Crytek Has No Plans To Continue The Darksiders Franchise

I’m not a big fan of the Darksiders franchise but some of you are and I’ll admit that there was a good leap forward from the first game to last year’s Darksiders 2. It may have been interesting to see where Vigil would take the series in Darksiders 3 and what improvements or changes would come in. However,  THQ has gone belly up and it’s appendages have been hacked off and sold to the highest bidder. It’s properties and affiliated studios are now scattered across the gaming industry.

If THQ was a human body, Vigil Studios would be the appendix – that organ that nobody seems to want or need. The studio went down with THQ and a number of its developers found their way to Crytek. This might lead you to believe that Darksiders 3 may still see day and could even be running on Crytek’s CryEngine but alas that isn’t going to happen, not anytime soon anyway.

Instead the Vigil staffers have recongregated to form Crytek USA which will be headed up by former Vigil boss David Adams.

“We were surprised when nobody bid on Vigil”, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli told GamesBeat. “We would have liked to have bid, but there were too many unknowns.” Yerli also said that part of what kept Crytek from bidding on Vigil was what they were currently working on but after a phone conversation with Adams, Yerli met with the devs in Austin and decided to form a new studio based around that core Vigil dev team.

“We had chosen Austin as the destination for [our U.S. branch], and we needed a lean and core team of experts to run the studio. At the same time, we didn’t want to continue with Darksiders 3, since that doesn’t fit with our strategy. So when I heard that [THQ laid off everyone at Vigil], I decided on Saturday morning to fly out to meet with them to see if the team would be interested to join our mission, which is significantly different than what this team has done before.”

Instead, Yerli claims the team will work on a project that “the team identifies as what they want to do”, insisting that Crytek didn’t simply task them with their own game concept. “Right now, they just know what the strategy of Crytek is and the framework we need to satisfy, but none of that drives what the game is about.”

Whether we may yet see a new Darksiders remains anyone’s guess but Crytek also acquired the Homefront IP and you can expect a sequel to that to continue development.