Ahead of the Easter weekend, Remedy has released a new development diary for CONTROL Resonant, Evolving The Gameplay Experience.
For their second outing, the team shares what players can expect to find in the twisted Manhattan landscape and their approach to tackling the challenge of shaking up combat for the sequel. Throughout the video, we also see glimpses of the game's loadout, alongside early concept artwork for Dylan.
We hear from a selection of lovely people, including Mikael Kasurinen (Creative Director), Juha Vainio (Executive Producer), Anne-Marie Grönroos (Lead Level Designer), Sergey Mohov (Lead Gameplay Designer), Annika Lehitnen (Lead Gameplay Animator), and Elmeri Raitanen (Art Director).
You can check out the second development diary for CONTROL Resonant below or on the studio's YouTube channel, HERE!
CONTROL Resonant - Evolving The Gameplay Experience | Development Diary Transcript
Juha Vainio: We have the biggest gameplay team in Remedy history.
Sergey Mohov: In Resonant, I think, we've taken the next step.
Mikael Kasurinen: It just felt good, it just felt fun, and it's like something that nobody's really done before
CONTROL Resonant - Evolving The Gameplay Experience Intro
Mikael Kasurinen: One of the challenges when you take steps towards an RPG direction has been the permutations of options that accumulate after we start to kind of lay them in front of the player. Even in the first game, we wanted to take these RPG elements that we bring into a Remedy experience. That's been our kind of conceptual direction, day one with Control, that we want to see what the Remedy RPG game would look like. And what was important to us [was] that we do it in our own way. And we're known for storytelling, creating these kinds of deep narratives, an interesting, complicated world and so on. So, it felt like we have all the right ingredients to be able to kind of step into this more RPG-oriented direction. And it's been wonderful, we're really excited about that.
Juha Vainio: We have the biggest gameplay team in Remedy history, which allows us to make more weapon forms, more paranatural abilities, more deeper gameplay systems, and the whole gameplay experience will then be much more solid, and I would say much more fun.
Anne-Marie Grönroos: So one very, very big thing that was our main way of forcing the players to engage with combat in the first game was, we just had these Hiss barriers appear on the doorways and lock you in with the enemies, and you had to kill everyone to get out. On the open streets, we most of the time can’t actually do that because, we can’t just make these huge red walls appear around the player. So instead, what we do, most of the time we try to incentivise the player to kill the enemies.
Sergey Mohov: So you can be fighting enemies with melee, on the ground level, for example, on the street, then use the Reach ability to zap yourself up onto a vantage point, shoot some projectiles down, and then jump back down with a ground slam to finish them off. I think that's a really satisfying.
Mikael Kasurinen: When we started to put together this functionality, it started off small, right? Like, first off, we wanted to just kind of tap into the idea of having a shifting gravity, and that was it. But as we kept working on it, it just felt good, it just felt fun, and it's like something that nobody's really done before to this extent. And we kind of got more excited and engaged by it. And we kept going further. The first time I saw this functionality, I was blown away because I knew when I saw it that we have something really unique and exciting going on here.
Annika Lehitnen: The Hiss and the Mold have evolved; they've become way more complex from the previous game, where we all only had, like, humans, with different guns. So this time, we try to also emphasise, way more, the two factions from each other.
Mikael Kasurinen: The Hiss and the Mold are these factions that we discover in the first game. Different paranatural forces, equally dangerous. Of course, they have different identities, different ways of affecting the world, and different visual appearances, and so on.
Elmeri Raianen: The Mold was one of those things that we needed to visually evolve a bit when stepping out of the Oldest House, because we didn't want this game to just feel like it's in a post-apocalyptic setting where nature is taking over. But our Mold really needed to read as an other-dimensional threat.
Sergey Mohov: In Resonant, I think, we've taken the next step. Enemies have very distinct combat roles. They're all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Both the Hiss and the Mold have evolved a lot as threats. And they are really good at getting the player to use the right tools at the right time.
Mikael Kasurinen: The real world has some kind of influence upon them, making them more violent, more aggressive, more unpredictable as well, posing a lot of interesting challenges. Movement and paranatural abilities that Dylan uses aren’t just a part of the exploration and of covering distance in the level; they're also about strategy in combat.
Annika Lehitnen: So, what is different for CONTROL Resonant is that when Jesse had her service weapon, it was always visible in that form if you're in combat. In CONTROL Resonant, Aberrant is only taking the form it needs when it needs it. So that means that, the form actually only appears when you're doing the melee attack. This means that sometimes, because there's a huge variety in the forms that you can take, sometimes we only have [a] very limited amount of frames to actually show the form. So, we tried to do the best we can to actually showcase them. But also at the end of the attacks, we have different ways of making the forms then disappear.
Sergey Mohov: Aberant is not just one weapon either; it can shift into different forms, depending on what you've unlocked. And so, depending on what is needed for the job at any given time. So it will evolve with the player, as they progress through the story, and as you explore the world and find new ways to fight. And also the first thing that you do in the game is actually choose which form it will take. So we don't give you a predefined form right in the beginning, we actually get you to choose what you want, straight up. We heard player feedback from the first game. And, we're happy to reveal that CONTROL Resonant will have save slots. So you can try different things and have multiple concurrent playthroughs going at the same time. You also get access to certain endgame activities in the game. One example of those is SHÜM, which will be familiar to returning players from Control 1. It's an arcade machine, and you will find one of these arcade machines in each zone, each with a unique challenge. They're quite hard to beat, but they also have leaderboards.
Juha Vainio: Story has always been in the centre of Remedy games, and story is super important for us as well. But when it comes to the second-to-second combat and traversal, we have really gone to town with gameplay. Now with Resonant, we are taking it to the next level.
