For years Remedy has been developing games on a proprietary game engine called Northlight. And Remedy creative director Sam Lake says that Alan Wake 2 will set a new bar for Remedy in terms of visual quality.
“Alan Wake 2 will, by far, be the best-looking, most beautiful Remedy game ever,” Lake says during a sit-down interview with IGN (which you can watch below). Given that Northlight is the engine powering graphically-rich games like Control and Quantum Break, this is a bold and exciting claim.
IGN asked if the partnership between Remedy and Epic Games on Alan Wake 2, where Epic Games is publishing the title, means the Alan Wake sequel could be developed on Epic’s Unreal Engine 5. But Lake says that it’s sticking with Northlight because it has tech best-suited for the experience Remedy is trying to create for the next Alan Wake game.
“[Alan Wake 2] is on Northlight. We feel that especially for this kind of experience where atmosphere and stylization are more important than ever before, is that we know Northlight so well we can focus on certain things and push certain things forward.”
The Northlight engine was designed to push forward storytelling elements Remedy Entertainment favors when developing games. This includes an emphasis on cinematic realism, photorealistic characters, large-scale destruction and physics, and more. Alongside Alan Wake 2, Northlight is being used for the upcoming CrossfireX story campaign which Remedy is developing for Smilegate.
Alan Wake 2 was officially announced at The Game Awards as Remedy’s first-ever survival-horror game. And Lake says that Remedy is taking advantage of the creative freedom to design a truly scary game.
Check out everything announced at The Game Awards here.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.