I hate Zelda because of Water temples. I almost hated Darksiders because of the Black Tower.
The other night I finished my plod to the main boss of the Black Tower, an ebony maze in Vigil Games’s Darksiders. Its convoluted multi-tiered design and Portal-like mechanics drove my pre-frontal cortex to exhaustion -- the chariot driver was no longer controlling the wild horses.
“Samael can f--cking blow me,” I announced to the TV as I attempted to adjust neon blue beams inside the tower’s gothic innards. At this point my girlfriend felt the need to intervene, reminding me that I was talking to a digital character.
After I quit for the evening, I remembered how much I hated Water temples.
I asked Vigil Games GM David Adams what was up with the Black Tower, and if the studio purposefully tried to give us all a rougher time in the dungeon. His take? No, not so much. But the Black Tower was a product of a last-minute rush.
“No, we didn’t go into it wanting to make that,” Adams told me over the phone, laughing as I explain how easily I get angered at games. “It’s funny. A lot of level design for us grows organically. The first thing we do is come up with a high-level thing -- what are the cool things we want you to do in that area? Then we brainstorm some puzzle ideas, boss fight ideas. We kind of put it together.”
“I wish there was some master plan behind what you do. You just kind of do it and then iterate. Try something else.
“It was the last dungeon we did. It was the one we were rushing to finish towards the end. It definitely didn’t get the time and care -- but I’m proud of it. There’s a lot of cool puzzles in there and stuff.”
I equated my frustration with the Black Tower to Zelda Water temples in our conversation. Adams didn’t comment on that specifically because we covered Zelda earlier.
Minutes before I told Adams that a lot of people are saying Vigil delivered the kind of Zelda game they’ve always wanted. I let the statement hang in the air.
“I won’t deny it. Zelda is my favorite franchise of all time,” Adams said.
“It kind of came out, I think a lot of games come out of this, where you’re sitting around and ‘Man, it would be cool if you could do this in this one game. But you could also do this in that other game.’
Darksiders is its own game, but the Zelda influence is too overt not to talk about. It’s something I’m sure Adams is tired of doing at this point. But he pressed on, talking about the studio’s initial influences.
“When we started, there were four of us. We were working on MMOs at the time and we really, really wanted to get into console development. It started with us talking about all the cool awesome games we played in our youth -- Castlevania, Metroid, Zelda, Kid Icarus, just a bunch of crazy games. “
“We got inspired and did the crazy thing and left and started Vigil.
“Zelda was definitely a big influence. Mostly early on -- we’d never made a console game so we were just looking at a lot of other games and how they structured it, how they did their pacing -- but at least for us we felt like as we went through the process, the game did start to take its own identity.
“It’s something that will definitely grow, if we get to continue on in the franchise -- yes.”
On a personal level, I love Zelda. Part of it was like, ‘Hey man, they don’t make these enough,’ he chuckled. “I have to go years without being able to play one!”
[image 1 source]
[image 2 source]
[image 3 source]
Contest:
10:00 AM on 01.19.2010
| 
Next time she cries at a film/show tell her she's being pathetic as its only a Film/Show.
On a side not iv'e been getting quite angry at Gracious&Glorious from Bayonetta (on Hard) - No witch-time D: .
The Black Tower was horseshit BECAUSE of one part in particular. After you break Azrael's second seal, the game doesn't really tell you what to do. The way you progress is arbitrarily use a jump pad in the corner of the room to jump super high (even though the other jump pads don't make you jump nearly as high, so it doesn't seem possible).
Check GameFAQs. There's like ten billion threads for it.
I remember seeing Jim's twitter about it, and here also. Can someone explain to little old me which parts of it were frustrating?
I tried to do two sections at once and it drove me insane. Those puzzles can be maddeningly tough (not to mention tons of hard baddies).
Some people had problems with the purple weight room (wasn't that bad at all), but the main problems that are flooding multiple message boards are "where to go after the second seal is broken".
Once you find out where the PATH is, it's easy as hell. I could also tell it was unfinished, because the beam guardians were extremely glitchy, and I would not only clip inside of them and get killed in a hit, but sometimes when I went for their head, I would teleport automatically to their feet (collision).
Either you don't have girls of your own, or you're very close to losing 'em. Or she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
Or, you're just really bad at telling jokes.
When did rerouting power ever sound like a fun mechanic?
