Control Resonant's Manhattan is Remedy's biggest world, designer says

Control Resonant releases on September 24, some seven years after Remedy Entertainment's 2019 original, and enough has changed in the sequel that the studio had to rethink how it builds levels.

The headline changes are a switch of main character, from Jesse Faden to her brother Dylan, a focus on melee combat that is a first for Remedy, and a move out of the tight confines of The Oldest House into the open streets of the studio's version of Manhattan.

Senior level designer Arhi Makkonen, who joined Remedy in 2018 during the last year of development on the first Control, described his part in that process to GamesIndustry.biz. "As a level designer, I'm doing the start of the block out," he said, "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."

Losing the ceiling

Working outdoors changed that calculation. "On the first game, everything is interiors," Makkonen said. "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."

Manhattan removes it. "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," he said. Dylan has a similar set of movement abilities to Jesse, Makkonen added, but is faster.

Guiding without fencing players in

Makkonen described the result as the "biggest world we have ever done," packed with things to find and explore, and said that scale brought its own problem. "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."

He offered an 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 stage when the character can go almost anywhere, including walking up sheer walls. "It's very hard to keep him out of the rooftops in the first place."

The team's answer was not to restrict him. The guiding principle, Makkonen said, 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." Instead, the designers steer players more subtly, drawing their attention with landmarks and color.