Following the news that the next Alan Wake title will not be a full, boxed release but a downloadable title on the Xbox Live Arcade, Remedy have taken to their damage control stations to defend their decision to downsize.
Alan Wake: Night Springs will be “Structured like a full release,” said Peter Papadopoulos, community manager for Remedy.
“If you’re thinking about this in terms of some kind of a, I don’t know, super simplified ‘we still use the name but changed everything about it’ version of Alan Wake, let me just say that this is not the case. That’s all I’m gonna say,” added Alan Wake co-writer Markus Mäki.
Night Springs will have a “pretty damn impressive storyline that expands the originals in some interesting ways,” he stated.
The upper limit for games released on the Live Arcade is 2GB, a limit that the original Alan Wake could have made with the cut-scenes stripped out.
I’m not too annoyed by the decision to re-structure the game as a smaller title. Generally I find these titles a nice counterpoint to a £40 release that takes up dozens of hours of my life, although I can see how some fans might extrapolate that a XBLA might lead to a less substantial offering.
Source: Alan Wake Forum
