Alan Wake 2's developers “have always internally felt that we need to find ways to do longer games”

Alan Wake 2 outfit Remedy Entertainment have “always” felt pressured to make their games longer, creative director Sam Lake has observed in a new interview which also picks apart the differences between the forthcoming midwestern spookalot, out this October, and the 2010 original. Lake added that, Remedy’s sense of audience expectations notwithstanding, he himself has difficulty setting aside hours for longer games. “[It’s] just struggling with finding time and you know, being interested in a story, wanting to see it through,” he said. “So it can even be daunting at times to start playing a game that you know is really, really long.”

All that’s from the latest Kinda Funny newscast, in which Lake spends a lot of time sitting there glassy-eyed while his professional input is sought on such topics as Embracer’s possible Gearbox sale and various Spider-Man 2 screenshots. But there are some morsels of info on the new Alan Wake, which will be Remedy’s longest game to date.

“I think that with Remedy games – if we go back through the whole history – being very story-focused games, have traditionally been quite short, like 10 hours or so,” Lake observed at one point. “And we have always internally felt that we need to find ways to do longer games, because it’s just like, people are looking at it from a value of money perspective as well – to get enough. So Control certainly was our longest game to date, and Alan Wake 2 is going to be longer than that – 20 hours plus.”

Elsewhere in the chat, Lake touched on one of the original Alan Wake’s mechanisms for extending playtime – its notorious collectible thermoses. “[There were] a hundred of them really all around the game world, in the forest,” he said. “You would be finding coffee thermoses, and we got some complaints that ‘this means nothing, if I want to complete the game – I’m looking for these coffee thermoses, and what’s the point?’ So we took that feedback to heart.” In Alan Wake 2, coffee thermoses are valuable items indeed. They let you save the game in breakrooms, as with ink ribbons for typewriters in OG Resident Evil.

Wake added that Alan Wake 2 might feel slower than its predecessor, for being a survival horror game rather than action adventure. “With that comes somewhat slow pacing for the overall experience.” But he’s confident it’ll feel in synch with Remedy’s work in general.