There are places in our world where fiction and dreams can come true.

Community Spotlight: Lily's Photography

Known for her breathtaking photographs, Lily's passion for Control series has helped shaped so much of the fandom and also influenced the studios' online activities.

DechartGames Take On Quantum Break

DechartGames featuring Amelia Rose Blaire Dechart (Amy Ferrero in Quantum Break) and Bryan Dechart take on Monarch Solutions in a new livestream.

Heron Confirmed as Control 2

Remedy and 505 Games have officially confirmed that Heron (the codename for an internal AAA project set in the world of Control) is the sequel to the 2019 adventure.

Community Spotlight: Olga

Olga is a tremendous cosplayer with an incredible eye for detail and an extraordinary collection, captured and edited by local photographer, Kira.

Alan Wake 12th Anniversary Update

For the anniversary, Vida Starčević sat down with Sam Lake, Ilkka Villi, and Matthew Porretta to talk Alan Wake 2, the TV series, and Nintendo Switch.

Community Spotlight: Sarah

For our first Community Spotlight of 2022, we're returning to the Federal Bureau of Control with a look back at Sarah's breathtaking portfolio.

Community Interview w. Vida Starčević

To celebrate The Sudden Stop turning ten, we recently interviewed Remedy's Community Manager, passing along questions we received from fellow fans.

An Open Letter from Sam Lake / Alan Wake Remastered

Alan Wake Remastered is coming! Read Sam Lake's open letter announcing the new game, his passion for Wake's debut adventure, and release details.

Our Conversation with Matthew Porretta, the Voice of Alan Wake

To celebrate the game's 10th anniversary, we sat down with Matthew Porretta, the incredible voice actor behind Alan Wake, to talk about his experiences and memories.


18th March 2023
Breaking Down Remedy's Northlight Engine

This week, Remedy delved into the work that goes on behind the studio's in-house engine, Northlight. The move for the first step in a new direction that brings the team's work more into public view. 

Behind the scenes, the engine has powered the studio's games for the past decade, originally for Quantum Break, and later Control and CrossfireX (Campaigns). Development is underway on Alan Wake 2 and future instalments of the Control series using the technology. 

The tools allow them "create games for PC and modern, high-end console platforms. Features include physics, audio, AI, rendering, gameplay scripting, UI design, debugging, and profiling."

With the new direction, Remedy has revamped the Northlight page on their website and published a video with members Northlight team. The page is now packed with information from two articles and a breakdown into what makes the engine special. 

You can view the new Northlight page on the website, HERE


Articles

About Game Engines - Is it better to have your own technology for making games, or should you license an engine? (Written by Mika Vehkala)

> Northlight in 2023 - We have realized we should get a lot better about how we talk about Northlight and everything associated with it. (Written by Thomas Puha)


Breaking Down Remedy's Northlight Engine

"At Remedy Entertainment, we have always been committed to using our own in-house technology, Northlight, to power most of our games.

"We spoke with the people who work with Northlight every day, our developers and the people who make Remedy's games, on what working with in-house technology means for them, and how Northlight keeps evolving.

"Northlight is a comprehensive game engine that, like every game engine, has a unique take on workflows and data pipelines. It has modern rendering technology, offers comprehensive solutions for most - if not all - areas of game development, and it can be used to make games for multiple console platforms and PC."


Breaking Down Remedy's Northlight Engine Transcript

Johannes Richter (Head of VFX): Northlight is the shoulders we stand on. It's what makes possible what we do here 

Anssi Hyytiäinen (Lead Technical Designer): Northlight is our proprietary engine and tech stack. 

I don't know, it's the daily friend and enemy.

Katriina Vakkila (Senor Documentation Specialist): For me, Northlight is a piece of software. It's also a team that I get to work with. 

Vesa Paakkanen (Lead Tools Programmer): In the team, we have more than 40 programmers working on the various parts. There's the runtime engine. There are tools. There are some back-end services, conventions, workflows, pipelines, DCC integrations. 

Katriina : But we also have people thinking about the content creation tool APIs. How to bring over content or how to do code reviews, or how to set up a build system that is so easy to use that you don't need a computer science degree to use it. 

Vesa: It's like this huge ecosystem.

