Darksiders II Interview with Jeremy Greiner

Jeremy Greiner: It’s a blessing and a curse having your own IP where you’re writing the fiction because you’re like ‘We can do anything!’ then you’re like ‘Oh crap, we can do anything…’ and you have to establish rules, give yourself guidelines that fall into those parameters so you don’t have any places in the fiction where there’s a hole or you contradict yourself. So it is a challenge, but it’s a collaborative team effort, we get everyone in a room to talk about it. Dave Adams, General Manager of the studio takes most of the lead on that, but we all get our opinions in.

Darksiders II has suffered from delays. What are the main reasons for this? Is it just for extra development time to polish it off, or is there something you looked at and thought needed to change?

Jeremy Greiner: No content was cut or anything like that. What it really was is Darksiders II is a massive game; you spoke about it being twice as long as the first one, and going through usability it’s going to be pretty freaking massive, there’s a lot of elements out there that lend to a very long play through and all kinds of content. Just the critical path alone is going to be at least 25 hours and then we have tonnes of additional side quests and all kinds of adventuring to do. Because of that wealth of content, we just needed more time for bug fixing and polish. That literally is all it’s for, bug fixing and polish. Thankfully THQ is in a position where they can allow us the time to hit the quality bar that we all strive for.

There are going to be a number of DLC drops for Darksiders II. What are you going to do to ensure that it’s different enough to the main experience of the game to make people want to purchase it?

Jeremy Greiner: I think the first thing we’ve done is thankfully they’ve bundled our first DLC drop with the release for anyone who pre-orders. From a content standpoint, it’s offering new unique challenges and options. I can tell you right now that the DLC content has not been made, it’s not like we’re carving it off from the main game as happens often in our industry, but it’s all going to be designed from the ground up, it’s all going to have different feel and look, it’ll tie in with the storyline and plot of Darksiders II and it’ll and just build on that experience.

Speaking of content, earlier this year there was the Darksiders II ‘design-a-weapon’ contest. What was the response to it, and have you now decided with community created weapons will be in the game?

Jeremy Greiner: Yeah! The weapons have actually been voted on by the community, our community manager is doing a great job on our social channels, and our Facebook page has something like 500,000 fans now which is just absurd! They voted on it, and the winners’ weapons will be in the game – the studio is putting them in right now – and they’ll be in the credit lines. It’s really cool, it’ll be really cool to see that because there was a fantastic response to this contest.

In a time where people are sometimes limited to only a handful of game purchases, why should they buy Darksiders II over other games that are coming out over the next few months?

Jeremy Greiner: In the end, Darksiders II is a game being made for gamers by gamers, and I look at it as a more of a grass-roots throwback approach to the action adventure genre as our genre gets more set piece orientated every single day. It makes me think that Vigil games are bringing the adventure back into action adventure. I think that right there is reason enough to go out and get it.

Finally, there are four horsemen of the apocalypse. Are you hoping to expand the series up to a Darksiders IV so we can see all four horsemen in action?

Jeremy Greiner: Definitely, we would love nothing more than that. And as long as you guys out there keep buying our games, we’ll keep making them and hopefully we can bring them all into one arena and have a really fun time of it.

Thanks for your time.