Gunfire says Darksiders 3 feels like ‘unfinished business’

Developer Gunfire has described how the desire to make a third Darksiders game survived the collapse of THQ and the end of the series’ original developer Vigil.

The journey to Darksiders 3 was interesting,” Gunfire president and Vigial founder David Adams told IGN. We actually finished DS2 and then a couple of months later THQ went bankrupt, which was kind of sucky.

Design director John Pearl added: They broke up the studio and didn’t put us up for auction. We were like, ‘We’re the Darksiders guys, surely somebody would buy us, right?’. Because we’d just finished DS2 we didn’t have another game in production at that point and we got the message back ‘nobody bought us, guys, we’re closing’. And that was just shocking. We weren’t expecting that.”

At that point it looked as if the Darksiders name had been lost for good, as it was owned by the now dead THQ.

There were some false positives along the way with other publishers that would maybe pick up the team, maybe there was a chance we could continue our work,” lead level designer Richard Vorodi added. We were always positive about whatever we were working on but in the back of our mind we were like ‘we want to do another Darksiders’.

Nordic Games went on to acquire not only several THQ licenses but also eventually the name itself. It then got in touch with Gunfire, which was home to much of the Vigil team, and Darksiders 3 was born.

Adams added that while Gunfire had a number of options available to it, thoughts seemed to always return to Darksiders. It felt like unfinished business,” he added.

Vorodi continued: I’m not concerned about legacy or anything like that. There’s an adage on Boy Scouts – you leave your campsite cleaner than you found it. I think if we can put this entry in the series out without damaging anything else and setting up the next one, potentially, then we’ve done out job.

Darksiders 3 was announced last week.