I played two PC ports of two big, exciting new games this week. One of them worked. One of them didn't.

The two big games in question were Square Enix and United Front's Hong Kong crime game Sleeping Dogs and THQ and Vigil's comic-booky fantasy game Darksiders II. Both games came out on Tuesday, both were released on Xbox 360, PS3 and, in an increasingly uncommon but welcome move, simultaneously on PC (hooray!).

But while Sleeping Dogs has a robust, customizable PC version, Darksiders II's PC port has more than its share of problems.

Let's start with the good. Sleeping Dogs is, as Tina raved in her review of the Xbox 360 version, a darned cool game. I've played four or five hours, and I'm enjoying myself quite a bit. I like the story, I like the characters, and I like busting heads and breaking legs in nightclubs.

While Sleeping Dogs isn't a graphical powerhouse like The Witcher 2 or Crysis 2, it's still a darned good-looking game. Its Hong Kong setting is colorful and sprawling, and it's the first time in a good long while that a game has given me that wonderful sense of disoriented tourism that the best open-world games can inspire.

I run a middle-of-the-road gaming PC these days, an i5 with 8GB of RAM centered around an AMD Radeon 6870 graphics card. I run Sleeping Dogs somewhere between its middle and high settings, and have got it dialed in to a near-perfect setting.

Sleeping Dogs hums along at a solid 60 frames per second, with its HD resolution and long draw-distance bringing Hong Kong to bright, colorful life on my PC. I haven't had time to put together a side-by-side comparison of how the PC version stacks up to consoles, but the friendly folks at Revision3 have made a video (off to the side here) that about sums it up. Everything on PC—the colors, the framerate, the textures (if you use the PC-exclusive HD texture pack), and the DirectX 11 features to enhance the shadows and anti-aliasing, make the game look and run well on PC. Best of all, it's got a built-in benchmark tool that lets you know how the game is handling your settings without your having to go in and see for yourself.

In fact, I used the word "port" in the headline here, but that word raises the ire of many PC gamers—a "port" is thought to be a shoddy rip of a console game straight to PC, with little thought to the extra horsepower and customization options afforded by modern DirectX 11 PCs. Sleeping Dogs would be more accurately called a PC version of the game. It's not without its bugs and weirdnessness—one time, adjusting the graphics caused my characters to "fall into the world" and tumble unendingly until I restarted the game—but by and large, Sleeping Dogs runs smoothly and looks great.

Darksiders II, however, is resolutely a port. And unfortunately, it's not a very good one.

I'll start out by saying that I actually don't mind straight-up PC ports of console games. I play most of those kinds of games with a plugged in Xbox controller, and I frequently play them on my big TV. Really, I like when a PC game feels like a console game played in true 1080p. Arkham Asylum on PC, for example, ran so smoothly and cleanly that it almost felt like a different thing than its console sibling, even though it was basically a direct port of the game.

So, I was ready for Darksiders II to be a port, but when I booted it up, I was surprised at just how bare-bones the PC version was. (Really, things didn't get off to a good start when the game made me create an account and sign into THQ's proprietary gaming network, blerg, but that's a story for another day.) The in-game menus are essentially indistinguishable from an Xbox 360 game—I couldn't even get into the settings until I'd played through the opening cinematic, and when I did, I was surprised at what I found. No detail settings, not even a high-medium-low graphics dial. Just one setting for screen resolution and a checkbox for V-sync.

I'd seen a lot of screen-tearing in the intro cinematic, so I thought "Well, better turn on V-sync." So I did. I also bumped the resolution up to 1920x1080, since it had defaulted to something much lower. The settings menu stated that I'd need to quit the game and restart it for the changes to take effect (grumble), so I did that, and before long was back in the introductory segment. Despite the fact that I'd turned on V-sync, at 1080p screen tearing had become rampant.

Huh.

I went into the settings again and checked the v-sync box. Yup, it was checked. Double-huh. It would appear that the v-sync option in Darksiders II does not work, at least for me.

I started playing the game, but the tearing was so intense that I couldn't get into it. Every time I'd pan the camera around my character's head, the screen would roll and clip onto itself, a spastic dance of graphical jitters that were distracting and disorienting.

Eventually, I found something of a solution—I bumped the resolution all the way down to 1280x720, where the tearing became much less noticeable. You might notice that's 720p, or, the same resolution at which most console games run. And even then, the tearing is minimized, but still present.

It's a shame that the only way to make the PC version of Darksiders II run okay on my machine is to effectively turn it into the Xbox 360 version. I don't ask for much in a PC port! But I do ask to be able to run the game in my monitor's native resolution without a fuss. Reader Andy Pavolillo wrote in with this involved but theoretically feasable workaround for the V-sync and stutter issues, but it requires an Nvidia graphics card, so I haven't been able to try it. Regardless, that kind of involved solution shouldn't be necessary for something as basic as V-sync!

