Alongside the new level, the expansion update will include an Assist Mode, new songs by Poe and Petri Alanko, plus a return of the beloved grey tweed jacket.
In a surprise announcement, Remedy has revealed its next Control adventure,FBC: Firebreak! The adventure is a three person, cooperative FPS set in The Oldest House.
We recently spoke Tiia Öhman about working as a photographer on the Alan Wake 2 set. Her stunning work can be seen in-game, in marketing, and on merchandise.
To celebrate the game's 10th anniversary, we sat down with Matthew Porretta, the incredible voice actor behind Alan Wake, to talk about his experiences and memories.
To kick off the start of November, CGWorld posted an interview with Remedy Entertainment's Senior Environment Artist, Masao Ogino. The piece focuses on Masao's twenty-year career in games and how he got started.
Born in Tokyo, he attended college in the USA to further study English and 3DCG, before returning to Japan and jumping into games. In the interview, he talks about learning a second language, looking for adventures outside his home country and the courage needed in taking that leap.
The main part of the piece though focuses on about his relocation to Finland to work at Remedy, where he has been for the past eleven years, working on titles such as Quantum Break, Control, CrossfireX, and Alan Wake 2. It's in that section where he describes what the role of a Senior Environmental Artist at Remedy entails and what his initial perceptions were of the studio when he first began.
While the original interview is in Japanese, you can check out a Google Translated-version, HERE. It's not perfect, but it provides the gist of their conversation.
To celebrate the launch of the PlayStation 5 Pro, Remedy recently published an article detailing the work that went into upgrading Alan Wake 2 for the latest console version.
The article tackles a number of topics from the studio's approach, to the introduction of ray-tracing, as well as the process of adding console-specific elements like a transparent surface reflection denoiser. While some may be missed in a typical playthrough, unless you were exploring the worlds with Photo Mode, each implementation brings a new level of realism to the experience.
Describing the approach to the task, the studio writes, “We’ve always wanted to bring cutting-edge visuals to our games, but everything is always a balancing act between the frame rate, visual quality, technical and hardware constraints, development resources and what we wish to artistically achieve with the game. Alan Wake 2 did not feature ray tracing on PlayStation 5, but with the Pro’s improved ray tracing features and additional power, we could bring ray tracing to Alan Wake 2’s Quality Mode on the Pro enabling ray traced reflections on opaque and transparent surfaces.”
You can read the article in full on the Remedy website, HERE! (Archived)
This week, Olli Tukianen (aka Ollie T), lead guitarist for Poets of the Fall and Old Gods of Asgard, surprised fans with the announced his debut album, Lost Within The Fire! The news came just days from his latest single, Livin' The Dream, was released after a seven-year break.
The album features eleven tracks, two of which you may have heard before; Let the Night Begin, Firefly, Etude no.1, Silhouette, Livin' the Dream, Rendezvous, Neon Highways, Green Fields, Midnight Fun, The Blue One, and Sleek Machine.
Pre-orders are available now, with a launch set for December 13th 2024.
Alongside the announcement of the album, Backstage Rock Shop opened up a new shopfront for the artist. In addition to physical copies of the album, on CD and vinyl, fans can also purchase t-shirts, hoodies, wristbands, a guitar pick set, and a keychain bottle opener. Something for all price ranges.
Official Album Description:Ollie T (Olli Tukiainen) is a Finnish guitar player best known for his work with the bands Poets of the Fall and Old Gods of Asgard. He discovered his passion for guitar playing at the age of 12. Over the years, he honed his craft by studying music at the Helsinki Pop & Jazz Conservatory, where he developed his skills and explored various musical styles. In 2005, Poets of the Fall released their debut album, which signified the start of a successful journey for the band. This success led to Ollie touring internationally with Poets of the Fall, further showcasing his remarkable skills in various projects, including the award-winning video game "Alan Wake 2."
After years of crafting songs and solo material, Ollie T released his first solo track, "Firefly," in 2017. This marked the beginning of his evolution as a solo artist, culminating in his debut full solo album, "Lost Within the Fire," which will be released in late 2024. This captivating album features a wide variety of moods, ranging from gentle ballads and soft tunes to the extravagant, sizzling guitar mayhem first heard in "Firefly." The album also showcases the talents of all the members of Poets of the Fall, including vocal parts by their singer, Marko Saaresto.
Tukiainen is one of the founding members of Poets of the Fall and has remained guitarist, providing the band's iconic epic guitar solos, since their formation back in 2003. While his solo artist brand is a recent creation, you're bound to be deeply familiar with his work, which can be heard in Max Payne 2 (Late Goodbye), Alan Wake (War, Children of the Elder God, and The Poet and the Muse), Death Rally 2011/12 (Can You Hear Me), Alan Wake's American Nightmare (Balance Slays the Demon and The Happy Song), Control (Take Control and My Dark Disquiet) and finally Alan Wake 2 (Herald of Darkness, Dark Ocean Summoning, and Anger's Remorse).
Most recently, he took on the role of fictional character, Bob Balder, in Alan Wake 2, and on stage at The Game Awards 2023 when Old Gods of Asgard performed Herald of Darkness live.