Mika Vehkala (Technology Director): So making games is hard. You have all these different disciplines, each having their own specialists. Each individual in our teams has a unique perspective. We are crafting our own technology for our teams and only for our teams, so that they could create, not only good but great games.  Having our own technology allows us to customize and tailor all of the workflows and pipelines to suit our people's needs. And this, in turn, helps us to make games that have unique aspects or features that make them stand out from the crowd.

Thomas Puha (Communications Director): But it's never about just developing technology for technology's sake. The tech is there to support the games and make the games better. And if you look at Remedy's games, y'know, we had really good physics implementation already in Max Payne 2. Then, of course, light and shadow played a big part in Alan Wake. And more recently in Control, we had really advanced destruction through physics. And of course, we had super good, I would say, the best implementation of raytracing in any video game. 

Mika: It's a careful balancing act between short-term goals and long-term goals to ensure that all of our games have what they need. Yet looking into the feature and into the new games that will come and being able to power them with all the necessary new innovations in pipelines, workflows or runtime technology. 

Johannes: The world's your oyster. You can build whatever you can think of. Whatever you can come up with that you want in your game. And we have incredibly talented and smart people to help us make it become real for the players to get excited about. 

Antti Herva (Lead Character Technical Artist): Right now, as we are in a multi-game project organisation. We can, sort of, find that path across our projects, what our projects need and what we want to do. And we can find the solutions that best generalize to all of those projects, and we get the best bang for your buck in those solutions. And it's also about creating the mutual understanding between the different teams, the technology and the art. That tight coupling gets us the most efficient, the best, the bleeding edge features that we need for the Northlight engine. 

Sean Donnelly (Technical Director, Control Franchise): What's the most interesting thing with having our own engine and tech is the human element. Like, for example, if I have a problem with a bit of tech or some feature,  I can actually go and talk directly to the programmer who worked on it. They might not like that all the time, but it's really great. For example, I have access to a whole bunch of experts, who I can have face-to-face discussions with. So, on the game team, that's really useful when you're planning, you're implementing new features, and it's just a nicer way of working as opposed to, y'know, posting a question n an online forum and waiting for weeks to get a response. 

Katriina: Our developers and users are never really that far away from each other. That takes a lot of the guesswork that is usually involved in software development away. 

Thomas: It just really enables our game development; teams work very closely with the Northlight team. Collaboration is always the key to success. 

Tatu Aalto (Lead Graphics Programmer): Aim is to build a sensible and clutter-free environment where lighting artists and visual effects and environment teams can build the worlds that they envision. We are always trying to pick a small subset of tech that we focus on and what people love building. Making a game is a long road. It's important to do fun things.

Mika: The key is that we have to make things simpler and more straightforward so that we can service all of the various game projects at the same time. It can mean removing deprecated code, paying back some of the technology debt, and working on decoupling systems, so that we can easier integrate our changes to the game projects or deploy all of our tools and pipelines to the content users. We're also working on developing and improving on our DevOps. So this means that we can easier deploy and deliver all of the various parts of our Northlight development environment inside our studios and also to our external partners. So, there are very many aspects in what you have to do when you go from a single-project to a multi-project studio. And this is something that we are quite happy and excited to work with, also here at Northlight. 

Anssi: We are retiring our old legacy editor which is almost 20 years old now, and we are replacing it with a completely modern and more flexible tool that allows you to edit everything in the game engine directly. Basically, the entire philosophy of how the game world gets laid out has been completely rethought. Instead of having very many legacy concepts, like you usually have levels, and prefabs, and archetypes and spawnables, and what have you. We have generalised that into just completely general concepts of bundles with completely free ability to do overwrites. Even the entire levels are just bundles you choose to load, the entire game is just ta bundle. So, it's just bundles all the way down to the turtles basically. The concept of bundles maps almost one-to-one with what USD (Universal Scene Description) provides us already. So NWED (New World Editor) is the bundle editor that we are going to use to actually define the game world. So it's replacing our old legacy editor. This is just a generalised bundle editor and you work directly with the game, live editing everything. NWED stands for New World Editor because our old world editor was called World Editor. *Laughs*

Mika: We recently adopted USD as a foundation for our new content pipelines and we are also working on a new game object model that is powering the runtime of our games. 

