PALGN: Hey Joe, thanks for taking the time out to chat to us. First just give us an overview on where you started in your career, what you do with Darksiders and in Vigil Games.
Joe: Hey guys, thanks for having me. My name is Joe Madureira, I’m the Creative Director of Darksiders, and I make sure everything that goes in and out of the game is looking top notch and high quality. I started off in this industry as in intern for Marvel, and I’m most well known for being the regular penciller for Uncanny X-Men. I also published my own comic series called Battle Chasers. When I entered the gaming industry, I worked with Tri-Lunar as a concept artist for Dragonkind, but the game was unfortunately cancelled. Eventually I came to co-establish Vigil Games, where we’re working on Darksiders and also Warhammer 40,000 Online. Though I mainly focus on refining everything, I do a lot of drawing and stuff myself when I can, and try help out the other artists as much as possible.
Joe Madureira, comic artist legend and Creative Director of Darksiders.
PALGN: When coming up with the designs and aesthetics of Darksiders, what exactly were your inspirations? We noticed that the game uses a lot of interesting colours, which is really interesting to see especially considering the whole doomsday theme of the game.
Joe: Coming from a comic book background, I felt that the comic kind of style and dynamic use of colours worked with Darksiders. Though the game is about the end of the world, we felt that lots of colours and interesting locales would bring it some interesting life. I mean though the game has some serious moments, we didn’t want it to be too serious and gave it a nice style, mixing up the colours to create a really unique universe that is visually attractive. The end of the world isn’t always just brown, it’s boring if it were like that. So a lot of our inspiration and ideas came from comics and such.
PALGN: The mere fact you have so much vibrancy in the game certainly has us excited, as we here love colour! So let’s face it, the protagonist War is a pretty bad-arse character, and we have to ask what gave you the inspiration to create such a powerful and awesome looking character? That and his sword, The Chaos Eater, too.
Joe: Well one rule I have when designing characters is to focus on their main standout features. I mean for example if I were to draw a goat, I’d focus on its horns, because a goats main characteristics are its horns! So with War, we focused a whole heap on his armour and sword. We wanted his armour to look battle worn and used and at the same time bad-ass, and with the sword we wanted to give it as much detail and crazy looks as possible. Throughout the development we just kept making it bigger and for me, a sword only looks even more awesome the bigger it is, and we’re pretty happy with how War came out overall.
Look at my horse, my horse is amazing.
PALGN: Well War is certainly looking pretty bad-ass by our standards. In terms of the gameplay of Darksiders, what games would you compare it to the most?
Joe: We’ve had a lot of different comparisons with the game, but internally we like to think of it as a blend between an adventure game like Zelda or Castlevania mixed with the more ballistic nature of your action brawler games. We’ve also tried to make the exploration part more exciting, because usually in adventure games it takes a while to finally get some crazy awesome weapon, but in Darksiders we made it so that exploring as much as possible will land you some cool gear in no time. We think we’ve created a really unique experience with Darksiders and people are going to love it.
PALGN: We’re definitely looking forward to finding some wicked gear in the game that’s for sure. How many hours can players expect to grab out of the game when just focusing on the storyline?
Joe: Honestly, about 20-25 hours, but we don’t think people will blast through it as there’s a lot of exploring and some really tough obstacles to get through. You’d have to be one pretty skilled gamer to blast through the game quickly, so it’d be interesting to see if anyone can speed run it.
PALGN: Well, we’re happy to try our best and take that challenge! One common issue that’s been going on in the industry is development of multi-platform games, particularly when it comes to the differences in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Did you guys run into any troubles with developing for both platforms?
Joe: Well it’s definitely known by now that the 360 is a little easier to develop for than the PS3, but at the same time when we have some PS3 specialists working with us, we never ran into any massive problems. Both versions of the game are looking really good, and honestly you’d really have to sit down and look hard to find any differences between the two. We think we’ve done a great job on both consoles and gamers on both fronts will be happy.
The basic armour of War is the equivalent to epic gear in WoW.
PALGN: Without spoiling anything for our readers, what would be your favourite part of Darksiders?
Joe: Hmm, well about midway through the game, you meet a new character throughout the storyline who goes on a rant and agrees with War about the current situation happening between Heaven and Hell. He goes into a lot of detail about it and is a really interesting character, and after the speech you actually get to fight him. I think that gamers will see what I mean when they get up to that certain part of the game.
PALGN: We’re definitely looking forward to it! Apart from Warhammer 40,000 Online which is your other project, what’s next for Vigil Games?
Joe: Well we’re definitely going to focus on a lot of Warhammer 40,000 Online and I mean so far, the game is shaping up really nicely, there’s some really bad ass things going on in it. As for other projects..well, we’ll announce them when we’re ready I guess *laughs*, is that detailed enough for you?
PALGN:We can’t complain, we have to try get some info out! And finally, as someone who is looked up to by many people around the world, and as a Creative Director, do you have any tips for aspiring artists or game developers?
Joe: Learn to take criticism! This is probably one of the most important parts of working in this medium. As an artist, you’re going to get ideas and designs thrown back at you over and over again and it can get really frustrating, but you just have to sit through it and keep at it. You’re probably going to run into a lot of failures and a lot of problems because that’s just what happens in this industry, I mean a lot of games get cancelled out and that’s the harsh reality. But yeah you just gotta keep at it and not give up, because the only way you improve is through that.
Amazing art.
PALGN: Great advice from a great artist. That’s all the questions we have for you, so thanks for your time Joe and good luck with the launch of the game, we’re looking forward to playing it!
Joe: No problems, thanks and have fun with the game!
Darksiders will release on January 7, 2010 simultaenously on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
PALGN would like to thank Paul Houlihan from THQ for organising the interview, and Joe Madureira from Vigil Games for taking the time out to answer our questions.
Loading...
