Remedy's Matias Myllyrinne

I think it's the little things that we don't need to worry about that we needed to think about previously, so we can focus more on the actual entertainment experience. And I think that certainly we're able to build more immersive worlds and characters than we were ever before. I think it's freed up a lot of our capacity to tell stories - the tools to tell stories are a lot better than they were in the last generation, so maybe that's kind of seconding David's emotion argument, because fundamentally telling stories is about captivating the audience and it's as old as time itself.

I mean maybe 2000 years ago you had folk sitting around a camp fire and there would be a really good story-teller and people would gather to listen to him and I think that's fundamentally what we're doing - it just happens to be a console and people can sit on a couch and listen to the story we're delivering.

I think that certainly there are principles... that you don't take control away from the player in an unfair manner, or disruptive manner, for a long period of time. That's a sound design principle that we certainly need to adhere to. Personally I don't enjoy very long cutscenes - I think you lose a lot of the impact once you go over a certain critical point and you keep on repeating that.

So we do have a lot of story-telling in the game and there are other ways of delivering that story, even if it's verbal, monologue or other tools that we have to make it clear from the context what's happening, or even with audio - with the score changing and so-forth, you can already communicate a lot through the non-verbal stuff as well.

So we'll have certain ways of delivering the story in the game and it won't be Max Payne - the graphic novels were a Max Payne thing for us - I think this time around the delivery of the story needs to match Alan Wake as a writer and clearly some of the manuscript pages that he finds in the world will be a means to deliver the story as well.

Unfortunately nothing is ever perfect... Let's just say, something we can be proud of and be happy with...

Long development cycles... they're a mixed blessing. They allow you to take your time and also to let things settle. You can put them into perspective. Often you find that something you've done... it's kind of like cooking a good meal - sometimes it needs to settle for a while so you can really appreciate it. You can also do some post production on it - shift some things around and edit things.

But I think the negative side is that, obviously, it's a long development cycle and there are clearly business realities that go with it and you need to be able to focus for a long period of time. Things around you might be changing, there's a lot going on and you need to keep your eye on the ball and just remain focused. That takes a lot of attention and determination.