Sean: For me, what's great about USD is it solves a bunch of problems in areas I've seen come up again and again through my career, over the years. Mainly around the space of being able to override and extend functionality in specific contexts. So. it's a very strong base for us to build on, and then we can focus on what we're actually good at, which is creating workflows which suit our people and our games. 

Kristof Minnaert (Principal Technical Artist): So, I think USD is one of the coolest pieces of technology, I've ever had the pleasure of working with. It's being integrated into Northlight so deeply is extremely exciting, and Remedy, I think, is at the forefront of adopting USD within the games industry. 

Sean: Our game object model is very modern and efficient in that it's data-orientated rather than object-orientated. So, at the lower level, that gives us a better handle on things like cache coherency and scheduling, which then allows us to do more complex simulations, have more entities, more stuff, to put it simply. Our gameplay coders love it because it's very fast, very easy to make features in it, but it's also very robust and safe. For example, we have to compile time memory access validation as a feature. 

Johannes: Anyone who has ever tried to pick up a new engine, it feels like I'm writing suddenly, I don't know, with a different pen or something, or I have to speak a different language. But in the end, it's not as scary doing it when you're there, as it might seem from the start because in the end, the fundamental principles are the same, and they're just being solved with a different mindset. Maybe a mindset that means we are much closer to the technology that we are using and not so far away, like a product. And that gives us more intimacy with the engine we're working with. And once you get over the initial hurdles, that some things are in places where you never suspected them to be, everything else can feel very comfortable very quickly. And there's always someone next to you, behind you, downstairs, who is there to help. 

Katriina: It's the first company where I've worked with that, going into a meeting with people, most people lean in, on a meeting. They're so into it, what they're talking about. Those are the great kind of meetings to attend. 

Mika: It's very important for us to keep our technology competitive and meaningful not only today but all the years to come. Every Remedy game is a proof of our commitment to our technology. Each game project has unique needs and requirements that will set some of the direction where we're taking our Northlight development. And in turn, the things that we deliver will help the games to realise their creative vision.  

17th March 2023
Acting Legend, Lance Reddick, Passes Away

Today, Lance Reddick's publicist has confirmed the sad news that the actor has passed away of natural causes at home.

The Remedy community will remember him fondly for his role in Quantum Break as the devious and dedicated Martin Hatch. And while the title was his first foray into the weird world of video games and motion capture it was by no means the only time. Later, players were treated as stepped into the role of  Zavala in Destiny 2 and Sylens in the Horizon series. It was probably no surprise that he was also a fellow nerd and geek who often sported a Star Trek t-shirt in photos and vlogs, and jumped into the Destiny series in his free time. 

Away from video games, he also appeared in a wide range of shows such as Lost, Fringe, The West Wing, Resident Evil, and Bosch, as well as taking on the role of Charon in the John Wick movie series. The comments that flooded social media since the news broke, show how deeply loved both as the characters he portrayed and the person he was, on the production side and with audiences across numerous fandoms.




Following the news of his passing, a number of people who worked with him on Quantum Break posted their memories of him on Twitter. We wanted to collect some of those to share who he was behind the camera.

Shawn Ashmore (Actor, Jack Joyce): "I was lucky enough to get to work and know him while making Quantum Break. Talented, kind, funny and very cool. Rest in peace." 

Mikko Rautalahti (Remedy's Story Team Manager on Quantum Break): "I just heard that Lance Reddick has passed away. I knew Lance a little bit; we worked together on Quantum Break. He was a very nice guy and a stone cold professional. He hadn't done motion capture work before and he was a little uncertain about it, but he really embraced it. He showed up super prepared, and he had that intensity you undoubtedly know if you've watched just about anything he was in. He could turn that on and off like it was on a switch, though; when he wasn't on, he was friendly and good to be around. A nice guy. He was one of those folks who really made an effort to make the game as good as it could possibly be. Some actors have that 'ehh, it's just a game' mentality. Not him. He took it seriously. We always felt that we were super lucky to get him. Hell of an actor."

Roosa Jokiaho (Remedy's Cinematic Scripter on Quantum Break): "There are no words…. This is truly devastatingly heartbreaking. Lance Reddick is absolutely phenomenal in Quantum Break (and everything else [he] is in) and getting to work with him has truly been one of the highlights of my career. Rest in peace legend."

