Remedy's Myllyrinne: Production Realities Make DLC Tough

While Matias Myllyrinne, managing director of Alan Wake studio Remedy thinks that DLC offers appealing creative opportunities for games, he sees them presenting significant challenges for the production processes demanded of current AAA titles. 
Speaking to Gamasutra as part of a larger feature interview, Matias Myllyrinne: The Advent Of Alan Wake, Myllyrinne said that he believes that DLC "opens up [the] opportunity" to pursue new creative ideas that might not sustain themselves over a full game, akin to "the musical episode of Buffy" -- a reference to a popular episode of the '90s TV show Buffy: The Vampire Slayer that was a musical, instead of its usual drama format. He explained: "You could do prototypes that aren't necessarily in the core of what the original IP was and maybe even do spin-offs and stuff like that." However, said Myllyrinne, "The production realities for a lot of these things, though, at least I don't see the benefits. At least for a larger game, like a AAA game like us -- if you're going to be doing motion capture, voice-over acting, face and motion capture, stunts... To do that, you're not gonna do those in bite-sized bits." Finland-based Remedy worked with international studios in New York City, Phoenix, Arizona, and Sweden for motion capture and voiceover work on the title -- and scheduling this time in smaller chunks would not be efficient, said Myllyrinne. However, he has been experimenting with ways to make it more feasible to do this work for DLC. "Certainly, I've looked at our initial production ideas, and what you do is you calmly do pre-pro on the whole thing first. You might gather all the material you need; for example, you'll do all the stunts, or you'll do all the body mocap in one go, but you don't necessarily go into production on all that raw data yet." "You do the actual production and the post-production for different episodes at different times. That seems to be the logical way of approaching it, but we're not there yet; so we'll see what happens," said Myllyrinne. To read the full feature, which goes into much greater depth on the saga Alan Wake's production and the current creative evolution of the game market in depth, is live now on Gamasutra: Matias Myllyrinne: The Advent Of Alan Wake.