” Raitanen added. “[It] occasionally invites you to explore, but then there might be this layer of paranatural threat and chaos that kind of is overlaid on top of the normal city, so that’s definitely been one of them key tools to make the zones feel like they have identity, and if you take screenshots of different places of the game, you can immediately tell that, hey, that’s from Evacuation Zone, and that’s from the molding park, or an abundant part of the oldest house, something like this.”
Grönroos went on to tease the fact that players will be able to find some linear content, which the studio calls “dungeons,” during their time exploring Control Resonant’s world.
“These spaces, which are not in the part of the overworld, [are a] more content linear experience, and there’s not a ton of other things distracting you there,” she said. “It is all about the story [in this area], although when the story is done, then we might be doing something different than there.”
“There might be a side quest that opens up that in the place where you are just about to go, and in fact, later on in the game.” Generally speaking, however, Remedy Entertainment wants a player’s first run through Control Resonant “to be very graded in a very similar [way] to how we did the main quest in the first game.”
Control Resonant is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on September 24th. For more, check out how the studio plans to market the upcoming title.
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