Tom Galt, lead designer on The Darkness II, sounds like he just got the wind knocked out of him. He's sitting in a nightclub down the street from this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), responding to complaints about his team at Digital Extremes replacing original developer Starbreeze for the sequel.

"Oh it hurts," he says, before giving his best PR quote about the team being capable. "We have a huge amount of faith in our team and ourselves, and we have a lot of incredibly talented people... I appreciate everyone's love of Starbreeze -- they've done some amazing stuff -- but I think we bring our own unique talents and ideas to the table."

As one of the key figures on the new game, Galt's been on the receiving end of mixed feedback since 2K made the announcement back in February. On message boards like NeoGAF, fans expressed excitement about there being a sequel, but skepticism over the developer switch.

"Why bother without Starbreeze? This is like getting a direct to video sequel," said Jo-El, as one of roughly 20 comments bemoaning the change.

"No Starbreeze means its [sic] doomed in my books," added mil6es.

"I find the lack of Starbreeze disturbing," said Dead Man Typing.

But are these comments fair? The response Galt can't give, either out of professional courtesy or because he isn't aware, is that Starbreeze today is an almost entirely different company than it was when it developed The Darkness, and asking for it to work on the game today is comparable to asking for a new team to make it.

Since 2008, Starbreeze has weathered a public game cancellation, a staff exodus, a decision to abandon its internal engine, and multiple delays on its latest project. Then, just three days before this year's GDC, its CEO resigned. The story doesn't have the messy lawsuit and media-baiting one-liners of Infinity Ward vs. Activision, but to an outsider, the end result is the same: the team that built the company's reputation is now divorced from the name they made it on.

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Since 2008, Starbreeze has weathered a public game cancellation, a staff exodus, a decision to abandon its internal engine, and multiple delays on its latest project. Then, just three days before this year's GDC, its CEO resigned. The story doesn't have the messy lawsuit and media-baiting one-liners of Infinity Ward vs. Activision, but to an outsider, the end result is the same: the team that built the company's reputation is now divorced from the name they made it on.

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While RedLime has yet to show its face publicly, and EA ended up canceling the Bourne game due to star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass dropping out of the latest Bourne film, insiders say that both of these games were conceived as evolutions of what the company had been doing -- ways to take the Starbreeze formula of first-person action games, and apply it to different licenses.

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In Bourne's case, that meant one of the big selling points was first-person melee combat. Starbreeze had done something similar with the Riddick games, but it had grown outdated and was clumsier than needed for a game about a secret agent, so the team spent a lot of time evolving that type of up-close combat to work in a more stylish way. That way it would be a feature than fans identified as part of the Starbreeze formula, and thus a natural evolution of what the company had done in the past. Bourne was a smaller game for the studio, though. "It was meant to be a quick project," says a source.

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RedLime, on the other hand, was the more ambitious of the two. Since its announcement, rumors have pegged it as a new game in EA's classic Syndicate franchise (pictured below), which our sources confirm is correct. The idea is that the game will mix the Syndicate universe with first-person gameplay, with a bigger focus on multiplayer than past Starbreeze games. "RedLime was meant to be the step up from Darkness, where we sort of took all the mistakes we did with Darkness and do them right, while Bourne was more meant to be a quick spin-off which was a little bit more focused, a little bit more easy," says a source.

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Kristiansson, while not acknowledging that RedLime is Syndicate, says that the biggest difference between it and previous Starbreeze games will be the focus on a core mechanic rather than on narrative or technology: "I think [our] technology focus used to be strong, and we had a strong storytelling focus in The Darkness, but now I think we mostly focus on the core gameplay mechanic. We're trying to be innovative there -- and we have something really exciting in our new EA title in this area... A lot of it has to do with going from more of a technology-oriented company and story-oriented company, and becoming more of a gameplay-focused company. I think now when we start pitching and creating a concept, we always start with the question, 'What's the core mechanic? What are you doing in this game that's different from other shooters, or other similar games?' A few years ago, we weren't too focused on that. We managed to pull off a great genre mix in Riddick, with shooting, sneaking, fighting, and dialogue, but there was no real core mechanic that differentiated it from other games. Now we are trying to differentiate ourselves more."

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Since Syndicate's inception, however, the game has gone through a rocky development process, with issues ranging from staff disagreements over the overall direction to problems with the technology. But the biggest difficulty -- and the one alluded to at the beginning of this feature -- has been that much of the staff has left along the way...

...staff turnover came to a head when seven of the team's most senior members left to start a new company called MachineGames. That group included Starbreeze founder Högdahl, as well as veterans such as Bourne director Jerk Gustafsson and longtime Starbreeze art director Jens Matthies. Publicly, the members gave two reasons for leaving in a December 2009 interview with EDGE magazine: they wanted to form a smaller company, and they wanted to work on an original game. Essentially, they wanted to move away from the kind of situation they had while working on Syndicate.

"I think some of those guys preferred the way of working that we had previously, like with Riddick -- with a smaller team, etc.," says Kristiansson.

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Shurs said:

This article was written by Matt Leone.

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Shurs said:

This article was written by Matt Leone.

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V_Ben said:

...True?

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Shurs said:

I meant nothing by it, other than to shine a light on the author the article.

I'm hoping to start a new trend where we recognize writers in addition to outlets.

Not that there is anything wrong with the way you presented the article, V_Ben, as I wouldn't have known it existed if not for your thread.

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MiniBossBattle said:

1up shoulda interviewed some ex-Starbreeze staffers...

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