Jacqueline Piñol (Actor, Dr. Sofia Amaral): "RIP sweet Lance. I am shocked and saddened by the news of @thereallancereddick passing. The world lost some of its magic today. He was a force. I had the pleasure of working alongside him on 2 projects. Having scenes with him was always such a gift. Lance was so giving and so funny and such a gentleman. My condolences to his beautiful wife and his doggies and his whole family. Gone too soon. Rest easy Lance."

Sam Lake (Creative Director on Quantum Break): "Shocked and sad to hear about Lance Reddick’s death. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with him. He was very talented and dedicated. A very nice guy. My condolences to his family and friends."

Reddick often shared aspects of his life on his social media channels; the antics of his dogs, political matters close to his heart, random thoughts, his music, and more. While he played serious roles in suits, his social media was filled with warm smiles. One of my favourite mini-vlogs featured him responding to a comment from a fan who stated that his voice could make an ingredients list sound soothing. It's something that I wanted to reshare following the news. You can check it out, HERE

Our thoughts go out to those who knew him. 



16th March 2023
Steam Spring Sale Has Begun!

Today, the Steam Spring Sale kicked off, with thousands of games now discounted until March 23rd, 10am Pacific. If you're looking to jump into a new adventure, take a look on the store! 

Included in the mix is the full range of Remedy titles available on the platform including: 

Max Payne (-65%)
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (-70%)
Alan Wake (-65%)
Alan Wake Collector's Edition (-70%)
Alan Wake Collector's Edition Extras (-70%)
Alan Wake Franchise (-60%)*
Alan Wake's American Nightmare (-65%)
Death Rally 2011/12 (-60%)
Quantum Break (-80%)
Control Ultimate Edition (-70%)
Control Ultimate Edition + Alan Wake Franchise Bundle** (-73%)

* Alan Wake, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and Alan Wake Collector's Edition Extras.

** Alan Wake, Alan Wake Collector's Edition Extras, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and Control Ultimate Edition.


While Alan Wake is part of the sale, the game is the original 2012 PC release and not the Remastered edition. At the moment, there's no news on whether that edition will be available on PC outside of the Epic Games Store.



15th March 2023
Our 11th Anniversary Competition Results
Task: Edit Cats Into Any Alan Wake Scene

This February, The Sudden Stop turned eleven! To celebrate the anniversary, we ran a competition asking Alan Wake fans to edit cats into any scene from the series. Cheese was at the centre of this competition, so your Photoshop skills weren't being judged. For those who didn't have any photo editing software, Microsoft Paint or Paint.net were suggested as good options for alternative, free programs. Give us cats, terrible puns, or chaos and we would be happy. 

For the competition, the winner would receive a winter pack containing special Alan Wake-themed coffee created by a Helsinki-based roastery, along with an official Control mug. Both items are also available on the Remedy Store:

Barry's Xmas Blend. For the colder months, the studio has teamed up with a local roastery, Helsingin Kahvipaahtimo to bring Barry's Xmas Blend. Described as a "medium-dark espresso blend with notes of dark chocolate, liquorice and roasted almond gets you a dreamy and creamy dark roast", it is a full bean blend of Brasilia Veloso, India Cherry, and Indonesia Java Baron. The pack contains 250g and can be purchased at the store for 15,00€.

Black Control FBC Mug. Following a successful run on the Remedy Store, the FBC mug is back, this time in black! The minimalistic design features the Federal Bureau of Control's seal in white, which shows up clearly against the shiny black background. The secure beverage container can be purchased at the store for 19,00€.

For this competition, the winning entry was Richard, who submitted this magical piece featuring a cat's choice of destruction in the Dark Place. I like to think this is just moments before the midnight zoomies.

Thank you to everyone who entered or shared the competition. You are all amazing! If you didn't win, don't worry, we'll have more prizes, competitions, and giveaways again soon. 


-- CONSOLE & PC GAMES --

The Crossfire Series

The Control Series

The Quantum Break Series

The Alan Wake Series

The Max Payne Series

-- MOBILE GAMES --

-- LIVE ACTION SERIES --

Icons by the incredible, Evil-Owl-Loki.

Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated.