Preview: 5 New Things We’ve Learned About “Darksiders II”

The original Darksiders took a Zelda-like adventure game and gave it God of War-style combat. Or it took a God of War-like action game and gave it Zelda-style adventure elements. Either way, it was one of 2010’s sleeper hits whose admirers crossed the line from fan to fanatic.

Which is why developer Vigil Games and publisher THQ are readying a sequel, slated to be released this summer. Dubbed Darksiders II: Death Lives, the game replaces the original hero, The Four Horsemen’s War, with his coworker Death. Though as we learned at a recent event THQ held at The Regency Center in San Francisco, there are a lot of changes in store for this post-apocalyptic Zelda of War.

Unlike other forms of entertainment, people who make games seem to really listen to their fans so they can significantly improve their work. And while the good people at Vigil are no exception, they’re also, apparently, not unaware of their own shortcomings.

“There were quite a few things that players commented on, and we took them to heart,” admits Darksiders II Producer Ryan Stefanelli. “Though the good news for us was that there wasn’t anything that surprised us. Most of it were things that made us say, ‘Yeah, we agree’ or were something we wanted to put in as well. For example, people said the difficulty curve spiked a bit too much, so we’re making strides to smooth the difficulty out.”

Another change that resulted from this feedback and introspection is that the game is much bigger and broader this time out. While game is largely set in the underworld as opposed to the surface world — though Stefanelli slyly hints, “There may be a few twists to that…” — you’ll see a lot more of the world in this second game thanks to all the side missions and secondary dungeons they’ve added.

As we mentioned, the game has you playing as Death instead of War this time around. “It allows us to tell the story of Darksiders from a different character’s perspective,” Stefanelli says, noting that while the last game showed the false apocalypse from War’s point of view, Darksiders II has, “Death doing his part, and we see how Death handled that situation.”

But while they’re both Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War and Death are very different people. Death, for instance, prefers to kill things with a pair of scythes, which he can use to slash enemies with hacking and spinning attacks. But he also has a number of secondary melee weapons that are split between such heavy ones as a hammer and such lighter ones as claws that will make you think someone at Vigil really, really likes Wolverine. “And within those,” Stefanelli notes, “there are three sub-categories. It’s not just a hammer and some Wolverine claws.”

Death also has his own unique magic attacks, which, Stefanelli notes, “are more like conjuring.” “Exhume,” for example, brings forth zombies who’ll try to eat your enemy’s brains, while “Murder” summons crows who are big fans of Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Another change, this time out, is that those aforementioned magic attacks and other aspects of Death’s character can be updated and customized, as the game features a leveling up system that lets you spruce up your melee and magic attacks. “In Darksiders, you purchased [magic attacks] from a list,” Stefanelli explains, “but in Darksiders II, you get experience points and level up, and can spend points in the skill tree.” This allows you to make those Birds-loving crows even more deadly, or add new ways to slice people with your scythe.

Just don’t expect to max out both skill sets the first time you play. “You can’t max them out right away,” Stefanelli says, though he does add that you’ll be able to replay the game from the beginning with your unlocked skills still intact. “And there may be DLC,” he says, “in which we raise the level cap, so you may be able to max your character out eventually.”

Working in tandem with the aforementioned customizing system are the skills you approve by being a sharp dressed man. Like with many adventure games, killing people in Darksiders II causes them to drop different pieces of armor.

This armor comes in three flavors, with each improving very distinct disciplines. Find a piece of “Slayer” armor, for instance, and you’ll improve your stats in melee attacking. And head banging. “We’re not going real deep into how the loot works right now,” Stefanelli says, “but I will say that loot is generally generated randomly, and it’s up to you to find and equip the loot that makes the most sense for how you want to play the game.”

This can be used, of course, to augment your upgraded skills — you can use helmets and boots from the “Necromancer” line to augment your leveled-up magic skills — or to compensate for the areas you haven’t built up so you can make your character a more well-rounded person.

At one point in the demo, Death walked up to what looked like a pile of rocks, stuck his hand in a hole, and caused the rocks to reconfigure themselves into a rock robot. Death then jumped on its shoulders and used it to get around, driving over some lava and then shooting one of its fists out so he could run along a chain, which connected its fist to its arm, so he could get to a previously unreachable area.

“in Darksiders, you met this blacksmith guy from a race called The Makers” Stefanelli notes, “but in Darksiders II, you spend a good portion of the game in the area where these guys came from. Their back-story is that they’re essentially the builders of all the worlds, and to do this, they have these constructs [the rock robots] that they use to build more worlds.”

In the demo, Death used the construct to get around. But it can also be used to combat your enemies. “You can actually shoot the first out and hit them with it,” Stefanelli says. That he said it with another sly grin, though, makes us think there may be still more to learn about Darksiders II.