If some of Darksiders' gameplay elements felt a little... familiar... at least it can't be denied that it had a visual style all of its own. Joe Madureira (of Marvel Comics fame) crafted a distinctive look for his Zelda/God of War hybrid and it paid off, with the first game in the series shifting over 1.3 million units. With a sequel looming on the horizon, TVG sat down with Daniel Isaac McGuffey, Creative Manager for THQ, to find out more about parallel time-lines, Death, and the Apocalypse.
Let's talk about the setting of the game. Why have you chosen to set it at the same time as the first one?
We want people to understand that the Darksiders world is much larger than what they saw in Darksiders I, which all happened on Earth. There's a complete alternate dimension - which we showed a little of today - in the Abyssal Planes, and we want to really explore that, and also set up what's to follow with the four horsemen. We do want to get them all in eventually, but we feel it's really important to showcase each of them one at a time, and show you what makes that character special, show you their motivation, show you their tool-set, how this character moves; traverses; interacts with the world, so the best chance to introduce Death was within that time-frame because of his motivation at the moment, which is to redeem his brother. We didn't want to completely remove War from the story either and just make it completely Death focused because we know people found War endearing and we want to connect the two together, so that's part of the reason why we're doing it in a simultaneous time-frame.
So will you be revisiting some of the events of the first game from another perspective, and meeting up with War as you go through?
Without divulging too much, yeah, there will be some crossover, and you will get a little more insight into what happened in Darksiders I via Darksiders II.
In terms of the new mechanics, what sort of new puzzles can we expect?
We do want to bring back some of the items you had in the first game. You saw the Ghost Hook, which functions a lot like the Abyssal Chain only it has some of Death's sort of signature traversal added to it, so he can get more mileage out of it and use it in different ways. However, he can also use it like War could, so you can use it in combat, pulling enemies towards you, or pulling yourself towards enemies. We wanted to refine the gear experience, so while there were six pieces of gear and a bunch of passive abilities you could get in Darksiders I, this time what I will say is, there will be only three gear items but they will change, evolve and level-up so that they will gain abilities as you go along. We want to keep players from having to go back and forth between menus equipping items; we want you to have the full tool-set available to you at all times once they're all made available to you, and be able to switch between them very fluidly without having to equip and unequip items. So while initially it seems like there will be fewer, they're much more nuanced and robust than what you were able to play with in Darksiders I.
So what are those three gear items? Are we talking equipment or weapons?
Well some of them will function as both, so they will all have a primary function but some of them will have a combat function as well. You saw the Ghost Hook, I don't think we're talking about one of the other ones yet, but there will be a return of the Portal Gun, so the Void Walker will be returning, but it's going to have a lot of different functionality that we didn't see in Darksiders I - it's definitely getting an upgrade.
How extensive will the customisable loot and armour be?
It's super extensive. War had the Trimmer Gauntlet, and Death's Scythe - essentially two different secondary weapons. We want to give the player a chance to get into combat in exactly the way that they feel comfortable with. So if they want to use really light weapons where they can get into combat and do a lot of damage up close, then we want to offer them those; if they want to do really heavy damage with much slower weapons, we want to offer them those. So we have multiple classes of weapons: we have axes, maces, we have melee weapons - which resemble gloves that have claws on them - we have hammers, different pole-arms, broadswords, and those will all have different effects on them. You can expect to see a really vast selection of weapons that will even get different benefits based on the armour that you equip. So there will be sets that you can find - you can find sets of armour that have weapons that correspond and vice-versa.
So will you be able to carry all those through into the multiplayer?
Into multiplayer? We're not talking about multiplayer at the moment.
But there's going to be multiplayer?
I don't think we're quite talking about what we're doing yet with the connected elements.
Can you talk about co-op at all?
We do have a few different things planned, but right now it's just not something we're talking about.
So you've mentioned that there will be other characters, other than Death, in the game - we've got War - is there going to be Fury as well, is that right?
Fury and Strife are the other two horsemen, and we're not talking about what their significance is in the game yet.
See I always thoug
ht it was Famine and Pestilence...
Part of Joe Madureira's involvement is that he has a remarkably different take on things. If I were to tell somebody to draw a tree and Joe to draw a tree, what he does is not going to look anything like what anybody else would do, and that's what he brings to the game. He's going to make Death and War look different to what anybody else would've imagined, and likewise, these guys - Joe and some of the other guys at Vigil - didn't think that Pestilence and Famine sounded like cool characters to play as, so Strife and Fury just fit more into the universe.
So obviously the game's going to be on Wii U as well - can you talk at all about the unique features that that version's going to have?
The team's still designing those. Because the hardware's so early and the team's only had a very limited time to work with the hardware, we're still determining what the most beneficial things to provide for the Wii U user-base will be, but it certainly will have most likely different interface capabilities than all of the other SKUs will have.
There's been talk about possibly releasing a comic book and a movie based on the series. Is there any more news on that?
There most certainly will be a comic book, and as we get closer and closer to the launch of Darksiders II you'll be hearing more and more about that. At THQ - I don't know if you know Danny Bilson, or THQ's mantra... it's one of trans-media - supporting games with products that make sense. Whether that be a movie or a comic book, we want to pursue those options as long as Dan... you know, obviously Darksiders is a game of incredible mind-share and quality; the art, the universe, is something the team works very hard on. So, if a movie makes sense, and upholds the vision of Darksiders, and makes sense in the grand scheme of things we'll do it. If it were just a play for publicity or revenue, it's not something that interests us. We're going to do it when it makes sense to do a Darksiders movie, but yeah, if those elements come together then you can expect to see one.
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