David Adams, studio general manager, and Joe Madureira, creative director, have admitted to dropping around 20% of content from Virgil’s Darksiders II.
In an interview with Gamasutra, the pair discussed the perils of having too many ideas, most of which are too expensive and time-consuming to pull off.
”We cut a crapload of stuff at the idea phase,” said Adams.
”We’ll prototype stuff, get halfway through and go, ah, that’s dumb; that’s not going to work, or we can’t make it work. Sometimes something gets near finished and you’re like, eh, we just don’t have time to make that as good as it needs to be”.
”I think we had a more clear idea at the start of this one what we could possibly achieve and what we couldn’t; on the first game we had no idea,” commented Madureira.
Adams continued, ”Yeah, the game we ended up with is probably, in Darksiders II, 80 percent of what we designed; the game we ended up with in Darksiders 1 was probably like 1 percent of what we started out with. So our ability to predict what we can get done increased drastically with the second game.”
”Yeah, you just have no idea. We had no rules, no nothing. But that helped us, too, because we weren’t scared of stuff that maybe we should have been, and we got a lot of stuff in, actually.”
Darksiders II is currently in development and is due for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC this June. You can read the full interview here.
