In their effort to keep a closer relationship with their community, Remedy recently announced a series of livestreams to be broadcasted through Twitch. Each broadcast will revolve around a specific theme and shall include developers involved that are connected to that specific theme. The themes of the streams are as follows; the first stream will make it possible for the community to discuss with the devs about the game’s gameplay and story. The second stream will focus on the game’s Visual FX design and the third and last stream announced will feature an entire campaign mission from start to finish. Exciting!
The first stream titled “Gameplay and Story: Discuss!” took place yesterday. Remedy’s community manager, Vida Starcevic, was joined by Control’s Lead Designer Paul Ehreth and Writer Clay Murphy. After a brief introduction of the developers, Paul took a PS4 controller in hand to play through a section of the (PC) build that was used during PAX – the Central Research level.
During play, Vida relayed questions the community had to these developers. Comprehensive questions, if I might add. Even Paul and Clay complimented the community for the complex and interesting questions they fired upon them. It all made for a very interesting stream that dove a bit deeper into the lore and general design. I also took the liberty to submit a question in the chat: “During the design of Control’s gameplay, what would you say were some of the ‘Eureka’ moments?” Vida appointed Paul to answering this question, as he is responsible for Control’s gameplay. Paul answered:
“That’s a tough one because with games like this one you have a lot of different abilities and enemy types. You kind of.. it’s really hard to get everything in at the same time. An enemy here and a weapon here but it’s not quite balanced yet. You have a couple of abilities but you haven’t quite figured out how they are best used against enemies. Uhm, there is something we always try to take advantage of which is called “Emergent Design” which is where you try to design like 80% of the game and allow some room for the fun to happen, like happy accidents that come out while you are working on the game. Some of it was planned for and some of it was like – “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could use this ability for XYZ?”. We have this enemy called the Hiss Cluster, it’s a big red spooky sphere and this enemy serves as to heal other enemies. When that’s around you want to target this first, but once we get the Seize ability we can actually get it on our side. In terms of the “Aha!” moment, that was actually one of the things we didn’t plan for to occur in that exact way until it happened.”
If you’d like to watch the entire stream yourself, click here to go straight to the Remedy Twitch where it’s saved temporarily. The next stream titled “Blowing Stuff Up: Visual FX” is planned for April 23rd 7PM EEST / 9AM PST. The playthrough of an entire campaign mission is planned to occur in May (as of yet, the exact date is yet unknown).
04/18/2019 Update: The livestream has now been uploaded t YouTube! I embedded it below for your convenience.