Some perusal of both the Steam forums and the official Darksiders II forums have turned up a lot of gamers having problems similar to mine—the nonfunctional V-sync option, in particular. Other PC owners, however, report that while the game may be lacking customization options, it is at least running smoothly and without graphical issues. It sounds as though AMD cards have the V-sync problem while on some Nvidia graphics cards, V-sync works as it should.

But the overarching vibe among PC gamers is one of discontent. Mouse and keyboard control customization is lackluster, and perhaps even worse, the camera auto-centers on to Death (the protagonist)'s back. There's no "free-look" option when using a mouse, resulting in a vertiginous flying camera that players must fight in order to look around while moving.

A large part of the anger is that some PC gamers feel they were mislead—people working on the game had ensured PC owners that the .config file that would allow them to tinker and tweak the game to their liking would be available, but now that the game has launched, it's nowhere to be found. In a post to the game's official forums, community manager Matthew Everett (to his and Vigil/THQ's credit) apologized for giving gamers bad information:

During the Community Summit both Jay Fitzloff and I (Mathew Everett) were under the impression that full .config files and final keyboard/mouse and controller hookups were going to work as promised when the PC version of the game launched. That was the plan at the time from a specifications perspective.

Unfortunately, especially at the end of the development cycle, sometimes things change at the last minute, and this was one of them. This puts us in an uncomfortable spot as we were acting on the best information we had at the time, and it has turned out not to be in the final game (at this point).

Since it was always the intention to implement these features, as I type this, the development team is checking to see what items can get added into the game. While I can't promise what can be done, I can promise we are working with the proper teams and have expressed the importance of including them in a patch.

When I asked THQ about the problems with the PC version, a spokesperson told me that "Vigil is tracking these issues closely and is keeping their collective ear close to the forums." And to their credit, a first patch has already been released for the PC version, addressing a number of game-crashing bugs more serious than anything I've encountered.

This is all a real shame, since Darksiders II is a fun game. Most reviews, including Kate's review for Kotaku, report it to be a fun and generally successful mashup of Prince of Persia, Zelda and Diablo. Everything I've played so far backs that up. But even when reviewing the PlayStation 3 version, Kate advised that players not buy the game just yet, as a number of significant bugs detract enough that it'd be worth waiting until they get patched. I asked Kate about screen-tearing issues in the console version, and she said that the display was fine on her version—the bugs she ran into were mostly functional.

Of course, this tale of woe is nothing new for PC gamers—it's common for this sort of thing to happen. But the contrast between the two games feels like a great example of how to do a PC version right, and how to get it wrong. Furthermore, there's a chance that you'll get Darksiders II to run perfectly fine on your system. But it also might be a mess. It's great that Vigil is working to fix their game, but when it comes down to it, a game shouldn't be released in the state that Darksiders II on the PC was. We PC players may grump about having to wait an extra couple weeks for a PC version, but if that's what it takes to give us a game that works immediately after we install it, so be it.

The overarching narrative of this week has been "Sleeping Dogs or Darksiders II?" Console gamers can't really go wrong, but PC gamers have a clearer choice—pick up Sleeping Dogs now, and you'll get a robust PC gaming experience with HD textures and all manner of DirectX 11 bells and whistles. But you might want to hold off on Darksiders II for a little while, at least until Vigil makes good on their promises to get the game up to snuff.

You could, if Hong Kong gangsters weren't your thing, call Darksiders II the biggest game release of the week. Probably the month, too.

So now's probably as good a time as ever to look at some terrific concept art from the game.

The environmental and weapon images below were done by artist Jonathan Kirtz, a freelancer who has also worked on games like the Warhammer 40K MMO, Warhammer Online and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

You can see more of Jonathan's work at his personal site.

Meanwhile, all the character art you see (with the exception of the large Death "painting", which was done by Joe Mad and Kirtz) was the work of a team of artists led by James Brian Jones, Vigil's Studio Character Lead. You can see James' personal site here.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Most men of modern profession have the good fortune to face death but once in their lifetime. These brave and critical souls stared into those empty sockets for hours and did not flinch... much.

Steadfastly refusing to spare anyone over 'til another year, Death rides his pale horse into the spotlight in Darksiders II, otherwise known as the franchise with at least two more sequels in it, if my apocalyptic horsepersons count is correct. Following in the beefy footsteps of his brother, War, Death uses the free time afforded him by everyone already being dead to try and save his sibling from a fate worse than him.

Judging by the reactions of these stalwart game critics, Pestilence and Famine are going to have their work cut out for them if they wish to step out of the shadow of their big brothers. I guess they're used to that. Here goes.

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Games(TM)
Death may be a leaner figure than his armour-clad sibling – the topless protagonist less a stocky mutant knight and more a sinewy ghoul right off an Iron Maiden album cover – but the game he's starring in is undeniably better built out.

