It’s been seven years since the original Alan Wake game came from Remedy Entertainment after years of delays. With an Alan Wake 2 nowhere in sight, Sam Lake, the head of Remedy, has gone into detail on what’s keeping the studio from working from working on a sequel to Alan Wake.
Of course, the fault lies with Remedy’s publisher, Microsoft. Remedy had previously developed Quantum Break as a title on the Xbox One, which came out last year to a storm of criticism about the game being ported to PC (despite being advertised as an Xbox One exclusive) and a host of technical issues on the PC.
However, even though Alan Wake was a success, along with its expansion Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Microsoft is unwilling to allow Remedy to develop Alan Wake 2 due to the publisher wanting new things from the studio. However, a few things that would have been part of the Alan Wake sequel did make it over to Quantum Break, mainly the cross-media portion.
Quantum Break, in addition to its time-stopping mechanic, had a rather novel way of storytelling as Remedy filmed a TV series ran concurrently with the game’s plot, which showed what was happening with a variety of other, minor characters in the game while protagonist Jack Joyce was attempting to avert the end of time itself.
Alan Wake 2 would have had a similar thing, considering the importance of TV in the original game (the game acted like it was a TV show, with acts divided into episodes, and you could also watch episodes of a Twilight Zone-like show called Night Springs on TVs around the game), but it seems with Microsoft not wanting to greenlight a sequel we’ll never get to see it.
Hopefully some day Remedy Entertainment will be able to make a sequel to Alan Wake (especially since that game has been removed from Steam due to its license running out and also ended up a cliffhanger). In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait.
