Dan Schmittou and Sheldon Carter join us to shine a little light into the shadowy corners of The Darkness II

I first stumbled onto The Darkness II while looking up future releases and the trailer instantly grabbed my attention. It was dark, intense, and the fact that the main character was a total bad ass didn’t hurt. It held all sorts of promise for a great game and I craved more.

My wish came true when I took part in a round-table interview with Dan Schmittou, the associate producer of 2K Games, and Sheldon Carter, the creative director at Digital Extremes. Many questions were asked, and much was talked about, but one thing was made clear to me; The Darkness II is going to be an awesome game.

Taking place two years after the events of its predecessor, The Darkness II continues the story of Jackie Estacado. He has become Don of a prominent New York mob family and now someone is out to destroy him. The Darkness, which he inherited prior, is back to ‘help’. Jackie struggles to fight both those out to end his life and the antagonistic Darkness itself.

The Darkness II is an FPS, but is dramatically different from other titles from the genre through it’s use of story, quad-wielding, and art style.

Schmittou and Carter stressed that it is the story that varies it from the others. Carter said, “Our first pillar when we were building the game was in service of story. This is a narrative driven game and we really want the player to have that experience and have that story all the way through. In terms of the context of why you are killing in an FPS, The Darkness 2 really stands out.”

The game itself is based on the comic series of the same name. Writer Paul Jenkins, who worked on The Darkness added his talents again to its sequel, to keep the feel of the story the same. Even the co-op mode helps fill in gaps in the main storyline.

Carter said, “When you’re playing in the co-op, you’re playing an interwoven campaign with the single-player story.”

He explained how this works through a story example. In the single-player game Jackie gives Vinnie an order to get the Darkness expert. In the co-op, Vinnie orders the players to go capture the guy.

Say hello to my little friends

Story is what drives this title, it’s what brings Jackie, his struggles, and the game to life. And for those that missed out on Jackie’s life from the previous game, do not fret, for the game does an excellent job to fill those players in. Although Schmittou points out that it wasn’t easy. “It was challenging but it also gave some pretty unique opportunities to take this intense, Darkness lore and tie it into Jacky as a person and make gamers feel like this character. Using the story and gameplay progression from high-intensity moments like the second part of the restaurant scene as opposed to the first part. Taking the scene showing the life of the head of a mob family and then seamlessly blending into high-octane action. That demonstrates how the game flows.”

Carter added, “There is a pacing perspective, too. The problem you can run into is if you have all the action running at 11 then nothing resonates at all. It was interesting because we could go so crazy with some of the things you could do with the demon arms because you also had times when you were wandering around a hub, talking to people. Slower interactions.”

One exciting feature of The Darkness II is quad-wielding. Jackie not only has two arms for holding guns, but he also has two demonic snake-like appendages that can do things as well, like pick up car doors and throw them into a bunch of enemies. With four arms, there are plenty of fun and gory ways for Jackie to dispose of his foes.

Carter said, “As for the mechanics, that’s were you get into the quad-wielding with two demon arms on the screen at all times. You’ve got one that can grab things from the environment, including enemies. You’ve got Slash, which allows you to cut enemies up. You can layer on to the powers and the possession of the Darkling.”

Schmittou admitted the company spent a lot of time making sure the mechanics worked as they were intended. He said, “The thing that we realised from the beginning was that these mechanics needed to be brought together from the get-go so that in the end they play well together.

“Combining them in such a way that challenges the player is not only quad-wielding, but also is eating hearts (health mechanic) and, if they’re getting overwhelmed, they grab a shield or throw it at some guys.  All of that was behind the balancing. We knew it was going to be a challenge so we had to get it out there at the beginning and keep iterating with lots and lots of focus testing.

Cell shaded graphics are highly refined in this title

“With user feedback and continually refining the systems, we ended up with a pretty intuitive way to play the game.”

However, there were some logical leaps to overcome before the mechanic was finalised. Luckily, as Carter pointed out, the groundwork had already been done by countless other FPS titles before Darkness 2. “We thought, ‘How can we make the base level of the game be about controlling the Darkness in this way [quad-wielding]?’ When you start thinking about it that way and you hold a controller, there are certain intuitive leaps you start making about how if you had a complete dual-wielding system, each trigger would be a separate gun, then that maps really interestingly to each of the demon arms, which could be on the bumpers of the controller when you’re starting off.

“We’re all used to games where you switch which of the triggers or bumpers you’re hitting depending on the situation you’re in. So we thought how could we make that all about having different weapons and them all being available at the same time.”

The most noticeable difference from the original game is the art direction of The Darkness II. The game, once again inspired by the comics, is done in a graphic-noir style. The cell shading gives the game a distinctive comic book feel. Vibrant color was also added to better reflect the amazing comic style. And it looks gorgeous.

Carter said, “We thought, ‘How can we adjust this? What can we tweak in order to put our own creative spin on it? Bring it closer to the origins of the character itself.’ A good example of this is our art style. We were really inspired by the comic books. When we started making the game we went through the reference material and thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to make the game look like the source material?’”

Schmittou added, “The artists were really inspired by the comics and that fed so much into the other decisions so that it naturally worked its way into the art.”

The Darkness II comes out February 7 in North America and February 10 in Europe. A demo is already available on 360, PS3, and Steam.

So are ya gonna get it?

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