Han Randhawa: Well, that counts as incredibly high compliments to us. The comparisons... it’s hard to get away from some of that stuff because there is a desire - not just in games media but in other mediums too - to box and compartmentalise things so readers and consumers can understand what new products are, in a nutshell. That can either hurt you or be very good for you.
Haydn Dalton: We had our own fan feedback - we’ve had the Zelda backlash! Even though we don’t say these things -- if a journalist turned around right now and said that Darksiders was better than a Zelda game, people would give us a tidal wave of negative commentary. But we didn’t say anything! [Laughs]
One guy I spoke to today said that he’s a big Zelda fan, but now he finds it hard to go back to Zelda from Darksiders because he says it just doesn’t hold his attention as much. That’s kind of strange for me, because we’re obviously huge Zelda fans as well. So to hear that makes us feel a bit uncomfortable! They’re probably going to put that in the review, and then we’ll get a whole new backlash!
The thing is, it’s all inclusive isn’t it? If you like Zelda, you can like Darksiders. You don’t necessarily have to just like one or the other.
Haydn Dalton: That’s right! Han’s worked at Psygnosis in the past, and I’ve worked for Ocean during the late 1980s and 1990s. And now we’re working in Texas! [Laughs]
Han Randhawa: It’s funny, because we’re both huge Joe Mad fans, and before we started working at on Darksiders we had no idea that he was behind the project. It’s been fantastic to work with him at last - before Darksiders, we worked on a Wolverine project that we tried to get his involvement in.
We couldn’t get him, so I ended up doing a lot of the concept drawings myself in his art style. Joe noticed that when I went to see him in Austin, and he said that it all looked a lot like his stuff. It was kind of embarrassing because, er... we ripped him off [laughs]. But, also good in the sense that we at least ripped him off accurately!
Han Randhawa: There’s been a bit of a brain drain for a while, because - I don’t really want to get into the politics of the thing, but heard about developers there trying for tax breaks? Montreal, for example, is very competitive in that space, with ridiculous tax breaks there. The UK is home to some of the best guys in the industry - I wish the Government would do more to incentivise things.
It’d be great to see the British industry on its feet again. The currency situation certainly doesn’t help though, along with the global economic crisis. I think there’s potential to go back to the way it was. I hear that Microsoft may be doing more in the UK. Phil Harrison is actually part of Lionhead now, so maybe through that there will be a ripple effect where EA and Activision will invest more in the country. We need more Rocksteadys out there.
Haydn Dalton: [Laughs] The main reason that happened is because we created Ulthane in the first game, and we wanted to make a race of Makers to suit his design. When it came to originally designing Ulthane, we came to the decision that he was going to be a bit of a recluse person, sat in the middle of nowhere...
We always made parallels to an Apocalyptic Shrek! He lives in a small place, doesn’t like ‘pigeons’ - the angels - getting in on his land. We just thought, ‘what kind of voice should we give him?’ He has this fiery red hair and big hammer... we’re big fans of Samurai Jack as well, I don’t know if you know the Scottish guy with the hammer in that?
Naturally, we didn’t make him Scottish purely based on these things. But they all had their part in making us feel that Scottish would be the best voice. We did some test lines with Joe and he put on a Scottish accent. He sounded like a ‘Scamaican’, a mix between Scottish and Jamaican. He thought it was awesome - we were all just laughing.
So we thought Scottish would suit this character, and it really did - I loved Ulthane in the first game, he’s one of the best characters. Now that we’re basing a race on him, they should all really sound like him shouldn’t they? That’s the reason why most of the main characters - at least in terms of the Makers - have got Scottish accents. That’s it, though. We haven’t got any Scottish demons or anything. We didn’t explore accents for that, like a Cockney demon or anything like that!
SPOnG: That would undercut the tone of the game a little bit, I’d reckon!
Han Randhawa: Yeah, like Brummie angels or something.
Haydn Dalton: What we should do, is get Dick Van Dyke with a Cockney accent to do the voice of Samael. Actually Samael is voiced by Vernon Wells, so...
Han Randhawa: It was definitely a big thing for us. This ties into the whole ‘moving away from the Apocalyptic theme of Earth’, for one, but it was also about leveraging the artists that we had at the time. I love the idea of making a stylised game, and we were able to do that with the characters in Darksiders I, but less so with the environments. This was because our team was very junior at the time.
Rather than have them train for several years to try and be painters or something, we leveraged the skills they did have, which was the ability to create more realistic buildings and work with photographs to create background scenery. With Darksiders II, we managed to fit the already-stylised characters and experience in creating painted scenery and got a bit more creative, making more of a fantasy look. That was the perfect opportunity to do that.
But to me, colour also tells a story. It’s a narrative device. So, the colour in the Makers at Tri-Stone... the race is in its twilight years, so even though the area surrounded by a lush forest, there’s a kind of sombre tone to it all. On top of this, if you give the player a one-colour palette throughout a game, a fatigue sets in. So you need to change it up a bit, with the icy Crowfather areas, the lush green areas... but even within those, the colour changes when you reach areas of Corruption and see the life saturated out of the world.
The whole thing is -- I think as humans consuming visuals and interaction, we desire contrasts. That helped us put things into perspective, and also to tell a story. What was here now, what was there before that and what’s going to happen. These were conscious artistic decisions, definitely, and I think it helps the player in certain areas as well.
Even in the dungeons - you reach a volcanic area in the present, and instead of going for straight reds, we give you a very cold yellow palette to tell you where Corruption is at its highest. You will have a chance to go to the past as well - I don’t know if I should be revealing that - and even in that same demonic area, the colours are a cool red not a hot red.
So basically you’ve got to provide contrasts, without taking the player out of the mood too much. We’re trying to play not so many of the obvious things, but sometimes you have to... you know, there’s a difference between a stereotype and an archetype. And an archetype is what we’re trying to set up here.
Haydn Dalton: If it’s a sole game based on that character, then we design the game around the functionality. Give the player a set of mechanics and you design the things around that. So we wouldn’t design the creatures to work the same way they do now when introducing guns, because everything gets to you too close too quickly.
Close Quarters Combat is actually a pretty hard genre to get right in terms of feeling and AI, so we feel that with a bit more space - where you’ve actually got projectiles - it gets a little bit easier. So we’d have to tweak the style of creatures, what they do, how they move and everything, but then we’d also base some puzzle stuff around projectiles. Who knows what we’ll do, ultimately, but essentially we’ll design around the character. So I don’t think it’d be too much of a problem to be honest.
I’d presume that what we’d do, to address the familiarity point, is that we’d do gunplay as a primary mechanic but still include melee attacks when enemies get too close. So we’d still do still stuff based on CQC. It’s just be a lot more effective at range.
SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time!
Haydn Dalton: Thank you very much!
Han Randhawa: Thanks a lot!
Darksiders II will be hitting PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in August