Who didn’t love the first Darksiders game when it was released last year? It was fun, fresh, looked great and played even better. Open stages that mixed combat and challenging level puzzles, the only downside to the game was the rather grumpy protagonist, War who had as much personality as a pet rock. Developer Vigil Games is learning from their mistakes however, and instead of loading War with a snappy repartee 2.0 engine, they’re going to utilise his fellow Horseman and brother, Death as the main character for the sequel.
Speaking with Gameinformer, Vigil Games Creative Director Joe Madureira explained how Death was conceived for the sequel.
The earliest vision for Darksiders was to play the four horsemen cooperatively, so for our pitch and prototype, I had already loosely concepted all four of them. We knew roughly what playstyle and what personality they would have at that time, since we were planning to do all four.
We wanted to play up the dead aspect of him and make him look almost zombie-like. He’s as close to a zombie as you’d want to get for the main character of a game.
Early on I had played with the idea of giving him six arms and a weapon in each hand. It was really impractical stuff that we knew we really wouldn’t do.
And unlike his stony faced brother, Death is also going to be a bit more talkative, but not the type of chatty that throws out corny one-liners.
We didn’t push War as far as we could as a character. He didn’t talk a lot. So we felt like if Death didn’t speak at all, that would be harder, so we decided to change that up and make him more intelligent and chatty. He has a dry sense of humor.
But Darksiders 2 isn’t just about giving players a character who is only different on a visual level, as Madureira explained that Death is also going to have different gameplay and combat mechanics when compared to his brother War.
We wanted to get basically as far away from War as you can. War was a very stoic, slow-moving, hulking, massive warrior. We gave Death movements more like an assassin or a rogue. He’s very agile, very quick, very aggressive, whereas War was a little more reactive.
There was already a competing product that has a scythe-wielding character, so right off the bat, that wasn’t that appealing to us. And because it’s a really large weapon, it would be wielded more slowly. That didn’t fit in with Death’s more aggressive, feral nature. Splitting it into two smaller scythes and dual-wielding seemed ten times more badass.
So yay or nay for the new lead character? Darksiders is out next year for multiple platforms.
Source: Gameinformer.com
Last Updated: June 23, 2011
