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Christmas at Remedy Entertainment these days is almost as much about people getting to know each other as it is about celebrating the holidays.

The company is up to 140 employees now, with 30 coming on in the past four months alone.

I hopped on Skype with Thomas Puha, head of communication for Remedy, and Remedy game director Mikael Kasurinen one morning, an evening in Espoo, Finland, just as their Christmas party was wrapping up.

It was the last company-wide meeting for the year and everyone got Christmas presents.

This time around, though, the presents — a special backpack emblazoned with the company logo — were hand-delivered to the employees by one another. Each was assigned a random name to bring the bag to. It was a way for people to get to meet folks they may not talk with that often or, perhaps, never met at all.

The spate of new hiring this year is a sign of a healthy company, a developer that is growing and, in this case, changing.

“If a company is around for as long as we are, change is demanded,” Puha tells me. “This year has seen a significant kind of change, but it’s been in the works for years.”

Remedy now has two teams and uses its own technology, like an in-house game engine, to build its creations.

At first blush, the company also seems to be moving away from what has always powered its many successes: games deeply rooted in stories which lean heavily on often flawed, often interesting characters.

Ask a fan of Remedy, or games in general, about the company and they’re likely to talk about the first Max Payne and his nightmarish personal journey through loss, or Alan Wake and his phantasmagorical life caught between self-created fiction and confusing reality, or maybe even Quantum Break’s labyrinthine nest of competing story lines.

All of those games shared not just the benefits found in the profundity of novels, but also a singular inescapable shortcoming: Single-player games, like novels, are at their core designed to be experienced once. Sure, you can replay a game you love, just like you can crack open a book you’ve already read and give it another go. But the experience remains mostly unchanged.

As games and the expectations of the people who play them continue to evolve, that sort of design doesn’t seem like as smart a risk anymore to many in the industry, especially for an independent company with a history of betting it all, each time, on one game and hoping things work out.

When Remedy announced awhile back that it was looking into creating a multiplayer game, the company seemed caught in the same currents of change-out-of-necessity that swept up other major studios in the past few years.

Epic Games is in the process of reinventing itself a fourth time, focusing on what the company calls living games, titles that can be constantly nudged in the direction a player is headed in terms of taste and expectation. Ubisoft’s titles, which also lean heavily on narrative, now almost all share new common elements: open worlds with online connections, perhaps that company’s solution to the problem of fickle gamer expectations.

And so it is that Remedy now finds itself on the precipice of change, looking out at the landscape of what is to come and trying to find a way to thrive in this new world of never-ending games, without losing its history or deep ties to storytelling.

It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean

As a long-time fan of Remedy titles, I can’t help but think of a single line, from a single game, every time a discussion of the publisher comes up. Sometimes, the line pops up in my head even when I’m not talking about games, but instead some topic that centers on a thing that is actually much bigger than it seems on its surface.

After listening to Puha and Kasurinen tell me a bit about what the company is striving to pull off with its still unnamed, unknown new project, I think about that sentence again. This time, I say it too. It’s an apt metaphor, it seems, for what Remedy wants to achieve.

“It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean,” I say, quoting the end of Alan Wake, which hints that the story of that game was part of something much bigger.

“Yes, you could say that,” Kasurinen says.

What Remedy wants to do with this mysterious new game, codenamed P7, is to deliver to players not a masterfully created, but narrowly focused story in a rich world, but a world in which players will find and create their own deeply compelling stories.

Essentially, they want to deliver the ocean to players, not the lake.

The story of CrossFire 2 Remedy isn’t just creating a new sort of game with P7, the company also took on the challenge of injecting story into a follow-up to China’s free-to-play, first-person shooter CrossFire, one of the top grossing online games in the world. Sam Lake told us that CrossFire developer Smilegate approached Remedy and asked them to create a story mode for the upcoming CrossFire 2. The story, he says, is meant to “serve as an introduction into their universe, and to deepen the fiction and lore behind it. “It felt like an exciting opportunity.” Lake says that Remedy has quite a lot of first-person game fans at the studio and that they were excited to take on the project. “Apart for being a first-person shooter, the story mode will be very much a Remedy game when it comes to cinematic action, high-stake plot and drama, and a cast of strong characters.”

“The key starting point for this game was that we traditionally … we tell a story that happens in the world,” Kasurinen says. “What we wanted to do was reverse that, to create a world where stories happen. That was a key defining point for the game. It allows us to understand a totality of the experience we want to create: You opening up and wanting to go into this new universe.”

That sounds in many ways like the sort of thing Ubisoft continues to refine in its Far Cry games, I tell Kasurinen.

