Control developer Remedy explores military shooters with CrossfireX on Xbox One

About five years ago, Remedy Entertainment, the Finnish developer best known for supernatural thrillers like Alan Wake and Control – He decided he wanted to become the type of studio that worked on multiple projects at once. Meanwhile, many on the team were interested in expanding to first-person shooters and finding a way to tell Remedy-style shooters in the dominant genre.

So when Smilegate, the Korean developer behind the popularly popular FPS CrossfireHe held out his hand, it made perfect sense. “They were looking for a study to help them on the narrative side of Crossfire franchise, “says executive producer of remedies Tuukka Taipalvesi The edge.

The two are now collaborating on CrossfireX, a console version of the military shooter coming to Xbox One this year. (Microsoft says the game will be optimized for the X Series, but there are few details about it at the moment.) Smilegate is handling the multiplayer portion, while Remedy is building a single player campaign, the first for the franchise. (If you have never heard of CrossfireI just know that it is extremely popular, with an estimated 1 billion players for life, mostly in China and Korea.)

For Remedy, it was an opportunity to try something new in a well-established universe. The great popularity of Crossfire It was part of what made it attractive, but the developers also say that its world and tradition are much more interesting than they seem. “The whole world of Crossfire it’s full of very, very strange things, so it just played in our hands, ”Taipalvesi. “He provided a lot of source material to get crazy ideas from Remedy.”

Art director Mikko Kinnunen compares the universe to Hideo Kojima’s idiosyncratic Metal Gear Solid franchise. “If you think of a traditional first person military shooter, what is the definition of a soldier? He is almost a person with a mask that has no personality, just does the job. In some games I don’t even remember what the name of the main character is. Was I Dirk? Or was I Hank? We are at the other end of the spectrum, where we have these exaggerated characters. “

Taipalvesi says that Remedy’s team started by taking all the innumerable elements of the Crossfire Introduced since 2007, it has included things like a post-apocalyptic zombie mode and one that transforms characters into Terminator-type killing machines, and uncovering a fictional timeline that makes sense. “We needed to deconstruct that,” he says.

While working in a universe so beloved by many was discouraging, Taipalvesi says Remedy had plenty of freedom to explore. “Smilegate is a developer,” he says. “They didn’t see this as an editor. They were bringing us to collaborate with them. And it is good to be desired. It is nice when external parties come to you, knowing your experience. “

The biggest challenge was learning to tell stories in the first person. Things like the scale of the world and how the narration worked had to be different from what Remedy’s team was used to. There were also technical challenges; a player’s portion of CrossfireX It’s being done with Remedy’s own Northlight engine, and the team had to find ways to make it feel as close to the multiplayer component as possible. “There are different types of rules for third-person and first-person storytelling,” explains Taipalvesi. “But ultimately, we believe it always comes down to building character, building the world, and good dialogue.”

The single-player part of the game will consist of “operations,” which will then be broken down into individual episodes, though how they will be released remains to be seen. And while building a branch of a popular online game isn’t necessarily an obvious move, it fits in with Remedy’s story of trying new things. After all, this is a studio that made a hybrid game / TV show and recently signed up as one of the first creators of Epic’s new publishing label. CrossfireX it’s just another opportunity to expand Remedy’s particular brand of storytelling to a new audience.