Remedy Entertainment, the studio that gave us Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break, has announced a surprising but potentially very cool partnership with Korean game company Smilegate to create the story mode for the upcoming FPS CrossFire 2.
“The whole team here at Remedy is incredibly excited to be a key partner in developing the future of the CrossFire franchise,” the studio said. “Smilegate specifically chose Remedy to bring our unique blend of storytelling, memorable characters and inventive gameplay to CrossFire's global audience.”
The free-to-play CrossFire doesn't have the name recognition in the West of games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but it's huge in Korea and China. At the start of the year, research firm Superdata ranked it as the second-highest-grossing digital game on the PC (and third overall) in 2015, with revenues in excess of $1.1 billion. Around the same time, Starbreeze announced its own deal with Smilegate to develop a new CrossFire FPS for the Western market, and there's also a movie in development.
So it's unquestionably big stuff, and coupled with Remedy's well-established talent for storytelling, the potential for a really interesting new FPS series seems very real. I'm assuming that CrossFire 2 is separate from the project Starbreeze is working on—CrossFire 2 was revealed in 2013, while the Starbreeze deal for a new game was announced in 2016—but it almost certainly is one of the two new games Remedy said it was working on, "with a new partner," back in June.
Remedy said it's actually been working on the game for awhile already, and will reveal details about what it's got going on “later down the line.”
