“OK, as Treatment we made our success on Max Payne, and Alan Wake has made his success in writing hardball crime fiction, and he has this detective character… If we’re going to give this character a face, it simply felt like on the meta layer of this – and there’s a lot meta, greater than ever earlier than – it simply felt like, nicely, I feel we have to do it this manner, that I would be the character.”
Like that unique Max Payne scene, that is Treatment breaking out of the bounds of conventional online game storytelling – it’s one other danger, one other sudden alternative. However it’s additionally a deeply pleasing Easter Egg for followers of the studio. One other of these comes within the type of Quantum Break’s Shawn Ashmore, who reappears right here as Tim Breaker (sounds fairly just like ‘Time Breaker’, doesn’t it?). Once more, Quantum Break isn’t formally part of Treatment’s Related Universe, however his look is one other nod to the studio’s previous – and one other a part of Lake’s curiosity in constructing on older concepts.
Quantum Break got here with the distinctive proposition of being each motion sport and live-action TV sequence inside a single package deal, and it’s no shock to see Alan Wake 2 trying to recapture that concept in a brand new kind – by creating complete scenes in live-action, on meticulously remade units that mirror the sport itself.
“I’m happy with Quantum Break, I do really feel that we achieved one thing distinctive, [but] I all the time felt that we might have gone rather a lot additional in bringing [the game and show] collectively,” says Lake. “However again then, by means of manufacturing realities, and scheduling and all the things, that was one of the best we might obtain at that time. So I positively felt after it that I need to carry on working with live-action as a component.”