The Swedish developer of the critically acclaimed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Starbreeze, is now hard at work on a follow-up. Called The Darkness, their newest game is a first-person shooter like Riddick (based on a Top Cow comic), however it has a completely different story with all new superhero-like abilities to change things up and differentiate this game from the pack of other shooters in development.
The game is set for release late in the second quarter of 2007 for Xbox 360 and PS3, and most of the major features are now falling into place. It was recently announced that some of the game will take place in a World War One setting, as well as in contemporary New York. The multiplayer mode will also offer the usual mix of deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag modes.
GameSpot UK recently got to visit Take-Two’s European offices and interviewed the producer, Denby Grace, about what Take-Two is trying to achieve in the game.
GameSpot UK (GS): Run us through the background of . . . The Darkness.
Denby Grace (DG): So the game is based on a comic by Top Cow, and it’s being made by Starbreeze Studios–the guys that did The Chronicles of Riddick. It’s a first-person shooter primarily but with a lot of superhero stuff thrown in. What we did is we took Paul Jenkins, one of the writers for Top Cow, and he wrote a totally new story loosely based around one of the comics called Resurrection. In the game, you play Jackie Estacado, who is a mafia hit man. But on the day of his 21st birthday, the Darkness manifests inside of him and things go downhill from there really! [laughs]
GSUK: It looks like the game has improved significantly over the past few months. What have you been focusing on?
DG: The last few months have been about getting our last bulk of features in as we move into alpha, and then it’s all spit and polish really. It’s something that we came across in Riddick, and it’s something we want to achieve with The Darkness–that final level of polish. Visually, we’ve put in a few new effects to raise the whole cinematic feel of the game, such as motion-blur and bullet trails. We’ve got a new, final model of Jackie, and he’s looking a hell of a lot better than before.
GSUK: It’s been revealed that about a third of the game takes place in a World War One setting. How does this relate to the contemporary New York environment?
DG: Yeah, you travel to this other world for something that we can’t really go into because we’d ruin the story. You get transported to this parallel world, and it’s effectively a place worse than hell where Jackie gets to battle with his own personal demons. He learns more about the Darkness, he battles for control of his body with it, and it fills in a lot of gaps in the story. It’s a good place for us to tell that. Like you say, it’s kind of a WWI trench setting, and you have allies that fight on your side. It’s very twisted, though, and very dark.
GSUK: You’ve talked about using the increased capacity of Blu-ray for movies and TV shows that will play within the game. How will this add to the experience?
DG: Yeah, well Blu-ray offers us around 25GB to play with, so we’re looking to license old TV shows, adverts, and cartoons to build entire TV channels in the game. You can actually turn on the TVs in the game and watch a film, watch a TV series, anything you want really. It’s a little bit gimmicky, but at the same time, it’s a really cool feature. Also, we tell mission-specific information through the TVs where it’s needed.
GSUK: What were your objectives for the multiplayer aspect of The Darkness?
DG: We want something that’s intense and a lot of fun, not something that’s going to be picked up by hardcore people in clan matches. We do think that people are going to pick it up and have a lot of fun with it–it’s an intense battle. When you’re playing as the Darkness, it has a real Aliens Versus Predator feel [as the Darkness can climb walls and attack with their claws]. We didn’t set out with a real objective to have a multiplayer that did this, this, and this; it was more that we wanted to transfer the gunplay of the single-player game, as it would be a shame not to use that in a multiplayer arena.
GSUK: Explain the difference between the humans and the Darkness in this mode.
DG: The human mafioso are pretty standard–they can pick up guns and armour. But then, we have a mode of game called shapeshifter too. By pressing a button, you can convert into a darkling. Like I said before, it’s kind of like being an alien in Aliens Versus Predator; you can see in the dark, you can climb up walls, you move faster than humans, and you can leap great distances and attack with your claws. — END.
Personally while I think that having real movies and TV shows playing on the in-game TV’s is a cool feature to make the game much more realistic this is hardly a feature that I care about. I guess it’s cool for those that want to have the option of not having to leave their game to watch TV (yes that’s a joke) . . . but I can’t help but think they could use this extra time and disc space for new features or something else.
I mean is this really the kind of “next-gen” features we have to look forward too? Is that what they will fill all that extra space on the Blu-Ray Discs with? How about having actual comic books from The Darkness comic laying around for those that never got to read them? Let’s hope developers don’t make a trend of this and start delaying games to pack their in-game TVs with content . . .
The Darkness CG Trailer