Tomorrow the Gamescom 2022 festivities will start in the form of the Opening Night Live... livestream. Originally teased on last week's CrossfireX livestream, Smilegate will be back on the stage with a mysterious new announcement.
At present, no one knows what the update will be, or if it will include any Remedy action, but the company has posted the following message to players via social media warning of an expected outage:
"The CrossfireX servers will be going offline tomorrow, August 23rd, to apply an update beginning at 7:00am ET. During this time you will not be able to access the game. Downtime is expected to last 4 hours. Thank you." (Source)
The time mentioned in the post places the update just seven hours ahead of the broadcast. Whatever it is it's expected to be quite the news story, with a follow-up broadcast scheduled for the next day (August 24th at 7pm PDT / 2am GMT / 3am BST) on the CrossfireX Twitch channel.
On the topic of Gamescom, with the 2023 launch date of Alan Wake 2 creeping ever closer, there's certainly interest in the game at the show. Plus, Remedy's marketing does like their reveals covert! It's worth being sceptical though and not going into the Opening Night Live show expecting an announcement; as the studio said back in May not to expect any news over the Summer.
The statement was made by Sam Lake (Creative Director at Remedy) who revealed the change during the game's twelfth anniversary, "everything with Alan Wake 2 development is going really well. We are deep in production, have a lot of material, and a great deal of the game is playable. But we’ve been talking for the past couple of months and have come to the decision here at Remedy, along with our wonderful publisher Epic Games, that we will not be showing anything big this summer. To create a proper, polished demo or a trailer takes a lot of effort, and it’s several months of work that could take away from development. We feel that we have momentum going, and we want to make sure we are creating the best, and first, survival horror game for Remedy. We don’t want to take the team away from that focus, so we’re going to keep going and making a great game experience, and unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for a demo and trailer."
