Fighting ax-wielding maniacs is just another day in the writer’s room for Alan Wake. Across three titles, including the recent critically acclaimed survival horror game Alan Wake 2, the writer battles murderers corrupted by a supernatural dark force that he can only escape with quick thinking, fast feet, ample shotgun ammo, and a powerful flashlight.
That’s a premise that’s pretty similar to four-versus-one multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight—where a group of nearly defenseless “Survivors” must elude a rampaging “Killer”—so the upcoming collaboration between the two games makes a lot of sense. Alan is the latest character to join the Survivors of Dead By Daylight, and brings some of the essential elements of Alan Wake 2 with him. Some of Alan Wake’s signature gameplay aspects inform how Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive has designed the Survivor, like the flashlight he wields as a weapon and the way his writing can affect reality around him.
I spoke to Dead By Daylight Senior Creative Director David Richard and Alan Wake 2 Game Director Kyle Rowley about the upcoming collaboration, and the two creatives discussed how though both games have different approaches to horror, they also have a lot of similarities. Take the flashlight: In Alan Wake 2, it’s used against the supernaturally infected “Taken” to banish the malevolent darkness that infects them, temporarily stunning them and leaving them vulnerable to firearms. Dead By Daylight’s flashlight has a similar use, giving Survivors a chance to temporarily blind player-controlled Killers so they can escape.
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Richard said that the Dead By Daylight team were fans of the first Alan Wake game, released in 2010. Though he couldn’t remember if it expressly influenced Behaviour Interactive’s approach to the flashlight, its use by Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment aligned exactly with Dead By Daylight’s horror sensibilities.
“Everybody thinks of the flashlight when we think of Alan Wake,” Richard said. “I do remember that I thought it was brilliant. The flashlight is used defensively, offensively, but it still makes you feel super vulnerable because it’s just a flashlight. And in the context of DBD, it’s important that you can’t really fight back against the Killers, in order to keep that fantasy that they are almighty, that if they get you, they’ll kill you. But we still needed that interaction, and the flashlight is just a perfect fit.”
Alan’s character abilities enhance the power of the flashlight, like in his titular games—using it both boosts his speed and lessens the speed of the Killer, giving him a better chance to get away. His other abilities focus on helping other players, which Richard said draw on character traits he showed in the original game, where he fights supernatural forces attacking the town of Bright Falls, Washington.
“When we built the character, we added a lot of information about Alan Wake 1,” he explained. “We all played it and replayed it and watched it again, and working with Remedy was amazing. But we didn’t have a lot of information about Alan Wake 2, because it was not out yet. So, we were going on that personality trait that Alan shows in the first game. He wants to save that town. He wants to save everyone. And he’s going to put himself into danger for it.”
Shared inspirations
Gameplay isn’t the only arena where Dead By Daylight and Alan Wake 2 have a lot in common. The developers also noted that they draw on similar horror inspirations. Slasher movies are an obvious area of overlap, and the works of Stephen King have been a big touchstone for Alan Wake 1 and 2, Rowley said. Richard also pointed to King as being highly influential in how Behaviour Interactive approaches its worldbuilding.
The impact of their inspirations might be why the worlds of Dead By Daylight and Alan Wake 2 are also so similar. Both center on frightening cosmic horrors—a deadly evil force called the Entity in Dead By Daylight, the murderous and mind-altering Dark Presence in Alan Wake 2—that can pull characters into their nightmarish supernatural worlds. They even work well together narratively. For example, Alan has been trapped in a frightening alternate dimension called the Dark Place for 13 years in Alan Wake 2, but he can affect that world through his writing. The Entity in Dead By Daylight is able to reach into the multiverse and bring both Killers and Survivors to its own strange dimension, so when it draws Alan into its world from the Dark Place, that raises the question of whether Alan is writing his story with the Entity into existence or he’s just slipped from one supernatural nightmare into another.
That ambiguity is part of the fun, the developers said.
“The thing that was super important for us when we created this universe, the Entity universe, was to make sure that we were as ambiguous as possible,” Richard said. “There’s no definite truth, and we wanted to leave a lot of the theory building to our fans.”
“I think originally when we were pitching some of our games, we kind of pitched on these narrative-driven experiences,” Rowley added. “And one of our team members was like, ‘Actually, I think we should call them mystery-driven, because basically all our games evolve around mystery.’ I think that that’s something that we like as studios, we like that idea that players can create their own theories around things, we leave things unexplained, and that synergy there between these two games is kind of great because, like you said, it’s like, what is the actual truth here about how Alan is ended up in this world?”
Complementary approaches
Both games represent different approaches to horror, though they both focus on the fear of the unknown. Dead By Daylight is all about player-authored stories of mayhem, and as Richard noted, a lot of the stress for Survivors in each match comes from not knowing who they’ll face, what strategies the Killer might employ, or what map they’ll find themselves navigating. In Alan Wake 2, the game is divided between two protagonists—Alan and FBI Agent Saga Anderson. While Saga faces physical enemies more like Dead By Daylight’s Killers, Alan’s part of the game is more psychological, full of apparitions that only sometimes turn hostile. Rowley said that much of the fear comes from Alan not knowing what he’s facing around him.
“A lot of our emotional response that we wanted to generate from the players on the Wake side was this kind of paranoia of not knowing if something is real or not,” Rowley said. “So that’s where a lot of our enemy design comes from, that idea of not being able to know, is that something that’s real, that’s going to attack me, or is it not? And playing on the edge of that emotional response on players where they’re not sure about stuff and the uncertainty that comes with that was a key part for us, and that comes about because of the fact that he’s been trapped there for so long.”
Richard said those aspects of Alan’s journey, and particularly how long he’s been trapped in his nightmare, bring an interesting perspective to the character in Dead By Daylight.
“I could have played way more Alan Wake games during these 13 years that nothing happened with the universe, but I love that it took all this time because Alan Wake being trapped for so long, when he comes into the world of Dead By Daylight, brings baggage, experience that goes with his personality and what we expect of the character, this champion, this user of the flashlight, this offensive flashlight,” he said. “The fact that he will put himself in danger to protect others and to make sure that others will survive. I think those are all very interesting traits that our players, especially the more experienced ones, will love to see out of a Survivor.”
As to why there’s no Killer from Alan Wake 2 for Alan to face, Richard said at the time the collaboration was being created, it just didn’t work. But the developers took a stance of “never say never” on the possibility of future collaborations between the studios.
“Like I mentioned earlier, we were navigating on Alan Wake 1. We didn’t play, we didn’t have information about Alan Wake 2,” Richard said. “And so for us, Scratch or the Dark Place itself was potentially a Killer that we could have. But was too close in the Entity, too almighty, impossible to conceptualize as a playable Killer. So we said, no, it’s not a great fit right now. But now that I’ve played Alan Wake 2, there’s all sorts of great monsters in there that could have been a great fit. Maybe later, I don’t know.”
Alan Wake will enter the Fog in Dead By Daylight on January 30. Alan Wake 2 and Dead By Daylight are both available on the Epic Games Store now.
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