The studio's unannounced big-budget project is just about ready to go into full production too.
Control studio Remedy Entertainment has previously revealed that it is working on two new projects in partnership with Epic Games, one a "AAA multiplatform game" and the other a smaller-scale effort, along with a live service game codenamed Vanguard. In a quarterly business review released today, Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said work on all three, plus the singleplayer campaigns the studio is working on for CrossfireX and Crossfire HD, are coming along well.
"Remedy’s AAA game project with Epic Games is soon moving into full production, and the second, smaller-scale game continues in full production mode," Virtala said. "With Vanguard, our free-to-play co-op game project, we have now defined many of the core elements of the game. Development progresses at a good pace, internal playtesting continues, and we are starting the next phase of closed external gameplay testing."
Remedy has previously been a one-game-at-a-time studio, but in recent years (and particularly with the success of control and funding from Epic) the studio has expanded its headcount to enable the development of multiple projects simultaneously. Virtala said Remedy was up to 281 employees at the end of March 2021, and it is "piloting and evaluating new ways to attract and recruit talent."
Unfortunately, the report provides no new information about what these new games actually are. Crossfire is a long-running online FPS that's big in Asia, but CrossfireX hasn't been announced for PC yet (it's currently listed for Xbox One and Xbox Series X), while Crossfire HD is only slated to come out in China. Remedy creative director Sam Lake said last year that the studio is currently working on a new game in the "Remedy Connected Universe" that's widely expected to be Alan Wake 2, but nobody knows for sure—and the identity of the other new game is a complete mystery.
(I continue to hold out hope for a new Remedy-developed Max Payne—surely Epic can afford to buy it back from Rockstar, after all.)
The one thing we can say for sure is that work on Control, for now at least, is done, but even that leads to questions: Virtala said that nearly all of Remedy's internal Control developers have now moved on to other things, "including a new, exciting early-phase project." Is that something we haven't heard about previously, then? Given that all the Remedy developments we know about are either in, or close to, full production, it seems likely. I've reached out to Remedy for clarification and will update if I receive a reply.
