Darksiders II – Death is dead

They might have snapped up many ex-employees of developer Vigil Games but Crysis publisher Crytek has confirmed there’ll be no new Darksiders.

When the assets of THQ were auctioned off last month the only thing that wasn’t sold, other than THQ’s core publishing business, was Darksiders developer Vigil Games.

Although there was some interest from Bayonetta developer Platinum Games, of all people, in the end nobody bought Vigil outright – although German publisher Crytek did snap up the majority of the staff afterwards.

But according to a new interview on GamesBeat they have no interest in continuing the Darksiders series. In fact it seems as if what Vigil were working on at the time – which is currently unknown but may well have been Darksiders III – is what stopped Crytek from buying them originally.




‘We had chosen Austin as the destination for [our U.S. branch], and we needed a lean and core team of experts to run the studio. At the same time, we didn’t want to continue with Darksiders III, since that doesn’t fit with our strategy,’ said Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli.

‘So when I heard that [THQ laid off everyone at Vigil], I decided on Saturday morning to fly out to meet with them to see if the team would be interested to join our mission, which is significantly different than what this team has done before.’

What Crytek has the new studio working on hasn’t yet been announced but Yerli insists that the new team will have plenty of creative freedom, even though they seem to have been told roughly what kind of game is wanted.

Crytek, which also owns the UK developer previously known as Free Radical Design, did very well out of the THQ collapse and also acquired the Homefront franchise for itself. Which is handy as they were the ones making the sequel for THQ.

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