Northlight Engine

Remedy developed Northlight Storytelling Engine, a multi-platform game engine which was first used in Quantum Break. According to Sam Lake, they had considered narrative elements to be key to their prior games of Max Payne and Alan Wake, but felt it was necessary to develop their own technology to better support this facet. Part of this decision came about when Remedy had been working on the cancelled Alan Wake 2 prototype around 2013, at the time based on the same engine used in Alan Wake which had limited their abilities for storytelling. Building on the tech created for Alan Wake 2, Remedy fleshed out various features that support the studio's narrative goals such as highly detailed and realistic human faces and bodies that can be animated through motion capture and a physically based renderer that supports global illumination, ray tracing and particle lighting. A real-time deterministic physics system that can calculate environmental physics effects, play them back in real-time or rewind to create large scale interactive destruction was also used.