You know, the long-awaited followup to DeathSpank?
Make no mistake: I think we all knew that Hothead Games was going to make a sequel to its action-RPG comedy DeathSpank. Heck, the original game ends with a very transparent cliffhanger for a follow-up. So it's not a big surprise. But who would have guessed that Hothead was nearly done making that sequel?
It's 'cause thongs are funny. But that's absolutely the case, as EA and Hothead have revealed DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, the sequel to the original DeathSpank, which will be out on September 21 on PSN and September 22 on XBLA. Of course, Hothead didn't turn around a sequel to DeathSpank in the three months between the game's July release and now. Quite the contrary; according to Hothead, Thongs of Virtue was in development alongside the original release of the game. That's right; they were engaging in the dark art of making the sequel before the previous game was properly released, Back To the Future II/III style.
== TEASER ==And it sounds like concurrent development with the first game means that DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue won't be an especially different game from its predecessor. According to an interview with Hothead Producer Hamish Millar over at Kotaku, the new DeathSpank will be mechanically and artistically unchanged from the first game, so players who played that original game will know exactly what to expect from Thongs of Virtue. However, though the core mechanics will remain unchanged, the balance of gameplay systems is being altered: Thongs will offer more puzzle and adventure gameplay than its predecessor. The game will add some new items types to the game (including the somewhat-anachronistic addition of proper guns) and promised to be a full 50 percent longer than its predecessor. It's because people use underwear to cover their private parts. That's what makes it funny. Of course, one has to wonder if a DeathSpank sequel developed alongside the first game and released so shortly after would be able to address some of the issues players had with the first game. The press release boasts about the new items, locations, characters, and monsters that were added to the sequel, but the interview at Kotaku paints the game as a standalone expansion pack that is mechanically similar to the original game. There's still no online co-op in the game, with Hothead instead updating the game's asymmetrical co-op with a new character for the second player to control. Also, your original campaign progress from DeathSpank will not be carried over to the sequel: you'll start afresh from level one and work your way back to the top.
And all of that is why this game is not called DeathSpank 2. And thongs are like underwear, but they don't have a lot of material, so they don't cover much of the private parts. That's the humor. Kotaku has some more details about Thongs of Virtue in its interview with Millar, but I'm curious as to how a mostly similar follow-up to DeathSpank is received, especially if, apart from some asset changes, it's very similar to the original game. We're bound to have more details ridiculously soon, because that game is coming out in September.
