Control Resonant releases on September 24, some seven years after 2019’s Control. Much has changed for the sequel, notably a switch of main character from Jesse Faden to Dylan Faden, her brother. The new game also places a focus on melee combat – a first for Remedy – and the tight confines of The Oldest House have been swapped for the open streets of Manhattan.
This meant significant changes to how Remedy approached the design, senior level designer Arhi Makkonen tells GamesIndustry.biz. He joined Remedy in 2018, during the last year of development for the first Control. “As a level designer, I’m doing the start of the block out,” he explains, “so starting figuring out how the world should be structured, what’s the experience, what content we’re going to have, what flow we have until the end.”
But his design work on Control Resonant required a very different approach, thanks to the more open nature of its world. “On the first game, everything is interiors,” he says. “We have the cool levitate ability, and everybody of course loves it – me too. It feels very good. But when you are inside, there’s always a ceiling.”
“Now, in Control Resonant, when we are outside in our version of Manhattan, we have a lot of freedom to make a lot of height distance, and that is what we really want to encourage. Dylan is similar to Jesse, he has a lot of abilities [that let him] move around fast, but Dylan is even faster.”
He describes Control Resonant’s Manhattan as the “biggest world we have ever done”, packed with things to find and explore. But that also posed some problems. “Any time you want to have some kind of a guided experience in our open-ended structure, that is always a challenge, because when you have open areas, you can go basically everywhere you want.”
“As much as possible, we want to have freedom”
For example, a sequence in which the designers intend for Dylan to follow a route through the streets and then loop back to the rooftops is difficult to implement when the character has the ability to go almost anywhere, even walking up sheer walls. “It’s very hard to keep him out of the rooftops in the first place.”
At the same time, Makkonen says the guiding design principle was not to restrict Dylan’s movements too much. The idea, he says, was that “if there is a possibility to give the freedom for the player to just go wherever they want, let’s go with that. As much as possible, we want to have freedom.”
Go for the zone
The solution was to subtly guide the player by drawing their attention using things like landmarks and colours. When the player enters a new zone, Makkonen says, “you see the most interesting thing, the main location of the zone in front of you, and then a lot of new opportunities around.”
The intention is for the player to build up a subtly guided plan of exploration: that is, “you want to probably go there, but feel free to go anywhere you want in here.” The finished world, however, involved a lot of testing and iteration to make sure the geography was easily understood by players.
“In a perfect world, a player wouldn’t even need to use a map to understand it,” says Makkonen. “In reality, of course, the map helps a lot.”
He says that after the first couple of hours, the world of Control Resonant is opened up for players to explore. But to help with orientation, each zone uses a distinctive colour palette. “That is very important,” says Makkonen. “We try to paint with strong colours in the sense that if you just see a picture of a zone, you straight away know that, oh, this the park, or this is the evacuation zone, this is central. And they all have their own stories, their own feeling and experience.”
He adds that the player is given the freedom to tackle each zone of the city in any order they like. “I’m very excited to see where the players actually go first,” he says. “[In] tests we see that sometimes players might go more into the main campaign, but some people might spend like 15 hours doing all kinds of side content, and finding cool stories, and getting totally hooked, and they haven’t even [started] the main quest yet.”
Gravity falls
Dylan’s ability to defy gravity has added an extra wrinkle of complication to Control Resonant’s level design. Makkonen says that although the game’s gravity manipulation provided a design challenge, it was also a “dream”.
“We wanted to make something where you could actually change gravity in many locations, not only in set pieces. Then we needed to have a lot of iteration and prototyping to make it work. Because first of all, it wasn’t always clear what surfaces are walkable.”
In certain places, Dylan can shift gravity to walk up walls, but Makkonen says it was initially hard to decipher where this was possible. “So we went to the mentality, ‘if it looks walkable, it is walkable’.”
That obviously brought its own design challenges, “because now a player can easily find one spot where they can fly out from the level. So there was a lot of communication between the artists and us, where we tried to figure it out.”
That involved things like carefully adjusting the height of certain elements or changing the location of walkable surfaces. “It took a lot of iteration,” says Makkonen. “But I think in the end we managed to do it [in a way] that feels very natural.”
“Dylan needs to feel different and fresh”
Aside from the open world, another big change for the sequel is the focus on melee combat: something Remedy has never tackled before. “Dylan needs to feel different and fresh,” says Makkonen, “but of course familiar as a Control franchise game.” The character’s new abilities, which include wielding the Aberrant, a shape-shifting weapon that can switch between forms like a hammer or blades, are intended to feel faster and more aggressive that Jesse’s, and Makkonen says the combat “felt good” from quite early on in development. “I think that was something that excited the whole team.”
Control Resonant has been a long time coming – in the intervening years, Remedy has released the long-gestating sequel Alan Wake 2, and the ill-fated multiplayer title FBC: Firebreak, which received its final content update earlier this year. But Control remains the studio’s most popular recent game by far – the original has sold around 7.6 million units according to Video Game Insights, far exceeding Alan Wake 2’s three million lifetime sales. Now, Makkonen is excited about finally sharing his work on the long-awaited sequel. “I’m really proud of how the world came out.”