Today, Remedy hit us with not only a second trailer for The Lake House DLC for Alan Wake II (a "launch trailer" despite the fact that it comes out on Tuesday) as well as the trailer for their squad-based cooperative first-person shooter, FBC Firebreak.
I... I don't know if I'll actually be playing it, because I don't have a ton of patience for multiplayer games (yes, I realize this blog started off as a World of Warcraft-exclusive one, but that's kind of the exception that proves the rule).
However, what we have gathered from the trailer has some interesting implications.
The game seems to put you in the shoes of a new FBC unit called Firebreak, which appears to be tasked with clearing out the Hiss from the Oldest House.
Control, notably, doesn't end with the Hiss fully stamped out. While the original source of the crisis is cut off now that the Slide Projector has been turned off, the Hiss is insidious and infectious - all the passive Hiss agents floating above most areas in the game are still amplifying the signal, potentially infecting anyone not wearing an HRA, or who aren't Jesse.
This, of course, allows the game to live on past all the actual missions to let you max out your skills and tie up any side quests. It's how I was able to continually just wander around looking for Hiss to fight and experience the supremely satisfying action the game has (though I'd have preferred a NG+, or even just a second save file so I could play the thing from the start again without losing my existing file. Seriously, this is 2024 and consoles have big hard drives. We shouldn't have to worry about limited save files in this day and age).
However, the very premise of Firebreak, I think, tells us something pretty concrete about Control 2: We're going to get out of the Oldest House and we're going to be fighting something other than the Hiss.
Jesse is a superhero at this point, but given the Hiss capacity to infect new hosts (and possibly even resurrect itself) it's clear that she just can't be in enough places at once to actually sterilize the Oldest House on her own.
But, if we're getting a whole game dedicated to that task, I think that leaves Control 2 in a position to move past it.
And I think that's really fitting: Alan Wake's two games are both primarily focused on taking down the Taken, because they're both dealing with the insidious Dark Presence. Indeed, half of Alan Wake II has us facing the Fadeouts/Shadows, which are related but separate.
But the whole idea of Control is that the Hiss might be one of the most dangerous phenomena the FBC has had to deal with, but it's far from the only one. Even in the original game, we get The Mold - a fully separate infection bleeding into the Oldest House through a different Threshold.
The sites we see in the Firebreak trailer are familiar - the region in Executive where the Post-It Note altered item seems to have started actually killing people, or the Black Rock Quarry. Certainly, this saves Remedy some time and effort on conceptualizing parts of the Oldest House, but I wonder if this is also a way for us to get one last good luck at the setting before Jesse goes elsewhere to investigate what is happening beyond.
Sure, the concept art we've seen appears to be just outside of the Oldest House, but honestly, I'd be pretty happy simply for the opportunity to step outdoors (though I'd love to go to Ordinary).
The Hiss worked very well as the primary antagonists for the first game, but I think Control promises way more, and I hope Firebreak gives us the chance to move past them.
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