DeathSpank Interview

DeathSpank was officially released on PC yesterday, so the folks at Big Download figured it was a good time to grill Hothead CEO Vlad Ceraldi about why the action RPG took so long to reach our platform of choice, whether or not Thongs of Virtue will be ported over as well, and more.

What other PC additions and adjustments have been made to DeathSpank?

We added several features based on fan feedback from the console version. First, we added an equipment comparison function as we have a lot of loot and we wanted to make it easier for gamers to make decisions on what to equip at any given time. We probably should have had this on the console version and misjudged how important it was to some gamers but we had problems coming up with a solution that we liked that worked on a 480 interlaced TV–a standard you still need to support with consoles. Given we had higher resolution and fidelity available to us, it was easier for us to come up with a solution that we liked.

Again, given all the loot, gamers asked for a repository/treasure chest feature so we added one chest for each town and major area to make inventory management easier.

We had to rethink the game UI and make it easier to change weapons and select game menus and streamline as much of that activity as possible. An example of this is weapon slots and how you can set them up and switch them on the fly. We are really happy with the result and the design.

We added Steam Cloud saving ability and carried over the achievements and leaderboards as well. And . . . well, a host of small refinements and decisions that we think make DeathSpank a great PC experience.

When will the second DeathSpank game be released for the PC?

I can say that we are working on it but just like the Mac versions, we are not finished so there is no date announcement but everything is going well with these versions so when we are closer to final, we will be able to share that information.