An emerging trend in media, legacy sequels blend new characters in with familiar faces to create a new entry in a storied, though often dormant, franchise. While Remedy’s Connected Universe has expanded since the original Alan Wake, the sheer length of time since a deep dive into The Dark Place certainly makes the new Alan Wake 2 feel like a spiritual cousin of Top Gun: Maverick or Blade Runner 2049.
And it comes with challenges common to legacy sequels. Not only does the game need to refresh those fans of the original Alan Wake who perhaps have fading memories of their experiences with the game, but Remedy’s Connected Universe expanded with the popular 2019 game Control. For Alan Wake 2, it was critical to be able to bring both these audiences up to speed with the life and times of the titular Alan Wake, and Game ZXC spoke to game director Kyle Rowley and principal narrative designer Molly Maloney about this very detail.
Remedy remedies this potential problem with the introduction of a second protagonist in Alan Wake 2, Saga Anderson. Saga serves as a counterpoint to Alan Wake himself, who was trapped in the shadowy dimension of The Dark Place at the end of the first game. Maloney described Saga as an outsider looking in, providing a strong POV character for newcomers.
“She provides a very valuable point of view. Think about it this way. Alan has been steeped and immersed in this world for 13 years. He's a man on the edge doing his best. But our best is not always… you know, it's tricky. Her point of view, as an outsider looking in, provides a really important foil to that experience. She is also on a very functional level lets us go to those places that I know fans are going to be excited to revisit. She's in Cauldron Lake. She's in Bright Falls. Switching between the stories provides a really valuable, refreshing moment.”
Saga is an FBI profiler sent to Bright Falls, Washington in an attempt to unravel a string of mysterious murders. Though not much is known about Saga yet, she’s well-known among her FBI colleagues for her abilities to solve the deepest mysteries, and she was seemingly briefly teased in Quantum Break, the 2016 game in Remedy’s Connected Universe that was released to rave reviews.
Though Remedy was aware of concerns that bringing in Saga as a co-protagonist in a game literally named after Alan Wake was a gamble, developers are confident that gamble pays off, with Rowley also ensuring fans that there's plenty of Alan in the game.
“The worry about creating an Alan Wake game but only playing him half the time is something we definitely talked about too. That's why it was very important that we definitely have it be 50/50 between the two. Then, Alan is present in the other side of the game too. It's not like he's only present in The Dark Place. We've shown some of that in trailers and stuff like that, so there's definitely enough Alan.”
One result of this dual protagonist approach in Alan Wake 2 was the need to create one mechanical experience mirrored in different contexts as either Alan or Saga. There was also concern that gameplay mechanics used only on one protagonist’s side of the story might lead to players getting introduced to new systems relatively late in the game, especially if players leaned on one character more heavily than the other, with Rowley explaining how this mirrored experience works in Alan Wake 2.
“I think that's the challenge of trying to create these two worlds with these two characters that feel different enough they feel unique. You're not just playing the same game, but it's also similar enough that you do not have to be on-boarded all the time about how you play. That's why we have this duality of where Saga has a mind place and Alan has his writer's room. Saga has the case board, Alan has the plot board. Mechanically, they're very similar, so I'm not having to relearn how to play the game. But the context is quite different, and what you're doing is quite different.
That differing context united by mechanics operates on a narrative level as well, said Maloney. Both Saga and Alan have their own narrative arcs, but these arcs twist together and touch upon one another throughout the game. While players don’t need to see all of Alan’s experiences at specific times to understand Saga’s and vice-versa, doing so adds a narrative richness to the game.
“They have their own course, but then there's the interplay between those two arcs that creates something new. From a narrative design perspective, it's like how do we push a great story through the lens of the player experience? How is the player driving that story forward? When planning Saga and Alan's respective segments, a very important aspect was ‘Okay, what are these two things?’ There's a uniting goal in them, but it's not about what you do. It's how you do it or what order you do it.
This is done through various narrative swap points that Maloney likened to exits on a freeway that allow players to switch between Saga and Alan at key points, as they work to uncover the latest happenings at Cauldron Lake.
Alan Wake 2 releases October 27, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.