“I hesitate to compare it to any existing game, but if we take that element in isolation of Far Cry that is part of it,” he says. “We want a strong context, strong sense of purpose and goal. We want those things to be super clear to the player, for there to be a number of things you have to pay attention to and optional elements you can pursue.”

Will it be as big as most Far Cry games?

“It’s too early to go into that,” Kasurinen says.

That’s not surprising. When we initially talked about this interview, Puha warned me that Remedy didn’t want to fall into the trap of announcing or detailing this new thing too soon.

Instead, he told me, he wanted to have a chance for Remedy to discuss game design philosophy without the pressure of trying to sell a particular game.

So Kasurinen wouldn’t talk about much in terms of the particulars of P7. Not the name. Not the plot. Not the timing. Not the platform. Not the publisher.

But we did talk about how Remedy got here, to the precipice of big change and the inception of P7.

The long journey

“If you look back at the traditional Remedy games we produced through the past 21 years, thematically and conceptually, they all had different feels to them,” Kasurinen says. “But they’ve all kind of followed a similar, tried-and-true cinematic gameplay approach. What is important is important to us with this new project is to expand upon that without losing the Remedy secret sauce. Expand gameplay and find methods to extend the experience and move away from the linear approach. We want to give the player a sense of volition, a sense of control over his or her path. We want them to have more options, to be able to customize their own experience.

“To retain the players they need to have a strong reason to come back to the experience, so we need to insure that the game is deep and varied enough to maintain their interest.”

This idea, this breakaway from Remedy’s narratively-driven, singularly experienced games, is one that has been in the back of the company’s collective heads for awhile now — particularly, in the heads of Kasurinen and Remedy’s creative director and head writer Sam Lake.

But to get to this point, the company had to drive through some other ideas, push out games that played with how they built stories and experimented with how they told tales.

By the time Remedy Entertainment got to Alan Wake, it had already moved on from its demoscene roots and past its first almost anachronistic top-down car battle game: Death Rally. The first game that helped establish the Remedy most people think of today, Max Payne, was a phenomenal, memorable hit in 2001 and the basis for a solid sequel in 2003. The company was taking in a much needed break from back-to-back long development, trying to decide what to do next. The threw around some ideas and one of them turned into Alan Wake, but not the Alan Wake that was released.

The game and development around it was, for nearly half a year, centered around creating an open-world experience. But, ultimately, the team junked that work and started over, deciding that they couldn’t deliver the sort of taut narrative thriller without making it linear.

“If you go back and look at Alan Wake ten years ago you could see us talking about it about how we dabbled with the idea of driving around in a car in an open environment,” Kasurinen says. “You could see even then that desire to go in that direction.”

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Instead, the team leaned into narrative and created something that was designed to be played like a television series, one episode at a time. It also led to something that has since become a common habit in television: binging. Many players ignored the natural breaks of the game’s episodes and instead played the entire game in one or two sittings.

The playful way that Remedy interjected television viewing habits into the game’s structure was interesting, but it was also telling of a deeper desire to experiment with that intersection. In many ways, that’s what put off the decision to jump into the earlier interest in open worlds and multiplayer for Remedy’s next game.

“Quantum Break was a game we had to do,” Kasurinen says. “We were dabbling with these ideas Quantum Break had quite awhile. We always wanted to see where it could go. Digital doubles, the TV show medium in the gaming. We always saw hints of that in Alan Wake. QB to me was ... it kind of had to happen.

“What we learned was, it’s challenging to combine this more passive way of telling stories with a game that demands you to be active and Quantum Break underlined those problems really clearly. We wanted, we felt it was exploration worth doing. We spent a lot of time making sure the connection points between the TV show and the game were strong and meaningful. It is a tough challenge to make people shift back and forth between active and passive mode.”

The team learned a lot about storytelling and the use of different mediums by creating Quantum Break. The game also provided a lot of player feedback that Remedy found equally useful.

Useful mostly in forming the experience, the lessons and the runway that would be needed to create the company’s next game.

In one way, it’s a bit of a lost opportunity.

“They emphasized key things we wanted to pursue in the future,” Kasurinen says. “Expanding the gameplay side, involving different areas, finding ways for players to affect the experience. But it’s also important we don’t lose that storytelling DNA that we are known for. We want to make sure that wherever we go for gameplay, we still have that be at the core, just connecting to all the different aspects of the game.”

In some ways, it seems that P7 is also powered by regret over what could have been.

“One way to tell a story is to create a rich world you can get to explore,” Kasurinen says. “When you look back at Alan Wake and Quantum Break, you can see we spent a lot of time looking at the shape of those worlds, the cities, towns, neat characters, maps. We spent a lot of time in crafting those universes, if you will. The gameplay is actually a linear story through those amazing, complicated worlds. In one way, it’s a bit of a lost opportunity.

