News: Darksiders II’s chunky, vibrant visual style came about because developers Vigil Games wanted to “own the style” and avoid the “next-gen grey” look that too many games opt for, according to lead designer Haydn Dalton and art director Han Randhawa.
Take one look at the chunky architecture and vibrant colour scheme of Darksiders II and you can probably name the game immediately. Developers Vigil Games will be glad, as that was exactly the point when settling on a visual style.
“We want to stand out from the crowd,” art director Han Randhawa told BeefJack. “We want to make sure that if you see a Darksiders piece of artwork you feel it’s Darksiders. We want to own the style, we want to make a house style.
“That’s very important for us. We didn’t want to be just lost in the swathe of other projects out there.”
Lead designer Haydn Dalton lamented the fact that too many modern games opt for a dreary colour scheme, meaning you can’t tell they’re legitimately “next-gen”.
“The big key thing is that if someone sees a screenshot of our game, they automatically know it’s a Darksiders game,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like a next-gen game but you can’t tell because it’s ‘next-gen grey’. Ours is much more vibrant. We’re happy to be different like that.”
It’s creative director Joe Madureina’s background in comic books that birthed the style, according to Randhawa. “We’re not going for an ultra-real look, even if the surfaces do have some treatments because of the next-gen nature of the game,” he said. “[O]ur silhouettes, the shape and language, is very chunky and comparable to a graphic novel.”
http://beefjack.com/news/darksiders-ii-dev-laments-next-gen-grey-graphics/
I have to say the recent gameplay trailer looks visually much better than the CGI trailers they released. Darksiders was a good looking game, and 2 looks to be stepping it up even more.
The rest of the interview
http://beefjack.com/features/darksiders-ii-interview-vigil-games-go-bigger/
Darksiders III likely to be smaller in scope than DSII
Lead designer Haydn Dalton has said that if Darksiders II sells well enough to justify another sequel, Vigil will probably aim for a tighter, busier game world.
Speaking to Videogamer, Dalton said if Darksiders 2 moves 4 million units a third entry is almost guaranteed, but that he expects THQ president Jason Rubin to check the team’s ambitious world building.
“Maybe what he might do is turn around and say, ‘We’ll do another Darksiders game, but we’ll try and reduce the scope so that we can make it even higher polished,’” Dalton said.
“Maybe he says, ‘Bring the scope down a little bit, we’ll still do another game but it’s a lot more focused’. That’s not such a bad thing to do either.”
Dalton said Darksiders II’s scope is “huge”; early reports indicate the world size is about four times that of the first Darksiders, something our own hands-on previews have backed up. The enormous scale may be one of the reasons why THQ has delayed the game well beyond its original launch plans, and Dalton doesn’t seem averse to the idea of scaling it back.
“Reducing the size of the world might be seen as a big impact from a player point of view, you know what, we might do a lot more interaction within the world if the world was smaller,” he said.
“And there might be even more polish, there might be a lot more animated things in the environment and a lot more detail or destruction or whatever it might be in the world because of a reduce in size. Rather than doing sheer square-footage, it’s more like what can you do in less room by focusing on it, and depth [and] interaction within a smaller environment.
“Initially it seems like if you make it smaller that’s not as good. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Quantity is not about quality. Just because you make something bigger doesn’t mean it’s better.”
http://www.vg247.com/2012/07/26/darksiders-iii-likely-to-be-smaller-in-scope-than-dsii/#more-280113
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