Remedy Entertainment
Control 2, the sequel to the 2019 third-person shooter that showcased many high-end gaming PCs, has been announced by developer Remedy Entertainment in a blog post.
It’s just entering pre-production, and it has no release date, but the announcement sets up some high expectations. The game’s “initial” development budget is 50 million euros (currently around $52 million), suggesting that this will be a triple-A, big-budget action game at a large scale. For comparison, the first game’s budget was just 30 million euros. Budgets for games like this often expand over the course of development, so it’s possible Control 2 will cost double or more than Control to make.
Control 2‘s target platforms are Windows PCs, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Remedy will self-publish the game on the PC, but 505 Games will act as the publisher for the console releases.
While the first Control launched on last- and current-generation consoles, there was no question that it was, first and foremost, a PC game. That’s partly because Control was among the highest-profile games to support ray-traced shadows and lighting as well as DLSS, which were not supported on the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Even on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, the ray-tracing features were substantially scaled back compared to what players with high-end gaming PCs with RTX graphics cards could enjoy.
Control‘s developer, Remedy Entertainment, is also famous for the Max Payne series, another third-person shooter franchise that made its way to consoles but that shined particularly bright on PC.
On one hand, you might ask how Control 2 could raise the bar on consoles when the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of its predecessor were already somewhat compromised compared to the PC release. But Control was one of the earliest titles on those consoles, and the technologies and techniques used by game developers to get the most out of the current-generation consoles are expanding over time, so you never know. Today’s announcement also confirmed that Control 2 would use Remedy’s proprietary Northlight engine, which was also used for the first game.
Control 2 is not the only new game in the Control franchise that Remedy has announced. Last year, the company revealed that it was working on two new Control games, and that one of them would be a cooperative multiplayer game. The multiplayer title is codenamed Condor, but we don’t know much about it at this stage. Control 2 is now confirmed to be the other of the two titles the studio had previously discussed.
