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Armchair Empire interviews Denis Dyack

by Rick Powers - November 1, 2002, 5:36 pm EST
Discuss in talkback! Source: Armchair Empire

Eternal Darkness is now out in Europe and Japan, and Armchair Empire pumped Denis for information about it ...

Discuss it in Talkback!

Armchair Empire talked to Denis Dyack, head of Silicon Knights, about the recent release of Eternal Darkness. Here's a bit of what Denis had to say ...


How much research was done for the various elements of Eternal Darkness, like the weapons, the clothing, the nature of Good and Evil?

There was a tremendous amount of research that went into the game. Just on an historical level, we tried to make each weapon accurate. We tried to make the gameplay at least resemble what the weapons would be like and how it would play. Obviously, we had to make some modifications. In real life, for example, it takes two minutes to load a musket – we didn’t want people waiting around for two minutes to load a musket. And if you look at Eternal Darkness, there is a tremendous amount of historical facts that are left as lingering details that if people want to explore, they can. As an example, every period or every chapter in ED a very significant event occurs for mankind. The death of Charlemagne as an example. It was really considered to be the beginning of the Dark Ages [in Europe]. He was bringing on the start of a renaissance thing and mysteriously died and the movement was over. Another thing, people ask, “What were those pillars of flesh?” that were in the Forbidden City areas. Have you ever heard of a conqueror named Tamburlaine?

Yes.

That’s what he did. He used to go through, conquer cities, and build pillars of flesh. So we took those historical facts and made our own stories up with them and really hoped that people would learn things through osmosis.

And when it comes down to Good and Evil, that’s a very difficult question or theme to tackle if done properly. Certainly, Eternal Darkness was not black and white. By the time you finish, you really have to wonder if Pious was really a pawn or was he in control, what choices did he really have? We did what we could to make the player think about it and leave a dramatic impact once they finished the game. Hopefully, when you played the game, you really thought this game did something different than most games.


Be sure to head over to Armchair Empire and read the rest of the interview!

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