Styx: Shards of Darkness Interview

Cyanide’s Lead Level Designer, Julien Desourteaux spoke to WCCF Tech about Cyanide’s upcoming stealth game, Styx: Shards of Darkness. In the interview, Desourteaux discussed the lovable goblin protagonist, Styx and his franchise potential, new features in Shards of Darkness in comparison to Styx: Master of Shadows, and some technical details of the game’s multiplatform release. An excerpt:

This sequel runs on Unreal Engine 4 and features “larger environments”. Can you quantify roughly how larger than the first game?

Rather than solely taking place in a huge tower (like the tower of Akenash in Styx: Master of Shadows), Styx will travel around to a variety of new locations in the world. These include airships in flight, a hunter village, a huge city under a mountain, roach-infested mines and more.

With regards to level design, we added many different ways to improve player navigation in the level, while keeping the same degree of verticality we had in the first game.

What’s the single biggest improvement in the feature set when comparing Shards of Darkness to Master of Shadows?

Styx’s flow of movement has been improved, and animations are much smoother. He can now use ropes, and the crafting skill tree branch offers more freedom for players to experiment.

Having more diversity in missions and their objectives was one of our main intentions for this sequel. The player will almost always have a few objectives active at the same time, so they can choose the order in which they want to achieve them.

This feature is good for replay value, as some objectives have alternative ways to complete them. Additionally, in the co-op multiplayer, players can choose to stick together or split up to achieve the objectives.

In terms of stealth gameplay, what do you think will set apart Styx: Shards of Darkness from the many games in the same genre?

I think Styx himself, our nimble, agile and fragile goblin, is the primary asset that sets our game apart from others. For example, when detected you do not have the strength or weapons to fight enemies face-to-face like in many other stealth games. Because of this, direct confrontation is not a good option – this game really harks back to the roots of the stealth genre.

The official description hints at a “complex narrative”. Can you give us any tidbits? Also, do you have an estimate on how long it will take to complete Shards of Darkness?

There are a lot of different characters in Shards of Darkness, and a complex plot with twists, surprises and epic moments, but I don’t want to spoil it for you!

Regarding the length of the game we did a lot of playtests. The average player will complete the main campaign of Shards of Darkness in around 15 hours, but that’s not including the completion of every secondary objective and emblem.