“We still want to create strong worlds, but the game should be crafted in such a way that allows this exploration.”

Project 7

There’s very little Kasurinen is willing to tell me about the game. I know, because I never fail to ask when I speak with Remedy developers, that it is not Alan Wake 2. I also know that while the game is the developer’s first big push into multiplayer gaming, it isn’t what most would think of when they think multiplayer: competitive. This new game, P7, is meant to be a cooperative game in an open world that will provide players the space to create and, I suppose, tell their own stories, if only to an audience of one.

I also know that this game will be the sum of the parts and discoveries made while experimenting in game creation with Alan Wake and Quantum Break. But, of course, it needs to succeed in the places those games didn’t.

“With the new project, it is important to find a more fluid, more organic way to tell stories without losing the interesting characters, surprising plot and so on and at the same time move the game play in a direction where it becomes more meaningful,” Kasurinen tells me. “This is the key reason we want to find a more streamlined way of telling stories.”

In previous games, the team seemed to always find itself focusing on the core path a player took through these robust worlds Remedy was making. They focused so much on that narrow line drawn through the experience, that often the game and its world shrank around that narrative.

Kasurinen on Epic and Ubisoft As a direction, I see it as totally valid. It’s part of that rhetoric of what we are wanting to do: Create a world and have stories in that. When it comes to Ubisoft and Epic, from my perspective, I think it’s excellent that there are these clear directions they have defined where they have tried to figure out from their perspective where gaming as an art form is headed and what is a game. That should be applauded, it’s valuable and helps this industry move forward. Compare to what Ubisoft and Epic is doing, Remedy’s approach would be different. To us, what’s always important is a sense of immersion to a player; creating that environment that allows a player to feel like he or she belongs there; having a compelling context that engages you as a player. Those are hugely important. Having that and providing an environment that allows exploration and improvisation and experiences you create yourself through the character is important. With a good approach, you can tie all of that together and create something exceptional.

“I think they could have been bigger [games] easily,” Kasurinen tells me. “Alan Wake had a long history of development, but it was through years of events that it took the shape it took. A lot of concepts were created through that journey. It felt like there was this world of concept and complex storyline that was left aside. The key point that we learned from that experience is that the world building we do needs to connect with the gameplay. Gameplay needs to enable organic experiences and interactions with the world.”

And so it will, the team hopes, with P7.

Every game proceeding this one started with a strong core concept, Kasurinen tells me. That concept serves the role of making sure that all of the bits and pieces of the game fit together nearly. In Quantum Break, for instance, the core concept centered around the marriage of the mediums of television and video games into one experience.

“You can see how that affected everything about the game, including gameplay,” he says.

In the case of P7, it seems, cooperative gameplay is a integral piece of the game’s core concept.

Kasurinen tells me this while making a very fine point: Remedy would never do a multiplayer game simply for the sake of adding or creating multiplayer.

“When we start to think of a new game we don’t think necessarily that it needs to have multiplayer,” he says. “We look at the concept and ask these questions about what are the different elements that would elevate this game into a unique special thing, differentiate it from others? Part of that process is that we make an effort to ensure that every piece fits together.”

So this new game will be Remedy dipping its toe into a game that features multiplayer at or near its core.

“The game is cooperative,” Kasurinen says. “That fits within the theme of the game we are creating and supports it, makes it even stronger. This is our first step toward shared experiences between players.

“The games coming after this game will feature bigger multiplayer than this.”

Despite the new approach and desire to include multiplayer, Remedy’s Sam Lake says a strong narrative is still very much a part of the new game.

“We announced earlier that we are exploring multiplayer elements for our future games, but that doesn’t mean those games wouldn’t have a strong narrative,” he says. “Like Mikael explained, I feel that co-op offers interesting opportunities for storytelling in games. Also, the multiplayer is part of the long-term exploration we’re doing, not the main focus of the games in the making right now.”

All of this is to say that for Remedy, the push into multiplayer games isn’t really driven by a business decision.

“This is something we need to do to evolve as a company, as game developers,” Kasurinen says. “All of these elements we talked about is something we are extremely enthusiastic to do. This is a really natural next step for Remedy to expand the experiences and just to give the player more choice, more ways to express themselves.”

And it’s important to note that Remedy doesn’t see this as stepping away from the narrative single-player games they are so known for. This is not a choice made to stop doing one in favor of the other.

“This approach doesn’t mean we wouldn’t do a new Alan Wake,” Kasurinen says. “I do think we are going to see less AAA, linear, story-driven games, but I don’t think storytelling in games will go away. I think indie developers have really stepped up in the last few years. There are strong characters and really excellent stories being told. You might not see the same AAA treatment, but I don’t think anyone minds that. Maybe that’s even a plus: Indie developers take more risks.”