- Control Resonant lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos and art director Elmeri Raitanen want players to engage in side content alongside the story
- Grönroos says, "We want the player to kind of get lost in the world in a good way"
- The game will also feature linear "dungeons", which Grönroos says are a "really nice contrast" to the overworld
Remedy Entertainment has placed a lot of emphasis on exploration in Control Resonant, and it wants players to discover and engage in side content in the game's open areas alongside the main story as much as possible.
That's according to lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos and art director Elmeri Raitanen, who discussed how Remedy went about creating the game's ambitious open world after Control's interior setting, in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at a preview event alongside this year's Summer Game Fest.
Raitanen explained that the team is "standing on the shoulders of an aesthetic giant," so moving past the award-winning Control's level design and striking concept was a challenge.
"From the design side, well, we did the first Control, [and] I think we were a bit naive back then, we didn't really realize how big of a jump it could be, [you] could go from Quantum Break, which was like a completely linear game, to something [Control] where you're actually supposed to backtrack, and it's more open, and it has a main mission, it has side missions, and so on," Grönroos said.
"So, there definitely was a lot of stuff in there we learned, but it was impressive what we did back then, but there were still a lot left out of out of there that we couldn't really get done in the first game, so this one, we are now outside [in] Manhattan, so the world is much bigger, the areas are more distinct from each other, they have more of this identity that has been thought of."
She added, "It turned out a lot of people actually just played the [Control] main mission and didn't even find the side content at all," but with Control Resonant, the team "really wanted to push more for in this game."
"We want the player to kind of get lost in the world in a good way," Grönroos said. "And force them to have fun," Raitanen added.
In Control, players were limited to the interior of the Oldest House, but in Resonant, the open world of a supernaturally warped Manhattan will be fully explorable.
This means many more visual landmarks to encounter that "can attract somebody's curiosity into some direction," which Raitanen explained "might not have been possible to do" in the first game "when we are going from like an interior space into another interior space."
"In the indoors we couldn't have those landmarks from very far away, and you couldn't have those visible from other sectors at all, but here now... the game is not fully open, it is separated in a disc, similar things to sectors, but the sectors themselves, the city zones, they are a lot more open than the sectors where the Oldest House, and in fact, like that big red building, for example, you can see that from three other zones over, you can see this big global landmarks from a lot of other zones," Grönroos said.
Raitanen hinted at what players can expect when they explore Manhattan, and while the world may appear to be filled with supernatural threats, the team didn't want to "sprinkle paranatural things and weirdness a little bit everywhere."
Instead, Remedy has built the environments with the intention of being explored, and you never know what you'll find.
"One key thing has been that we want to make it like the city is not necessarily your enemy, it might actually feel like deceitfully pleasant," the art director said. "[It] occasionally invites you to explore, but then there might be this layer of paranatural threat and chaos that kind of is overlaid on top of the normal city, so that's definitely been one of them key tools to make the zones feel like they have identity, and if you take screenshots of different places of the game, you can immediately tell that, hey, that's from Evacuation Zone, and that's from the molding park, or an abundant part of the oldest house, something like this."
Beyond the main story, Grönroos also hinted at additional sequences and "linear levels" that Remedy called "dungeons", which she explained are a "really nice contrast" to the overworld that players see from the outset.
"These spaces, which are not in the part of the overworld, [are a] more content linear experience, and there's not a ton of other things distracting you there," she said. "It is all about the story [in this area], although when the story is done, then we might be doing something different than there.
"There might be a side quest that opens up that in the place where you are just about to go, and in fact, later on in the game," Grönroos added, but said Remedy wants the first-time experience playing Control Resonant "to be very graded in a very similar [way] to how we did the main quest in the first game."
Control Resonant launches on September 24 for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
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