Control publisher 505 Games recently revealed in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz about how the handling of an upgrade path could have been much better. In the interview, Neil Bralley also mentioned that the publisher would be looking towards better ways to get it right for future games.
As fans might already know, owners of Control‘s base version weren’t entitled to a free upgrade path, and the only way to get those options were to invest again in the game’s Ultimate Edition which released post-launch. 505 Games statest that options like Smart Delivery weren’t the industry norm previously, and both the developer and publisher made several decisions that made using those features difficult.
“Every transition from one generation to another creates challenges for both development and publishing,” Ralley said. “The Smart Delivery option, if I can use that term to generalise, was something we hadn’t faced before as an industry.”
“For Control, we made certain decisions restricted how we could perform Smart Delivery for the next-gen version of Control. They were the correct decisions at the time, but they created those blockers.”
The publisher has already made several improvements to its future games, as titles like Ghostrunner and the upcoming Assetto Corsa would be making use of Smart Delivery features. Developer of Control Remedy Entertainment is already hard at work on CrossfireX, and rumors of a possible Alan Wake sequel have been doing the rounds lately.