Whatever you may think of it on its own merits, it’s safe to say Max Payne 3 didn’t quite live up to the previous two. Being developed by Rockstar instead of Remedy Entertainment, the threequel wound up having a different vibe to the neo-noir stylishness of its predecessors, and looking back on it, lead writer Dan Houser admits the team didn’t nail the tone.
“It was a linear game, so it was a little different from writing an open-world game, a little more structured. I really enjoyed that as an experience,” he recalled to IGN. “I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn’t have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen.”
After leading the narrative departments of many of the Grand Theft Auto games and the first Red Dead Redemption at that point, Houser had some confidence. His belief during development was that the team was nailing what fans wanted – alas, it was not. “I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it,” he remembers.
“So I got that completely wrong,” he says, candidly. “I know [Max Payne creator] Sam Lake well, and he’s a very good guy and really talented. I thought we’d done a good job of doing another Max Payne game. Some people liked it; lots didn’t. So we got it wrong, or I got it wrong. I failed. My bit was not a success.”
Now that we’re 14 years removed, there’s a lot to like about the third installment of the series. The gunplay is solid, the setting of Sao Paulo is a fun contrast to the streets of New York City, and the plot is appropriately psychological.
But it is a different energy to Remedy’s more reserved approach – not exactly surprising given it’s Rockstar – and even today, if you play all three Max Payne games one after the other, you’ll notice a difference. “The game is beautifully made, and it wasn’t as successful as it should have been,” Houser says on reflection. “So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed his writing.”
Sadly, we’re still waiting for Max Payne 4. Remedy’s working on remakes of the first two. Whether we’ll get the trilogy-ender is in Rockstar’s hands. But at least we haven’t seen the last of the detective just yet.