http://www.gametrailers.com/video/story-trailer-darksiders/49407?type=wmv
Gee, I sure do love the bible! Using it as source material for a video game plot is probably the most creative idea I've heard in the past five minutes. And bro, as soon as I heard that demonic choir belting out broken Latin, I knew shit was about to get real. And by "real," I mean laughably pretentious (if you're convinced that Darksiders is going to be a good game, there is a 95% chance you don't even know what that word means).
Let's face it: the bible is outdated. How could you trust the writings of a civilization that hadn't even invented the iPhone yet? And pitting heaven against hell in a video game is like adapting a young adult novel about vampire abstinence into a film, in that both make me want to jump off a cliff and land on a switch which makes all the creators involved jump off a significantly higher cliff.
"But wait," you tell me, "the main character's name is War! That's pretty fucking deep!" No. Naming characters, like children, after abstract concepts, is a good way to get people to pick on them for the rest of their lives. In storytelling, hardly anything is more obnoxious than going out of your way to spell out symbolism. The trailer convinced me that, as is the case with the first one hundred pages of
The Sound and the Fury, that the narrator was literally retarded.
The graphics are OK, I guess. But giving everyone epic level 80 World of Warcraft gear is the visual equivalent of going to Arby's and ordering food; just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. And for some reason, like Arby's, it appears that everything is covered in melted cheese for no reason. By the same token, I venture that anyone who buys this game will feel the same kind of soul-crushing remorse as someone who has just ingested a Bacon Cheddar Roastburger.
Second, and please take these words to heart, I don't care if you think a game suffers from a lack of originality. I especially don't appreciate a blind judgment of a person's character and intelligence based on your personal opinions. Who gives a shit if a game contains elements of the Bible. By your logic, anything that even mentions the words "heaven" or "hell" would be considered, as you put it, "outdated". People sometimes seem to forget that this is an entertainment industry and as such, being critical about something that's created purely for the sake of fun, make you look, to use your own words again, "laughably pretentious". You should try and examine your arguments when using that word; sometimes it just makes you look worse.
Sure, chances are good that this game won't have anything we haven't seen before, but I know that I will probably have a blast with it anyway.
I don't get it?