Back in the early days of this console generation, The Darkness successfully transitioned from a much loved graphic novel, to a successful story-driven first-person shooter for PS3. Players itching to continue demonized mobster Jackie Estacado’s story will be surprised by the amount of action, story, new darkness powers, and exciting gameplay that the The Darkness 2 brings to the table.

I had a chance to talk to Sheldon Carter, the Project Director at Digital Extremes (developer of The Darkness 2) at PAX Prime to discuss the new features, story, and gameplay tweaks that players can expect from the sequel.

Check out our Darkness 2 developer interview and trailer after the break.

SonyRumors (Jan): After the fairly conclusive ending to the story of the first game, how does the development team plan to continue Jackie’s story?

Sheldon Carter: Yeah, Darkness 1 wrapped up nicely in that ok Jackie killed uncle Paulie and there’s this ambigous ending with Jenny and Jackie kind of in a white space. So what we did basically is we pick up the story two years after those events.

Now Jackie is now the Don of the Estacado family; he’s living large, he’s the mob boss and he’s suppressed the Darkness for the past two years, until an attack that provokes him to release the Darkness once again.

For us story-wise, the first game was written by Paul Jenkins (who also wrote some of the graphic novels), we had to have him as a writer in our game too. It’s a natural extension, a true sequel to the previous game.

SonyRumors (Jan): Is The Darkness II still set in New York? Or are there new locations?

Sheldon Carter: Well, Jackie’s family is from New York and he’s the Don there so there’s lots of New York locations, and by that I mean there’s a lot of NEW locations in New York that you haven’t seen before in the previous game. And then one of the hallmarks of The Darkness is going to hell, you did that in the first game so we’re doing that as well.

SonyRumors (Jan): What Darkness powers are available in this new game?

Sheldon Carter: There’s quite a few, the ones that we’ve talked about so far, the ones you saw in the demo (PAX Show floor Demo) are the Black Hole, which is a returning power. It’s kind of new now because you actually have to rip out a black heart out of an enemy and then throw that heart to create the black hole.

We’ve got Gun Channeling, which lets you channel the Darkness through your guns so it gives you amplified damage or unlimited ammo for a short amount of time.

All the powers, all the demon arms have progression in them so the first stage of gun channeling is nice, but as you level up, you get to the point where you can see through walls when you’re gun channeling, and it’ll even auto target for you. So if you’ve got automatic weapons and you’re gun channeling, your arms are going all over the place just picking off everything.

SonyRumors (Jan): With the demon arms, the player now has to control four arms which sounds difficult, how does the development team implement controls for this?

Sheldon Carter: It’s pretty intuitive, essentially you have your L2 and R2 shooting your guns, or if you’re single wielding then one controls your aim/zoom while the other shoots. And then L1 and R1 act as your demon arms. The left bumper is your grabbing arm and the right bumper is your slashing arm.

SonyRumors (Jan): Are the Darklings still a big part of the game?

Sheldon Carter: Yeah, the Darklings are back; well Darkling actually and that’s the big change; one of our mantras when we started working on the game was in service of story, so we thought the Darklings in the first game were these throwaway little dudes that you used to solve puzzles and were pretty much gameplay tools.

For Darkness II, what we wanted to do was create a real character, create a sidekick, a buddy that could be with you throughout the whole game; he could bring comic relief to situations as well as help you out in combat. He’ll jump up on a guy and distract him, he’ll grab a guy by the leg and pull him out of cover. He’s pretty fun.

SonyRumors (Jan): While a lot of players missed it, The Darkness (original) featured full black and white movies – like To Kill a Mockingbird – found on random TV’s in the game. Are those kind of movies coming back in the sequel?

Sheldon Carter: We can’t really talk about too much about that becaue it would ruin some of the story if I told you about what those are, and how those work but yeah we loved that part of the first one too.

*Jan’s Note* Judging by Sheldon’s answer, it seems the full movies are back and have some correlation to the actual story in the game. So by now I’m pretty excited to find out what movies they’re going to be, but Sheldon was very good at avoiding answering them.

SonyRumors (Jan): What guns are available for players to use in the game?

Sheldon Carter: Well, it’s a shooter first and foremost and really everything that you’d imagine in a first person shooter (with a mob focus), so instead of high-tech weapons, we’ve got guns like the Colt Commandos, we’ve got Uzi’s, we’ve got Desert Eagles in the pistol category, we’ve got different types of sub-machine guns but not the military teched-out smg’s, but more like the stuff that you’d see used in the street level. There’s lots to see in terms of weapons.

SonyRumors (Jan): Let’s talk release dates, when can players expect The Darkness 2 to hit store shelves?

Sheldon Carter: We’re coming out February 7, 2012 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.

SonyRumors (Jan): Thank you Sheldon!

Sheldon Carter: Thanks a lot.

*End Interview*

I loved the first game and am really excited to get my hands on the second one. The story of the anti-hero Jackie Estacado have always been compelling and from what I’ve seen on the show floor, The Darkness 2 is going to be very story-focused and will have the players experiencing it in real-time. The Darkness 2 is one game I’m looking forward to in 2012. In the meantime check out the intense trailer from Visogames (Youtube)

Ordering with Amazon links from our site helps pay for the site’s servers and programs.