Interviews// Darksiders II

Daniel McGuffey: But this time it’s much more broken out, and the player is not going to be able to encounter everything in one playthrough. They’re going to have to make important decisions about what they want to equip, what skill tree they want to progress down, and what kind of play style is important to them. They’re not going to just be able to get a hold of everything.

More to your question, we studied all the feedback, all the press feedback, that we could. You’ll notice some things in the demo today - for example, when you hit an enemy successfully it flashes. If it’s blocking, there’s really clear and concise sound and visual feedback, and particle impacts too that let you know that your attack is being blocked. Some feedback was that in combat, particularly with bosses, you weren’t able to determine whether you were hitting an enemy or not, and that can be frustrating. That’s another reason why numbers are helpful.

So there were a lot of things that we just wanted to tune and tweak, and we also wanted to make sure the world is altogether more interesting too. We want this world to feel more alive, more like a real place than Darksiders 1 did. A lot of that comes from the NPC interaction. The Lord of Bones’s realm is actually a town - we’ve not populated it yet, but the idea for that is to be a thriving area full of NPCs that can give you backstory, narrative and different kinds of quests where you can get armour and loot. Just making the world feel much more rich and populated this time around - that’s something we want to provide.


SPOnG: The fact that it’s so huge compared to the last game - each zone has more content in it than the whole of Darksiders 1 - when you make a game of that scale, does that throw up more challenges for you guys?

Daniel McGuffey: Yeah, I think those challenges are inherent. But one thing we knew we wanted to do was give the player more of an experience on horseback, and you’re going to get Despair almost immediately in Darksiders II. From the moment you dive into this world you’re going to have your horse with you, and thus have an expedient means of travel. When we say the world is big, we do mean you’re going to be spending a lot of time on your horse.

Unfortunately, we feel like Ruin was a little under-utilised in the first game. Players really liked him. He was a really unique part of the experience, so we don’t want to miss another opportunity here. There are big worlds to explore here. We’re just really big into fantasy worlds - ones that look and feel quite unlike anything else you’ve experienced before. I always talk about Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and Sam leave the Shire for the first time - everything that you see around every corner was something new and crazy, and we want to give that to the player.

That’s a challenge, because that’s more art, more planning and more assets to generate. There are so many challenges in that respect, that when you’re creating something so big you’ve got to make more, and Vigil is obsessed with quality so it’s not like they’re just pushing content out. Everything is meticulously crafted and refined to fit in the world and everything goes through Joe Madureira so he’s giving approvals and art direction on it all. So that’s just one of the challenges we face.


SPOnG: You mentioned Lord of the Rings there. Are there any other influences that helped create this world in Joe’s head? I’m sensing a lot of heavy metal vibe here.

Daniel McGuffey: [Laughs] Yeah. I’m not sure I can cite any definitive influences specifically, other than stuff that comes out of Joe Madureira’s head. And I don’t know what his influences are necessarily.

I do know that the team is pretty well-versed in Warhammer 40,000 lore, going back to Citadel’s miniatures 20 years ago... just the way those miniatures looked where armour was never symmetrical, creatures have just very meticulous details to them, and that’s part of Joe’s style. He never really does symmetrical design either. Every little nook and cranny of a character or environment is thought about, and it’s a very specific style guide that the team adheres to in order to ensure what they create fits into that world.


SPOnG: In the last Darksiders game we played as War. This time we’re playing as Death. Are you guys looking expand the stories of the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse any time soon? Be that games, comics, films?

Daniel McGuffey: Yeah, there are certainly some things in play already, that the closers we get to Darksiders II’s launch we’ll start to reveal more about. If you’re familiar with THQ’s strategy at all, you’ll know that Danny Bilson and THQ in general are big fans of transmedia. Recently Red Faction Armageddon launched simultaneously with Red Faction Origins, a show on SyFy network.

Darksiders has such a rich universe with such dramatic characters and environments that we want to maximise that any way that we can. If that means movies or comics, we’re going to find a way to do it, if we can achieve a level of satisfaction that it needs to be. I don’t really have an answer for you at the moment, but you can certainly expect us to go down that route if it’s beneficial for us.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Daniel McGuffey: Thank you!