Darksiders II – the somewhat less tangled but no less silly story of Horseman of the Apocalypse #2 as he attempts to undo the end of days and clear War's name – presents the same melting pot of borrowed ideas as its predecessor, but with a few extra ingredients thrown in to spice up the brew. Along with the Zelda dungeons, God Of War combat and Metroidvania item-collecting come the welcome additions of Diablo's looting and World Of Warcraft RPG-ing.

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IGN
Darksiders II further fleshes out the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse introduced in the first title - this time with War's brother, Death, at the helm. Death believes that War has been wrongfully convicted of destroying mankind, and seeks to restore humanity to clear his brother's name. The narrative is pretty entertaining, if not severely overdramatic. Though it should please anyone solely in the market for ‘epic,' it lacks any trace of subtlety and often comes off as sophomoric. Given that the end result of any plot advancement is inevitably that Death needs to gather three of something and thrash some skeletons, hearing the characters go on about the old ways and soul judgement just feels a bit silly. However, if a healthy dose of ridiculous doesn't faze you, the contrived reasons for Death's various escapades through heaven, hell and everywhere in between do provide an amusing backdrop for his quest.

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Giant Bomb
Everyone wants something and no one's going to help out a horseman for free. So like any other proper video game protagonist, you're going to spend most of the 20-25 hours helping out the people around you. It starts by getting a forge going and discovering that much of the world in Darksiders II is overcome by corruption. This force is creeping across all the realms, infecting enemies and even the land itself, which is peppered with glowing rock formations that can be destroyed with bomb flowers. You'll work your way through multiple realms, each with its own version of the Tree of Life (or Death, as the case may be) and its own unique landscape and features. The story pushes you from one quest giver to the next, and everyone seems to have a few things for you to collect, be it the two keys, three parts of a staff, and so on. Though the story may be pretty straightforward, the dialogue is well-written and acted well, giving the game a weighty feel, overall.

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Gamespot
If the original Darksiders was an action/adventure/puzzle game, then the addition of loot drops role-playing elements into that mix, which brings to mind a potential concern: Darksiders was already a heavy mixture of recipes that had come before, recalling games like The Legend of Zelda, God of War, and even Portal. There were so many mechanics and so many tools to keep track of that the game struggled to find its own identity.

In Darksiders II, a funny thing happens on the way to the apocalypse: it establishes an identity all its own, rather than one defined through the games that inspired its existence. The game's expanded scope (about twice as big as the first game) and thoughtful pace (about twice as long as the first game) are most responsible for this. You now have a chance to breathe between battles, and each new mechanic has time to settle in before a new one is introduced. The more leisurely sense of pace is obvious from the very beginning. Darksiders' first hour was front-loaded with explosions, angelic cries, and the bloodcurdling sights of demonic forces swarming across the earth. Here, there are moments to take in the frozen chasms beneath you, and to enjoy the slick new motion mechanics that have you defying gravity in heady flights of fancy. (You won't miss War's wings in light of Death's fleet-footedness.)

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Polygon
What's truly impressive is the concentrated quality on display in all that dungeon design. Dungeons are layered and loop around on themselves in a way that pushes you in the right direction while maintaining a sense of scale and limiting downtime. Instead of endless hallways or a series of closed-off arena battles, virtually every room centers around one or two challenges - a puzzle to be solved with Death's expanding tool set or a Prince of Persia-style platforming segment that has Death scampering up the walls and showing off the game's beautiful animation work.

Even when dungeons don't hide a new tool for Death, they introduce one-off gimmicks such as lanterns that must be carried between statues to unlock doors or the ability to time travel to a past version of the dungeon. I wish Darksiders 2 placed more new toys into Death's toolbox - only one isn't a repeat from the first game - but even with a familiar inventory, I was always challenged and satisfied with the brain-bending solutions.

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GamingTrend
With a game over 24 hours on your first run, you might question pacing. Darksiders II paces the items and powers out so you aren't getting inundated with new gadgets and powers all the time, instead scratching that itch with the loot system. The dungeons are heavily varied, and the puzzles don't repeat in other dungeons. Fresh approaches to puzzle solving should push this title away from the Zelda comparisons levied against the first title – Darksiders II stands on its own.

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Kotaku
But when it does work, it's a gloriously stupid romp that's far more entertaining than it has any business being. By the time the player has trained a few scythe combos and special skills, combat is satisfyingly solid, and the ability to customize weapons, gear, and skill choices lets the player craft a combat experience well-suited to his or her own preferred play style. I grew to find myself actually liking Death, by the time the heavily-foreshadowed end finally came.

Ultimately, the bugs in the PS3 edition of Darksiders II are a disappointing stain on an otherwise entertaining game. It would be nice to give the game a YES, but we don't yet know if the Xbox 360 and PC versions are clear of the bugs I encountered on the PS3. Hopefully, the game will see a patch sooner rather than later.

I am become Death, destroyer of crates.

