Darksiders II is just over two weeks away from hitting the public here in the US. Despite the incredible hype, there is already some occasional talks of Darksiders III. In a recent interview with Darksiders II lead designer Haydn Dalton, the topic came up and there were some rather interesting comments. In particular Dalton stated that if a third game were to be made, the idea of a slightly smaller scope with more dense content might be an intriguing direction to go.
Having played Darksiders II for 10+ hours and having gone thruogh virtually the entire Maker’s Realm. I can attest to the fact that Darksiders II has a gigantic overworld. Just in the limited area that I did play, it was clear this is one enormous land area. We keep hearing the comparisons to the first game about the sheer size of the overworld, but it’s not just that. There really is a lot more to the overworld than just space.
When I was playing through the early parts of Darksiders II, I got my first mission and was off to the first mini-dungeon of sorts. Just along the way I started navigating off the main path and found myself entrenched in a side mission. I couldn’t progress very far as I ran into a giant enemy Gorewood, that I simply couldn’t defeat. My character just wasn’t leveled up enough, I didn’t have much loot, and I didn’t have any of the wrath abilities. Sure if I really stood there and battled it out for a long awhile, I may have been able to progress, but it was just very difficult. However, the point here is that this optional side dungeon was accessible in the overworld before even entering the first dungeon!
In addition to these completely optional side dungeons, there were also several other goodies to be found in the overworld. I ran into a lot of miscellaneous treasure chests that contained loot along my quest, some of which sprang up some combat battles with some difficult enemies. That all being said, there was a lot of open field style gameplay as well where Death would just gallop along on Despair to get from place to place.
I see where Dalton is coming from when he talks about the reduced scope and more dense content, but I’d hate to see that take that away from what Darksiders II is. If anything, despite the sheer size of the overworld of Darksiders II, there surely is a heck of a lot more going on in the overworld than the original Darksiders had. My thoughts, let’s at least wait and see what we get out of Darksiders II before we start a conversation about the future of the franchise and what should or should not be in Darksiders III.
Darksiders II is set to hit stores on August 14th here in the US.
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