It started with us talking about...Kid Icarus
Kid Icarus-styled game featuring one of the four horsemen CONFIRMED.
Now the end dungeon boss fights, holy crap I was cursing up a storm for a while.
The solutions to all beams and portals were obvious. You look at the bubble you have to electrify, and there was always only one path the beam could take.
When you come in the Black Throne, there's only one green door on the level Azrael is. Once you break the first seal, two portals appear, a red door becomes a green door and a first set of rotating platforms appear. Exact same pattern after second seal. Really, it's that hard to figure out?
It's not that bad.
maybe it was because i solved the puzzles by luck
maybe its because i did each section on a different day
azrael was f-ing annoying though
The only confusing piece of Black Tower for me was when I had a brainfart preventing me from realizing that I was supposed to drain water into a separate area using a portal.
I suppose it's the fact that I've been a huge Portal fan and completed every puzzle on the game, including those bonus 'challenging' puzzles..
All in all, I hated The Hollows the most, and got lost often.
Seriously, I don't get why people whine about them.
----------------------
I just finished the black tower last night, overall I think it took me about 3hrs, could be significantly less, or a little more. I thought it was fun, totally worked my brain over. But I could tell it was sort of incomplete because of how some of the "solutions" looked, you know, like that wasn't the way to go and I missed something, but it ends up working when I give it a shot.
The way that -I- got up to the third section was definitely NOT the way you were supposed to. You know the portal pad that is at the top of the spinning rocks in the middle? The one you use to direct the final beam? Yeah I managed to get a shot off on that and used it to get to the top door, not the pad that was off to the side that you were supposed to jump out of, I found that out on my way back down.
On the keeper boss things: I only got knocked off one time, and that was because I tried to land on him while he was spinning, dunno if that helps. :\
Overall, I thought the Black Tower was challenging and fun, even if I got slightly frustrated a couple of times, never to the point of anger, just more of a "hmph, now what! Guess I'll sit here and stare at the pieces for a minute." And that usually worked, running around looking at what I had to work with, where I needed to go, and maybe playing with the pieces for a minute to see what they do.
"THE BEAMS.....THE BEAMS"
F*ck you and your beams.
The game was polished, had overall good mechanics and is by no means bad, but the fact that even though it is a clone of Zelda outright it did NOTHING new on its own, not even putting its own unique spin on anything, made it so derivative that it was a complete waste of time. It represents everything wrong with the industry's lack of forward thinking design (at least from most developers) that it is completely pointless to play.
I own Okami, which is also a game which closely replicates the Zelda formula, but Okami still had its own unique feel and mechanics on top of the borrowed ones from Zelda and as such felt like its own game. Darksiders on the other hand, doesn't even have its own art style, its transparently World of Warcraft.
It insults me that they plan to make this into a series. Its already a series, just with a different name and a million times better.
Now, Water Temples... Man, screw Water Temples.
Glad I rented this, glad I beat it. Hope they don't make a sequel.
(sarcasm) What about all sequels that came or are coming out? Modern Warfare 2 did nothing out of the box. Or those who were once innovative, but are now just milking their franchises like Pokemon or Guitar Hero? Bayonetta is to Devil May Cry as Dante's Inferno is to God of War. Should we run at them with lit torches and pitchforks? They certainly aren't new ideas? God forbid they could be fun.
I understand the importance of innovation. though I ask you again, in the grand scheme of things do you really think the majority of games aren't really ripping off each other or do you just want to point the finger at Darksiders because they didn't throw in a couple new gimmicks? Face it, Zoonami CEO Martin Hollis said it best and I quote "Pauline Kael famously criticized films as being only about violence and romance: ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang'... Games are virtually all about violence, or at least conquest and dominance. So we can say games are all ‘Bang Bang, Bang Bang.'"
Also, Raven Software's Manveer Heir said "There are some outliers, but we continuously make the same games about the same things... The only things that change are our mechanics. We regularly have white male generic space marine characters as protagonists. Our NPCs are often cookie cutter and stereotypical. We use the same backdrops of post-nuclear apocalypse or colonizing Mars, or crazy fantasy worlds."
First off, Darksiders may include ideas and inspiration from other games, but there's no way you can claim that it isn't its own game at the same time.
Secondly, if you beat the game, I think it should be fairly obvious to you that there will indeed be a sequel.