Also vases. And skeletons. And bees. And, oh yes, enormous slavering eldritch horrors from Hell. I destroyed a bunch of those, too.

Darksiders II begins more or less where the first Darksiders left off. In that game, War—as in, the apocalyptic horseman—accidentally triggers the Armageddon before the correct moment and everything, more or less literally, goes to hell. But it was a set-up; other powers used War for their own ends and he is, if not blameless, at least not as guilty as other parties think. Darksiders II stars War's brother and fellow horseman, Death, as he attempts to set the record straight and redeem War's good name. Doing so mainly involves going places and killing everything that lives there.

Plot-wise, the game never does make any more sense than that. But that's okay. It's the video game version of the summer popcorn flick, and that's not a bad thing.

Darksiders II needs you not to question its internal logic. Much of it is, at best, strained. While playing, I had several conversations, like:

"I have to go to the land of the dead."
"Aren't you Death?"
"Yes."
"So isn't that your..."
"No."
"But..."
"This is one of those questions you shouldn't ask."

"So you're invincible in this game, right?"
"Nope. That's my health meter, and I have potions."
"But if you die, who kills you? And when you do, does everyone else become immortal?"
"Remember what I said about questions?"

Much in common with certain blockbuster films, it can be a delight to watch as long as you don't look through the logic holes. The game makes a covenant with you: if you promise not to think about any of it, it will provide you with the tools you need to travel, and the reasons to keep pressing onward.

Like the double-bladed combat and inventory full of magical garb, that need not to think too hard about the construction and purpose of the world is something Darksiders II borrows handily from games that came before it.

Darksiders was a pastiche of other games, brought together into a new package. Darksiders II is, in many ways, more of the same. Death's default weapon, the double scythes, feel so much like Kratos's arm-blades that it took me several hours to stop trying to use combos and motions still stored in my muscle memory from the God of War games.

So. For players who were wondering what would happen if God of War cross-bred with Zelda, then added a touch of the Kingdoms of Amalur aesthetic, and added dungeons that were essentially Fallout 3 and Portal, the answer is: you get Darksiders II.

The amazing part is, after a sort of rough beginning, the odd medley actually works. It does take three or four hours for all the disparate pieces to feel smoothly integrated. Like cooking or—better yet—like baking. When baking, it takes time and patience to get all of the ingredients in the bowl to stop being just ingredients, and to start being a cohesive dough. So, too, with Darksiders II.

Certain elements never do quite work. One late-game dungeon, set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, very suddenly invalidates everything Darksiders II has taught the player over 16+ previous hours of play. The modern, real-world setting, full of destructible cars, isn't actually the problem. (In fact, it's a pretty great change of pace.) The mechanics, on the other hand, are completely upended. It's a large area with no climbing, and rather than being able to use the abilities and weapons he has leveled up over two previous large acts, Death is more or less constrained to an awkward, two-handed angelic machine gun that makes taking any other action more difficult than it has to be. Put down the gun, open the chest, pick up the items, pick up the gun, move to the left, kill two things, put down the gun, melee kill the other twenty things, pick up the gun... The weapon was a frustrating exercise in "ideas that looked better on paper than in practice." Still, the game did try to provide new guns frequently, as if it knew that, at some point, I would have given up and left mine lying behind me in the dust.

Aside from some exceptions like Salvation (the machine gun), the tools that Darksiders II provides with each new area generally work well. And again, aside from the same exceptions, each added mechanic—a grapple, an ability to be in two places at once, and so on—generally carries forward well from dungeon to dungeon and act to act, staying useful as Death continues his journey.

A colleague and I discussed Darksiders II while I was playing. I said to him that I had been ready to hate the game, realizing how utterly derivative it is, but that somewhere around the four-hour mark, Death had grown on me. The stolen and borrowed parts, I remarked, had grown into an entertaining whole. He agreed: "You're just like, 'this is just Zelda with a growly grouchy man in bad World of Warcraft armor.' Then four hours in, you're like, 'This is great! It's like Zelda! But with a guy in grouchy WoW armor!"

But his final verdict summed up everything I was thinking about Darksiders II: "If you're going to steal, steal well."

A Word About Glitches on the PS3

I hit a great many bugs during Darksiders II. Some were cosmetic, some could be worked around, and some halted my gameplay entirely. I got stuck inside of objects and walls more than once, I encountered a couple of system-freezing hard crashes, and I repeatedly faced issues where my quicksave and fast travel abilities disabled themselves during normal play, and I had to quit and restart to bring them back. I also encountered several larger issues. Among them:

• A collision problem during the fight with the Guardian. The script requires players to grapple onto the boss's shoulder and to strike a gem there. Multiple times, with both shoulders, the grapple would take Death inside the shoulders, gripping an invisible point from which his scythes could not connect with the gem. Eventually he would drop to the ground and I could try again. Even though I knew the script and understood the tactics, I had to repeat each part of the fight 2-3 more times than should have been required.
• Late in Act II, there is a vertical platforming section requiring Death to scale the inside of a tower while a very lethal floor (on fire, covered in spikes) inexorably rises beneath him. Touch the floor, and it's all over.
  
