Remedy still continued to struggle with merging the open-world survival gameplay and story, now further complicated with Microsoft's involvement and suggestions for improvement, which Lake compared to a "too many cooks" situation. They were now missing various publisher milestones as they tried various changes to the open-world format with no clear resolution. Roughly three years into development, the team recognized they needed to stop and refocus on what the core elements of the gameplay was to be. According to Lake, Remedy took the leads from each department to form a "sauna" group, making them work in a room together to lock down the gameplay that "Alan Wake" should have without losing much of work they had already done, "with all the heat and pressure on us". This took about two months but from it came the revised gameplay loop, which they were able to reapply to the existing open-world setting they had, breaking it apart into linear chapter-sized levels for the final game and adding some additional assets as needed. This allowed some levels to be used for daytime that would be used to advance the story, letting the player talk to NPCs and explore the area, and others for the night levels that were predominately action-based, and even with some levels having both daytime and nighttime versions. This change better supported the thriller narrative as well. Other key gameplay ideas that came out from this period were the ideas for the Taken and how the player would fight them, how these enemies would appear and the in-game signals the player would see and hear to prepare, and the use of lit safe havens between combat. Lake stated that because they kept as much of the previous open-world elements they already built in this rework, this helped to give "a sense of realness" to the game world. Oskari Häkkinen, the head of franchise development at Remedy during "Alan Wake"s development, said that retaining the open world map, with features planned and rendered in the distance, gave them a means to provide landmarks to give a sense of direction to the player, gave the ability to create foreshadowing in the narrative, and generally helped with overall cohesion of the game world.