Darksiders III likely to be smaller in scope than DSII

Lead designer Haydn Dalton has said that if Darksiders II sells well enough to justify another sequel, Vigil will probably aim for a tighter, busier game world.

Speaking to Videogamer, Dalton said if Darksiders 2 moves 4 million units a third entry is almost guaranteed, but that he expects THQ president Jason Rubin to check the team's ambitious world building.

"Maybe what he might do is turn around and say, 'We'll do another Darksiders game, but we'll try and reduce the scope so that we can make it even higher polished,'" Dalton said.

"Maybe he says, 'Bring the scope down a little bit, we'll still do another game but it's a lot more focused'. That's not such a bad thing to do either."

Dalton said Darksiders II's scope is "huge"; early reports indicate the world size is about four times that of the first Darksiders, something our own hands-on previews have backed up. The enormous scale may be one of the reasons why THQ has delayed the game well beyond its original launch plans, and Dalton doesn't seem averse to the idea of scaling it back.

"Reducing the size of the world might be seen as a big impact from a player point of view, you know what, we might do a lot more interaction within the world if the world was smaller," he said.

"And there might be even more polish, there might be a lot more animated things in the environment and a lot more detail or destruction or whatever it might be in the world because of a reduce in size. Rather than doing sheer square-footage, it's more like what can you do in less room by focusing on it, and depth [and] interaction within a smaller environment.

"Initially it seems like if you make it smaller that's not as good. Well, that's not necessarily true. Quantity is not about quality. Just because you make something bigger doesn't mean it's better."

Darksiders II arrives on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at the end of August, and is also expected on Wii U.