DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue Interview

Gamasutra had the opportunity to fire off some questions to Hothead Games producer Hamish Millar about Thongs of Virtue, their forthcoming DeathSpank sequel. A three-paragraph snip, as you might have expected:

“We thought of it like a great Bond film,” Millar tells Gamasutra. “We came up with a wish list of all the amazing things we can do with this guy. From there, Ron [Gilbert] went through and crafted the story to bring it all together.”

The game draws influence from a range of time periods, and sees DeathSpank wielding weapons ranging from medieval axes to sci-fi ray guns. “We didn’t make any assumptions about the world,” Millar adds. “The reality is that there is a lot of non-conformity in this game; it doesn’t conform to the things a lot of people take for granted.”

Thongs of Virtue follows the same formula as the original game, and promises to offer more quest variety, with a greater emphasis on “puzzle-focused and adventure quests.” Hothead admitted that the first game featured too many fetch quests, and hopes to rectify that imbalance in Thongs of Virtue. “We always said this game was ‘Diablo meets Monkey Island,'” Millar says, “but the reality was that there was a huge amount of Diablo and a little bit on Monkey Island. We worked out that balance in this game.