Announcing the impending Alan Wake as an open-world title back at E3 2005 was “a mistake,” developer Remedy freely admits. “We’re not even shy to say it.”
“Remedy is a humble group of people and we will say it was a mistake,” head of franchise development Oskari Häkkinen told Joystiq in a recent interview. “It was a tick-box back then, that was a trend. ‘Open-world,’ ‘free-roaming’ and ‘sandbox’ was the way to go.”
The studio tried to make the thriller work in an open-world setting and get the pacing right but when players were “turning up to a love scene in a monster truck when they should be showing up in a Cadillac,” he said, “you know something’s wrong. You know something is not working.”
Remedy ended up throwing away about six months worth of work.
