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.
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.
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.
All images courtesy of Kotaku.
Should be interesting to see how well received this one is, with the first part out just a couple weeks ago.
More content? So did they just hold out content from the first game then knowing a sequel was 2 months away?
So this is a pass for me.
With the amount of complaints DeathSpank had for not being very long, there is something decidingly underhanded about this announcement.
Will this set a trend for future downloadable games? A publisher begins to notice their game will probably end up 10+ hours long, then ask/tell the developers to cut it into two, but then stay silent about it so potential customers don't think they're being nickel and dimed until it's too late.