14 DAY TRIAL // Gamers knew Darksiders was going to have a sequel soon after the launch of the first title, with the game ending suggesting it and with publisher THQ saying that the game has been such a surprising success that development on a new game in the series was already underway.
But it seems that War, the bulky action hero of the first Darksiders, will not be the protagonist of the second game.
Danny Bilson, who is an executive vice president at publisher THQ, has told the IGDA Leadership Forum that, “There's only one apocalypse - I couldn't very well have four different apocalypses, one for each rider.”
He added some information about the actual gameplay in Darksiders 2, saying, “It has some new mechanics and some very robust features that differentiate it a lot and grow it from the first game because you have to build on the first one, you can't repeat it. I think that's very important in franchise-building.”
At this year's E3 trade show THQ has also said that it plans to make Darksiders 2 twice as big as the first game while making sure that returning fans see familiar elements while newcomers experience the same blend of exploration and combat.
Darksiders currently has a Metacritic score of more than 80 on both the Xbox 360 and on the PlayStation 3 and there's talk that the script for a movie adaptation of the video game is now being written.
The sequel is under development at Vigil Games, a developer which is also currently working on Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millenium Online, a MMO based around the Space Marine mythology of the Games Workshop table top game.
Initial reports suggested that it will take two years for the Darksiders sequel to be created and THQ has talked about putting it out during fiscal 2013, so fans of the series will have to wait a bit before they experience the apocalypse all over again.