  When I finally succeeded at climbing the tower, I hit X (the jump button) in order to ascend from the final landing position to safe ground, and got stuck. Death hovered in mid-air, apparently the victim of invisible geometry. Then an amazing thing happened: the game tried to trigger both the "you have been stabbed by the spiky floor and are dead" animation and also the "you have successfully navigated this obstacle and here is a pan of the room showing your next door" animation. The screen glitched, jittered, and tore for a brief, horrifying "Schrodinger's Death" moment before resolving into a loading screen. The end result? The game had decided that yes, I died, and would need to respawn—but it also had decided that I completed the platforming section, and so I respawned at the top, instead of at the lower checkpoint.
• The next-to-lass boss is probably the most difficult of the game. I learned his fight and eventually won, but no cut-scene triggered. Instead, he simply vanished. Loot lay where he had stood, and it looked as though I should be able to retrieve it, but I was stuck. Nothing on my controller worked except for Start, which allowed me to pause, change the options, or quit, and the right stick. I could move the camera around to get a good look at how stuck I really was, but that was it. I turned off the controller and swapped it for a freshly charged one, just in case the issue was with the controller, but the end result was the same: no left stick, no d-pad, no control buttons or triggers. I restarted the game and fought the boss again.

• When asked about a patch, THQ PR responded that Vigil was "looking into the issue as we speak," and added, "The team is currently polishing "Argul's Tomb" [DLC] and prepping bug fixes for an imminent submission to first party."

  
  

Bugs aside, the game doesn't always work. Some puzzles are more obtuse than they should be, and sometimes, even when they work in theory, something gets stuck in practice. There's a lot of irritating backtracking deliberately built in. Swapping tools and skills can be clumsy, and certain sections near the end overstay their welcome, slow down the action, and are just tedious. There is too much pixel-hunting when it comes to performing any action; finding the exact right spot to stand in order to have the option to act can be a pain.

But when it does work, it's a gloriously stupid romp that's far more entertaining than it has any business being. By the time the player has trained a few scythe combos and special skills, combat is satisfyingly solid, and the ability to customize weapons, gear, and skill choices lets the player craft a combat experience well-suited to his or her own preferred play style. I grew to find myself actually liking Death, by the time the heavily-foreshadowed end finally came.

Ultimately, the bugs in the PS3 edition of Darksiders II are a disappointing stain on an otherwise entertaining game. It would be nice to give the game a YES, but we don't yet know if the Xbox 360 and PC versions are clear of the bugs I encountered on the PS3. Hopefully, the game will see a patch sooner rather than later.

First THQ's media relations folks send me a furry hat that's too small for my head. Now they've signed my death warrant.

In honor of next week's release of Darksiders 2, THQ got some lovely folks in Pakistan (it says so on the sticker on the bottom) to jinx the living hell out of my life expectancy. The laws of irony are at their most powerful in my household; I'm not sure they could resist a farcical death date inlaid in gold on a miniature genuine marble/onyx headstone.

If I don't show up for work on Tuesday, someone please train my children to become deadly assassins so they can one day exact bloody revenge. That is if THQ doesn't go under thanks to all the money being spent on threatening my life.

Perhaps you've heard that Darksiders II will star Death. You hadn't heard that? Well, it will! But sorry to say, he cares more about his brother War than he cares about you.

This latest trailer is narrated by Skull-face himself, and it even ends with a roar, which as we all know is the key to a successful game trailer.

Every corner of the Darksiders world is laced with art. There's art on art, more art than you can shake a stick at. That makes sense, given the fact that Vigil, the studio behind Darksiders and this August's Darksiders II, is headed up by well-known comic artist Joe Madureira.

I spoke with Madureira last week about the intricate and instinctual process of designing the art for Darksiders, why his new protagonist Death wears purple, the importance of Death's loincloth, and what instrument the horseman would play if he were in a metal band.

Madureira also shared some cool new artwork and screenshots from the game, which you can check out in our exclusive galleries below.

Kotaku: So, you're making a new game with an entirely new protagonist. And he's got a mouthless skull-face. How can you make Death into a relatable character? Is that even a priority?

Joe Madureira: A lot of it comes through in the voice performance by Michael Wincott— even if you were looking at the back of Death's head, you'd still get a lot of the emotion. A lot of it's done through body language as well. In the end, we had to cheat a little and affect Death's mask, even though it's made of bone. It does contort, and his brow furrows slightly. We couldn't get away with not doing that. But I think we pulled it off.

Neither Death nor War had any irises in their eyes. Do you worry that makes a character seem too inhuman?

