There’s a lot of room to talk about the overt game influences featured as mechanics in Vigil Games’s Darksiders. But let’s not forget that Vigil was creating the game while some of its influences were in production.
Take the ‘Voidwalker,’ for example. According to Vigil’s general manager David Adams, the studio had conceived the idea for the Portal-style gun before seeing Valve’s downloadable.
“That one is a weird amalgamation,” Adams told me when in a recent phone interview. “We’ve been working on the game a long time. We had the item — which we called the Voidwalker — specced out as one of our gear items before Portal even came out.”
Adams admits that Portal had an effect on the design of the ‘Voidwalker’ after the team played the game. He says its impossible not to be influenced by other games.
“I’m not going to say Portal didn’t influence the direction it took in some way.
“But the general idea was there, of making holes in the world and moving between them. The idea definitely evolved after playing Portal. It was like, ‘Oh my god this is kind of like what we were going to do only they did some stuff cooler.’ “
“It’s nearly impossible not to be influenced by what you play. When you play an awesome game and you’re like, ‘hey that’s kind of like that Voidwalker, maybe we can do this and that.’”
Games copy games. And in the zanier scenarios like this one, studios could be fiddling with the same type of mechanic. I remember listening to Pandemic designer Tom French talk about Assassin’s Creed hitting while the studio was working on The Saboteur on a not-so-recent episode of the EA Podcast. Free-climbing was something they could call their own for only a short time.
“For the record,” Adams tells me, “orange and blue is a perfect set of contrasting colors. We debated that endlessly: ‘we can’t do that, that’s too much like Portal.’ But ‘yeah, they’re pleasant colors, they’re contrasting on the color spectrum …’ There’s logical reasons for doing that.”