Today, Remedy released a new interview which explores the actors behind our favourite Alan Wake 2 characters. In the past, they revealed pieces from Peter Franzén (Ilmo and Jaakko Koskela), as well as a joint interview with Melanie Liburd (Saga Anderson) and Ilkka Villi (Alan Wake, Mr Scratch and Thomas Zane). Today we hear from the wonderful Janina Gavankar and Sam Lake as they talk about the slightly world-weary but ruthlessly driven FBC agent, Keiran Esetvez.
The interview was recorded back in December 2022, a year before Alan Wake 2 came out. In the piece, they don't discuss The Lake House, which featured Gavankar as the lead, so it's a little unclear how far they were along with the plans for the expansion. But it is a great exploration into how she approached Estevez and how it feels to be a fan stepping into the Remedy Connected Universe.
You can watch the full interview below or on the Remedy YouTube channel, HERE.
The actors behind Alan Wake 2 - Janina Gavankar [Transcript]
[Teaser] Janina Gavankar: And I get to play a character that just exists in your Remedy Extended universe.
[Teaser] Sam Lake: Yes.
[Teaser] Janina Gavankar: This is wild.
[Teaser] Sam Lake: Yeah, it's awesome.
On screen question: What were your first impressions of Agent Estevez?
Janina Gavankar: Kiran has worked for the Federal Bureau of Control and sacrificed a lot of her life to be able to do it. And that's exhausting for her, but there's very few people who can do the job. And, you know... somebody's got to save the world from AWEs. So when you first meet her, I mean, I feel like you get a sense that she knows more than Saga and that she's trying to save Saga from becoming her almost, right? Like knowing too much and not being able to go back and have normalcy in her life.
On screen title: Janina Gavankar & Sam Lake / Kiran Estevez & Alex Casey
Janina Gavankar: Hi, I'm Janina Gavankar, and I play Agent Kiran Estevez in Alan Wake 2.
Sam Lake: Hello, I'm Sam Lake from Remedy. I am playing Alex Casey in Alan Wake 2. As you can tell, I'm totally losing my voice right now. But it doesn't matter because Alex Casey's voice is done by the wonderful actor James McCaffrey.
Janina Gavankar: When Kiran meets Saga for the first time... it was interesting to have this feeling of, like, being protective.
Sam Lake: Yep.
Janina Gavankar: Seeing things of herself in Saga and being like, “trust me, you don't want to cross this line because there's no coming back from this. When you see all the things that we've seen at FBC, you could lose your life to this. Trust me, I have.” So I think that she's impressed by her, but also has a lot of protective feelings about distancing her.
Sam Lake: Yeah.
Janina Gavankar: Hmm-mm
Sam Lake: Yeah, it's interesting because at that point in the story, Saga has already been pulled into this craziness. And you as the player playing Saga want to proceed, but then we meet Estevez, and she kind of stops us.
Janina Gavankar: Hmm-mm
Sam Lake: Like, don't go forward.
On screen question: What do you like about Agent Estevez?
Janina Gavankar: One thing I like about playing Kiran is that she's not the “stereotypical” strong female lead. Nobody's doing that in Remedy. Nobody's doing that “Well, I'm not like the other girls.” There's no competition between women. These are just people trying their best with what they have in front of them. And that's it.
On screen question: What got you interested in working on Alan Wake 2?
Janina Gavankar: I've been a fan of Remedy for a while now. I 100%ed Quantum Break and Control, and I found a little Easter Egg in Quantum Break called Time Knife. And I did a little table reading with the writer of that screenplay as well as some of the cast members, and it was ridiculous. But that's also how I like somehow became friends with you.
Sam Lake: Yeah.
Janina Gavankar: And I would have just done it even if you didn't notice. I just thought it was funny, but it started a nice, long friendship.
[As Estevez] Janina Gavankar: Bad news: It's highly classified.
On screen question: What is your favourite part of working in the games industry?
Janina Gavankar: I've been working in the games industry for a while now, and I do a few different things. I obviously perform, but I also consult on the narrative side, on the casting side. So that is really where you get to have the most fun, I think, because you're there when you're blue-sky-ing, when you're thinking, “What could this be?” and “What do we love?” and “What do we want to try?” and go down as a rabbit hole, and who's right to put this on their shoulders and lead us up the mountain? And then I kind of leave for a long time, and then I come back in the end. You know, that's kind of what I find myself doing a lot now, and the smartest artists on the planet are working in the games industry. Every person who works in the games industry has to be a multidisciplinary artist. You have to understand so many technical things, as well as being a creative, vulnerable heart. You have to have so many disciplines to be able to work here. It's enthralling.
On screen question: What are you most excited about in Alan Wake 2?
Janina Gavankar: I love horror games. I love horror movies. I also write and direct horror pieces. I like it because the genre of horror has the guts to look at the things that you are too scared to look at yourself. So, it's a Trojan horse to allow you to open yourself up to vulnerabilities that you just can't in real life. There's also the thematic rabbit hole of duality. In this game, that I think is going to be really scary because everybody has many sides of themselves. But I mean, everybody walks the line between good and evil and making their choices from moment to moment and, you know, almost nobody wants to admit to their dark side that it exists. So, because I'm the collector of all the things, because I'm the reader of all the manuscripts, I can't wait to connect everything. I can't wait to find it all and go on the Reddit and talk to all of the people about what's connected to what. Like, I just can't wait to find all of the red strings that connect all of the games in this universe. Ah, I can't wait.