The thing with War is that he's just a lot more of a stoic. He just didn't have a lot to say. If [Death] had a lot more moments of really high emotion and stuff - it would be really difficult. But he's just an aggressive badass killer anyway, so it was not as hard to pull off as we thought it would be. Not having a face helps more than it hurts this character; it gives him that mysterious, creepy vibe.

You've said Darksiders II will have much more of a supporting cast than the first game. Could you talk about that?

There're definitely a lot of characters where you actually can interact with, you can go back to them throughout the game. You learn a lot about the story from interacting with them as opposed to watching cutscenes - that helps give more depth to Death's character than watching a little movie, because you actually get to see the interaction.

Even though Death is kinda of just a dark badass guy, he definitely has a more personal story than in the first one. We haven't revealed too much about it other than the fact that the Horsemen were involved with the destruction of their people, their own kind, the Nephilim, but Death carries that guilt with him in this game, and he's faced with some big choices that affect humanity and his own redemption.

Does the narrative branch at all?

It's not a branching narrative - there are occasionally choices, there are dialogue choices, but they don't affect the game in a major way like moral choices or anything like that. It's more about where you want the conversation to go so you can get more info about specific topics.

Is Death based on a particular rock star? He looks like a heavy metal god.

[Laughs] Not at all. He just - I think it's the long hair, and skulls, hey! It's rock 'n roll.

If Death played in a heavy metal band, what instrument would he play?

I wouldn't be surprised if we see some dudes rockin' out with Death's mask on. That was not the intention though.

He seems like a bassist to me, with the way he slings his arms down.

I dunno, he seems like more of a drummer to me.

Ha, yeah, I see it. Okay: What is a Darksider?

We thought rather than pick a name that was very specific to one of the characters or the four horsemen or whatever, Darksiders just kind of encompassed all of the characters and the universe, and the tone of our world. There aren't really any innocent parties in the first Darksiders, even the angels sort of have their dark secrets.

Honestly, part of it was just that it was a name that we all liked, and Darksiders kind of just kept making our top ten list over and over. And we said, "Damn it, let's just call it Darksiders!" It just kind of stuck, it was catchy.

I kind of like names like that anyway; I did a book called Battle Chasers and at no point does anyone say, "It's the Battle Chasers!" it's like… who is a Battle Chaser? I don't know. You never see the word anywhere in the book. But it just kind of encompassed the right energy and vibe for the book. And again, like Darksiders, it's vague but it also sort of fits the story and the characters.

Do you think about how the character models animate when you draw them?

Yes. I think it's the first thing that I think about actually, with characters and game concepts. In comics, as long as you can draw the pose you need to, then it's fine. In games, a lot of times it's how they move and it's the design role that the creature plays. If we're doing a creature and we've just done five flying guys, it's like, 'You know, you really need a big weapon wielding ground-guy,' and that immediately tells me it's going to have two arms, probably legs, what kind of weapons is he holding…. those sorts of choices sort of narrow everything down.

In the end, the gameplay aspect is the most important because, you know, 'this guy doesn't wield a weapon, he shoots stuff at you from far away,' he doesn't necessarily need to walk, so… as long as he's far away from you, shooting, he could fly or whatever. And that is the kind of stuff that gets worked out beforehand. But [gameplay] is probably the biggest influence on how the character's going to look like than, you know, what I felt like drawing that day or whatever.

When you make an environmental structure, how much thought do you put into its function? On a lot of these notes I'm seeing are pretty functional.

Again, it really depends on if it's just eye candy or if it's involved in the direct gameplay path, or if it's part of a puzzle. If it's just buildings or trees that are just dressing up the scene, then it's like 'eh,' a quick drawing will do. But if it's something where "oh, you need to pull this lever,' and it turns the water on, and it goes down this aquaduct, and then you can cross this thing… obviously it needs to be way more specific so that the modelers can build it right. It's done in stages, so we'll build it and make sure it's functional in a very loose prototype before we go in and polish it up. The notes happen throughout, sometimes beforehand, sometimes after it's been built and it's not working properly. Or sometimes it does work but it looks crappy. We'll do what we call Paint-overs where we take a screenshot of the crappy looking version and paint on top of it in photoshop. Sometimes even with layers you can show, 'Here's how the bridge should close' and you do a couple different layers showing the various stages. I would say the majority of our art direction is done through paint-overs. It's a constant iterative process.

Do you guys do that more or less than other studios?

I believe that it's common - I actually don't get together with other studio art directors as much as you'd think and talk about our process. But at vigil, right from the beginning, it's just the way we work. I had no experience at all, and this is the easiest way to convey - you can't really explain something in words, it's easier to just scribble it on there. Kind of like drawing on a whiteboard except that you're actually drawing on the image.

I know it's a common practice at other studios, I just don't know if they do it as much as we do. Because we paint over on almost everything.

How many iterations do the characters go through before they're done?

We tend to nail characters more often without problems right off the bat, but if we have a variant like, let's say, here's a demon soldier, here's a demon brute. And if the brute is basically just the soldier but with bigger armor and weapons then it doesn't really make sense to re-draw the entire guy. So we'll just paint stuff right on top. Usually. Not always.

