. Here, the bottom image, with ray-tracing enabled, shows reflections of light and other surfaces in the marble floor, compared to the more traditionally rendered version shown on top.
Control was developed by Finnish studio
Remedy Entertainment as its first major release since its 2017
initial public offering (IPO) and separation from
Microsoft as a publishing partner.
Control was developed using more efficient development strategies to reduce costs and development time. The game was completed within three years with a €30 million budget, a lower cost than that for a typical
triple-A game.
Control was directed by Mikael Kasurinen, who worked on
Alan Wake as lead gameplay designer and
Quantum Break as lead director; and
Sam Lake was the writer and creative director. Lake created the game's story and characters during the pre-production stage, and narrative lead Anna Megill developed its content.
Control was developed using Remedy's proprietary Northlight Engine, which was first used on its previous game,
Quantum Break.
Control was one of the first major games to be released after the introduction of
graphics cards that support real-time
ray-tracing through
DirectX Raytracing, and was the first major game with a nearly full implementation of all available
Nvidia RTX features and support for Nvidia's
DLSS for resolution upscaling on supported graphics cards.
Gameplay Gameplay was one of Remedy's development priorities for
Control. Whereas earlier Remedy games explore supernatural themes,
Control is the first game in which the protagonist wields supernatural powers. The powers were designed to be easily recognizable and grounded in reality; the developers avoided adding magical abilities that would feel outlandish in the game's setting. The telekinetic powers were designed to feel intuitive: players do not need to manually target the environment to pick up objects, and grabbed objects can be hurled to deliver devastating damage. To achieve this, Remedy replaced the
Havok physics in Northlight with
PhysX. The abilities and the Service Weapon are designed to complement each other in combat. One resource slowly recharges while the other is in use, encouraging players to strategically switch between them. The Service Weapon was designed as a highly capable tool for dispatching enemies. The
artificial intelligence (AI) of the enemies in the game was designed to be aggressive, forcing players to use all of the skills in their toolset. The developers wanted to give players more options in combat and introduced enemy variants that force players to instantly change strategy because different enemies have different vulnerabilities. It was a response to
Quantum Break, a linear action game that took five years to develop but only took players about eight hours to complete. These design meant
Control became less curated; as a result, the developers adopted a minimalist
head-up display and removed waypoints. The mission logs only inform players about locations of interest, and players must find their way there. This approach avoided funneling players toward a particular direction and lets players immerse themselves in the game's world, encouraging exploration. Early versions of the game included
cooperative multiplayer, which was eventually cut from the game. The clean, utilitarian design of the Oldest House provides juxtaposition against the Hiss, a supernatural, otherworldly being that reconfigures the building's architecture to suit its needs. Among the Oldest House's real-world influences is
33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, a windowless building in the center of New York City. Macdonald used this building as a modern example of brutalism and created the Oldest House as a "bizarre, brutalist monolith" to house the FBC. The design team also took inspiration from films, such as those of
Stanley Kubrick, particularly
A Clockwork Orange, as well as films featuring oppressive government agencies such as
The Shape of Water. The developers fixed the story in the genre of the
new weird, a modern variant of
weird fiction, with stories that combine science fiction and fantasy, often involving a bureaucratic government agency. In
Control, the developers reversed the role to place the bureaucracy at the center of the story; the game's narrative designer Brooke Maggs said an oppressive bureaucracy in a corporate office environment contributes to an unnerving experience. Kasurinen said the Hiss was also inspired by the genre; he described them as a disease trying to invade a human body, and that it will slowly try to corrupt and take over its host. According to Kasurinen, one of the game's core themes is the "conflict of collision of strange and mundane".
Control is filled with familiar, commonplace objects that seem innocuous until players discover their altered, often horrifying or incomprehensible, nature through paranatural phenomena.
Narrative design served as
Controls creative director who developed its original story. Mikael Kasurinen envisioned a Remedy game that broke from tradition, one that emphasizes world-building rather than being character-driven. The developers first created a vision for the game's world, rather than building its world around a screenplay. Whereas the main story focuses on Jesse's personal arc, the side stories focus on the game's world and its inhabitants. The development team used
environmental storytelling to spark players' interest in optional content, rewarding curiosity and exploration with additional narrative and new playable powers. Jeremiah Trench was the first character created for
Control; according to Lake, Trench represented the FBC and its questionable morals, and he was "a man of action" and "a cynic" who had "suffered a great tragedy". The development team designed Jesse as an FBC outsider with insider connections. This concept forms the basis of a key plot point concerning the FBC's involvement in a tragedy during Jesse's childhood. As with
Max Payne, self-narration forms a part of the
Control narrative, allowing players to know more about Jesse's true feelings about the world and characters around her. Lake said he had been yearning to add his native Finland to one of their games. Finnish actor
Martti Suosalo voices the janitor Ahti, one of the game's supporting characters. The game's music score includes a
Finnish tango Lake wrote, Petri Alanko composed, and Suosalo sang. The game also includes a voice cameo by
Hideo Kojima and his English translator Aki Saito in a side mission. Remedy used fewer live-action elements in
Control than in
Quantum Break; most of the live-action footage in
Control is of Casper Darling explaining parts of the Oldest House and Objects of Power within it. According to Lake, these videos were designed to be "slightly crude, clumsy, amateurish by design", and "slightly awkward and clumsy" because they were intended for internal training of FBC agents.
Control also includes short episodes of a fictional show called "The Threshold Kids", a puppet-based show seemingly aimed at children who may reside in the Oldest House. The core game includes
Easter eggs referring to
Alan Wake, which shares paranormal themes with
Control; one such Easter egg discusses the aftermath of
Alan Wake as part of the FBC's case files, which reveals events that occurred in Bright Falls, the primary location of
Alan Wake, to have been an AWE. A secret area includes a vision of Alan Wake. A
backmasked track in the credits sequence of
Alan Wake: American Nightmare alludes to a past event in the town of Ordinary. Sam Lake later confirmed the existence of a shared universe between
Alan Wake and
Control that is known as the Remedy Connected Universe. This was cemented with the release of the
AWE expansion, directly bringing characters and events of
Alan Wake into
Control.
Music The game's soundtracks were composed by Petri Alanko and
Martin Stig Andersen. Alanko worked on the main themes and cutscenes in
Control, while Andersen worked on the themes of exploration and combat. Alanko regularly joined Remedy's meetings to stay informed about the game's story to better understand the emotional materials he had to work with. To create the haunting sound of the Hiss, Alanko used a microphone that can record
electromagnetic radiation to record sounds of heavy wood being dragged across a floor. He also burnt a piano and destroyed electronic equipment to record its sound. These sounds were then processed to hearing range, generating cacophonous
droning sounds. The Hiss's main, six-note
leitmotif was created very early in the game's development; Alanko used old choral recordings and processed the voices to strip away their normal pitch, creating a discordant sound to connote the otherworldly nature of the Hiss.
Poets of the Fall, an alternative rock group that are close friends of Remedy, provided songs, including "Take Control"; these songs are stated in-game to be by the fictional band "The Old Gods of Asgard", an allusion to
Alan Wake. Remedy used "Take Control" as part of the "Ashtray Maze", a section in which Jesse fights her way through an ever-changing set of rooms. Remedy worked with Poets of the Fall so they could dynamically incorporate the song as the player progresses through sections of the maze. Music from Poets of the Fall's album, including the track "
My Dark Disquiet", is also featured in the game. ==Release==