GamesBeat: Speaking of the first game, what were some of the things you wanted to do, or some of the feedback that you got that you’ve incorporated into this one?
Stefanelli: Well, it’s funny. A lot of the feedback we got from players involved things that we wanted to do anyway, but we didn’t have time because there’s only so much you can do with a first project and a new team, a brand-new technology because we did it all in-house… We got as much as we could in Darksiders one. But a lot of what you’re seeing in Darksiders II are the things we would have put into one if we had the time. The loot, getting experience and leveling up. The less linear world. Skill trees. We always wanted to put that stuff in, so Darksiders II is just the chance to realize that part of the dream for us. In terms of player feedback, we built this game for players. The reason the game is what it is, it wears a lot of its inspiration on its sleeve, is because it’s built by gamers. These are the games we love, we want to build something we want to play, and we think gamers respond to that. There are a lot of things. If you get down to specifics… The difficulty curve is kinda spiky in Darksiders one, so we’re trying to teach the players better, make them better prepared for the challenges in Darksiders II. There’s more content, people wanted to talk to more characters. Joe Mad does awesome NPCs, so there’s a lot more quest content, you get to talk to a lot more characters in the Darksiders world. We took the criticism to heart, and we’re doing what we can to make sure people love Darksiders II.
GamesBeat: Playing through Darksiders, one of the things was you had War, this bad-ass Joe Mad design; he’s super cool, he does all this spectacular combat, and then he spends a good portion of the game solving kind of annoying puzzles. It slows down and feels very menial, especially for this guy who should be kicking the universe’s ass. Have you addressed that, and how?
Stefanelli: Well, the puzzle aspect of it is core to the Darksiders experience. It’s something that we love, and we make the game for people who are going to enjoy that part of the game. I think what’s cool about Darksiders is we’ve always tried to make the puzzles feel a little bit epic in scale, in terms of the action content, and the fusion of this type of puzzle-solving with this type of combat is something that really hasn’t been done very often. I can’t think of games that have given the player opportunities to do something cerebral, but then throwing in that type of ass-kicking combat. So Darksiders II sticks very much to the formula of Darksiders one, because that’s at the core of it. Dungeon-crawling and adventuring is really the essence of Darksiders to us.
GamesBeat: Red Faction: Armageddon kind of underperformed and THQ shelved the entire franchise. When you’re working on your own game, and you hear that, how does that impact the team?
Stefanelli: The team just stays focused on their task, which is to make an awesome game. They did it with Darksiders one, they saw how people reacted to it, we are completely and wholly focused on making sure that Darksiders II is awesome. That’s all we really can do. The rest of the stuff, that’s up to THQ to handle. We just make a great game.
GamesBeat: [We were told] that the level we were being shown is actually optional, that it’s an optional dungeon. How different is the scope now from the original Darksiders? What do you for completing these optional areas?
Stefanelli: The world formula in Darksiders II is similar to Darksiders one, it’ll feel familiar to players, but the main difference is that it’s a lot less linear, and the world space is just bigger. That’s one of the reasons we give out the horse right from the start. Darksiders one, you earned or found Ruin. Darksiders II, Death starts with his horse, Despair, and so we were able to make the world much larger as a result of that. Getting to that scale that we really wanted to capture with Darksiders II, it’s visual, right? Guys are bigger than Death. But it’s also the breadth of the content. When you get out into the world, we want people to feel like they’re exploring, feel like they’re adventuring. To do that, we want to put them on quests that are optional. That’s part of meeting the characters, too. Even the scale of the characters you meet is larger. Getting side quests, exploring the world, sometimes you even encounter sidequests as you’re exploring that you didn’t think you were going to find, just as a reward for going to the extents of the world. That’s intrinsic to the Darksiders II experience, going out adventuring.
GamesBeat: And loot will play into that too…
Stefanelli: Sure.
GamesBeat: Video games usually have shitty endings. You spend 20-30 hours and it just fizzles out or majorly disappoints. Darksiders had a really strong ending, but there was the heavy implication that the four horsemen were going to play a pretty integral role in the sequel, and then when the announcement came, that it was Death, and Death alone. So…
Stefanelli: Why did we do that?
GamesBeat: Yes.
Stefanelli: Well, the essence… It’s kinda twofold. One, if we had just rolled straight into the story of the four horsemen and what they were doing together, there would have been a lot of missing elements. The story is fairly complex, there’s a lot of stuff that you see happen in Darksiders II that sets the stage for what may be Darksiders III if we were to go do the four horsemen all together. If we just jumped straight into that, it might have been a bit confusing. There’s a lot of the story that we really wanted to tell. And a lot of people were just curious, what were the other horsemen doing? Because it seemed sorta strange that this big false apocalypse would happen and only War was involved. Were the other horsemen just hanging out on a couch drinking beer? No, they were doing other things. This, you get to see what Death was doing during that same event. It really gets to his character, too, because he handles that situation a lot differently than War did. War’s very stoic, stand-up guy, does things because he’s honor-bound, does them for duty. Death is going to do whatever it takes, solve it his own way, circumvent the authorities, so to speak. Just goes Jack Bauer on everybody’s ass.