Or let's say we have a concept that we like, but in the game he just doesn't look super cool, and we want to add horns and whatever—we'll just do that in a paint-over. We won't re-do the entire process. But it's not as common [with characters] as it is for the environment, that's for sure. We just struggle more with environments in general.

Is it always additive? Do you ever feel like you've got too much art onscreen?

Occasionally, yeah. We'll sometimes overdo it with effects, or the colors will look really garish, in certain lighting. And we'll have to tone stuff down. In general [laughs] more is better. Especially in games, when stuff is moving around on the screen, and stuff can look kind of small from far away, we just try to give everything unique elements so they're recognizable. Sometimes it involves taking way, but usually it involves adding more cool stuff.

It's definitely a hard balance. You look at a scene and you're like, 'Eeh, something's missing, it's not dramatic enough.' And then you start adding stuff and then you're like, 'Woah, there's so many boulders in this area! I can't even tell where I'm supposed to go, what a mess!' And then we'll start taking stuff out. Or we'll do like, one giant boulder instead of eight small ones. It sounds dumb but that's the kind of stuff we constantly have to deal with.

For Death: Why purple?

War had a lot of red going on, so red was off limits. When we tried blue, blue is a soothing color… there's basically two colors that sort of fit death or arcane magic, or underworldly ghostly etherealness: so we had this ghastly green and this purple. Black and purple just look evil, I don't know why. [Laughs] But you'll notice, there're a lot of Disney villains that actually have purple as well. We used the ghastly green so much in a major area of the game called the underworld where Death is facing off against an undead kingdom - we couldn't have giant landscapes and characters in purple because it was way too garish so they got the green, Death got the purple, and it just stuck.

Did you worry about the Skeletor comparison?

We heard that early on, and we laughed about it. Honestly, I think it was one of the reasons that I took the teeth off the mask, because I didn't want it to be an actual skull face. Then it literally would be Skeletor. But we weren't worried about it, it's kind of funny, it's kind of a funny connection. You always get stuff like that - like "Oh, he looks like this, the game looks like this."

And it's like: Eh, we just wanted to make him cool. And I like He-Man, whatever. I like Skeletor. I'll take it. It's the 80's comeback, man. And look, you're never going to play a Skeletor game. It's not going to happen, so you might as well just buy Darksiders II. [Laughs]

Did you put a lot of thought into death's back? Since we're going to spend so much time looking at it?

It's one of those things - it's iteration, one thing they absolutely need is a loincloth. I put one on the back so that I don't have to see a guy's butt while I'm running in the game. You'll notice Death and War both have them. You need that coverage. Beyond that, you have to pick a pose that's cool from the back not the front - it's the exact opposite of what would come naturally. Once you have those rules in mind… I mean, we've been doing it for a while, so it's second nature now. But in the beginning there was a learning curve to it.

What do you miss about doing comics all day?

Well, I'm still doing it to some extent. Not full time, but every once and a while I do get that bug, and I'm lucky enough to get to keep my foot in both worlds. It's one of those things where the grass is always greener. When I'm home drawing, it's relaxing, I don't have to deal with a ton of people. I've got my music on and I get to draw just like when I was a kid. There's something really meditative about it - but eventually, after a while, it's just boring and lonely, and it's nice to go into the studio and feed off everyone's energy and excitement. Whether it's a good day or a bad day, sometimes we have arguments and bad meetings, and whatever. There is an energy to being in a studio that's pretty awesome. So I would definitely miss that as well. So, you know, they each have their own appeal.

How has it been developing the game for Wii U?

Yeah, we're not allowed to talk about the Wii U version at all.

PR: That's where I'll jump in. We'll talk more about the Wii U later.

Okay, okay. Since the plotlines of the first and second Darksiders are concurrent, are we going to find out what happens at the end of Darksiders, or are we really going to have to wait for a third game?

Aw man, I can't talk about the ending of Darksiders II!

No, of course. I'm just wondering if people who are hoping for some resolution for the first game's ending will find any kind of satisfaction here, or if they'll have to wait for a third game.

You'll definitely get a lot more insight into the story - there's two ways to progress a story: one is to tack on to the end of it, to add to the linear story. And the other is to go depth-wise into it. I won't say which one you get more of in the sequel, but you'll definitely get something out of it.

We were conscious of it, we knew that we're not starting off where the last one ended. It was cool to end on a cliffhanger in the first one, some people were frustrated; some people were super frustrated, some people were super excited. And everyone remembered it, and that was the main thing. Because some games just end and you never talk about it again.

In the sequel, we chose to just give you a whole new character, which also blew people's minds. It's the way we do things—if it's not jarring and it's not exciting you, (hopefully not frustrating you), just being impactful, then it's probably not worth doing. Hopefully people will be happy with the ending of Darksiders II. But I can't really comment more than that.

