Alan Wake 2 creative director Sam Lake stopped by IGN’s gamescom studio to discuss the upcoming survival horror sequel and how it hopes to solve one of the original’s biggest criticisms.

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This is just one part of Alan Wake’s new identity as a survival horror game, and that switch will hopefully address the issues fans had with combat from the first game. According to Lake, some complained that it became too “samey,” and the team took that to heart.

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“So, we were looking for solutions and then we just realized that in survival horror, the pacing is slower. It leans much more on building up to an encounter and then having more strategic resource management and all. So we chose to give more variety in combat but also have less combat, instead we’ll have more moments to do things with the story. So all of this made us go, ‘Wait a minute, why haven’t we thought about this before when we started going into this?’ And yeah, it’s been great.”