Tencent Co-funds Live-service Game by Control and Alan Wake Devs
Remedy Entertainment has partnered with Tencent. The Chinese giant is co-funding the first co-op live-service game from the creators of Control and Alan Wake.
Remedy Entertainment does not complain about lack of work. After the success of Control, the developers are working on the return of Alan Wake and the sequel to CrossFire. There are also plans for a free co-op game codenamed Vanguard which is co-financed by the Chinese company Tencent.
As we read in the announcement for investors on the studio's official website, Tencent will cover part of the development costs of the game, which will be released on consoles and PC as a title from Remedy Entertainment's catalog. The exception will be the Asian market, where Tencent will publish and localize the game. In addition, the Chinese company will fund a mobile version of Vanguard.
For now, we do not know much about Vanguard, which is easy to confuse with Condor announced this year - a side-scrolling installment of the Control series in the form of a co-op shooter. However, the project co-funded by Tencent was mentioned much earlier, as early as the end of 2018, so even before the release of the original Control. Nevertheless, the new announcement reads that the title is still in the proof-of-concept stage. Apparently, the game's launch is still a matter of distant future.
Nonetheless, here and there Remedy Entertainment has provided scraps of information. Vanguard will be a "groundbreaking" co-op free-to-play live-service game. It's not clear in what this "groundbreakingness" will manifest, but GamesIndustry.biz's interview with Tero Virtala sheds some light on the matter.
According to the CEO of Remedy, one of the biggest challenges for developers of co-op games is the problem with regular content delivery. After all, it's impossible, at least according to Virtala, to "rely on hand-crafted levels and missions to be unique all the time" in the long run. The Remedy team hopes to solve this problem by bringing "the way we tell stories through the world and exploration" to online play.
The studio dreams of a title that takes the narrative of Control or Alan Wake to PvE co-op formula. Vanguard will be quite an expensive game - its budget will be on a similar level as the previous AAA titles from Remedy Entertainment's catalog. The whole thing is being powered by Unreal Engine.