To wrap up, here's something I've been curious about lately in general: What does the word fantasy mean to you? What makes a world a fantasy world? What do fantasy games need more or less of?

To me… I play a lot of RPGs and I read a lot of fantasy novels so when you first say "Fantasy" to me, I think of elves and warriors and magic. But I think that as far as game genres, and when we're talking about art direction, to me, it's just anything that we're not photo-referencing.

When I say 'Hey, let's go more fantasy with it' when I'm talking about art, a lot of times, you can just have like, waterfalls spilling out of building windows in this desolate apocalyptic scene, and it's more fantasy. It's not just, you know, a hollowed-out building. You could see that in Detroit. Adding fantasy elements, it's just something that you couldn't possibly see.

I've been enjoying games that are definitely fantasy but aren't Tolkien-style fantasy. Gravity Rush, Bastion, The Secret World, etc.

Yeah, and I've always been fascinated by… I love elves and dwarves as much as everyone else, but I love worlds that blur the lines and introduce new elements. That's why even when I was doing Battle Chasers there were giant robots and guns and swords and wizards… it was kind of a mishmash. But yeah, you're right, it doesn't just have to be Lord of the Rings fantasy.

Thanks for your time.

Definitely, it was fun.

The new Darksiders II map isn't the only thing that's going to be grand when THQ/Vigil Games' next hack and slash title releases next month (the map is said to be double the size of its predecessor). It's also a shared quality with the fiendish enemies you face off against. It's a wonder that the protagonist, Death, can hold his own with his comparatively tiny scythe.

There are a ton of quick cuts in this newest trailer, but I spotted a lot of visuals and enemies from the E3 demo I experienced last month.

The sinister sounding Darksiders II: Soul Harvest is more than just an iOS marketing tie-in that let's fans of all things dark and stalky unlock special goodies prior to the game's release next month. It's also how I imagine the anthropomorphic personification of the end of all things would get things done in the digital age. Why risk your unlife traveling to Waffle House to harvest 12 souls when there's an app for that?

Being Death is a busy job. Imagine having to personally attend the end point of every life in the universe, gathering each and every soul and carrying them by hand to their final destinations. It's unrewarding. It's exhausting. It's downright dangerous, really, as anyone that's read Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse can tell you.

Face it (or grinning skull it, per your preference): no one personally attends anything anymore. We video conference. We email. We order in. Why should the harvester of souls behave any differently? I know we like to hold tight to tradition, and for some reason picturing death as a scary skellington with a bloody big scythe is comforting to us, but holding our fictional explanations of difficult concepts to a higher standard than we hold ourselves is bullshit.

The modern, connected Death rides a pale Prius, but only to the store to buy groceries. He's got a plaid button up with tiny, thematically significant skulls all over it. He wears skinny jeans, because he likes to imagine he has skin somewhere. He wears glasses with transition lenses that go dark in the sunlight. He has a pair of expensive ear buds threaded through the holes on the side of his head, dangling playfully from either side of his jawbone.

And he has an iPhone. When he wants to harvest souls he opens up an app and taps on a spot with his stylus (no skin, remember?). Oh look, the Atlanta Modeling Academy has nine souls to harvest. Funny, he would have thought there'd be more. Oh well. *taps*

Darksiders II: Soul Harvest simulates this experience, allowing players to harvest three locations every ten minutes. The more souls harvested, the more rewards are unlocked. They've got mobile wallpapers, a Prima Games Dungeon Guide (there's a dungeon. There's another!), an issue of the Darksiders digital comic and some sort of in-game weapon. And harvesting souls that have checked in at Best Buy earns players extra points, just like the real death.

Darksiders II: Soul Harvest [iTunes]

Edit: It's not my fault Darksiders and Darkstalkers are so damn close. Come on, Capcom and THQ, get your shit together. *hides*

I'd sure love to play a kickass game based on Skeletor. That may not be an option right now, but fortunately there's Vigil's upcoming Darksiders II, whose protagonist Death looks a fair bit like He-Man's blue-hooded nemesis.

Earlier this week I spoke with Darksiders II creative driector Joe Madureira about the game's art, design, and vision. Mid-conversation, I asked him what he made of "The Skeletor Comparison."

"We heard that early on," Madureira said, "and we laughed about it. Honestly, I think it was one of the reasons that I took the teeth off [Death's] mask, because I didn't want it to be an actual skull face. Then it literally would be Skeletor. But we weren't worried about it, it's kind of funny, it's kind of a funny connection."

But really, there are worse people your protagonist could be compared to. "I'll take it," Madureira said. "I like He-Man, I like Skeletor! It's the 80's comeback, man. And look, you're never going to play a Skeletor game. It's not going to happen, so you might as well just buy Darksiders II."

I mean, there might be some Skeletor game in the future, but I still take his point.

I'll have more of our conversation about art and design of Darksiders II later this week.