Are you staying by this studio's side?

The action adventure game Darksiders II for the Wii U won't look any better than the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 versions, but not because it is unable to do so.

Jay Fitzloff, marketing manager at THQ's Vigil Games spoke to Video Gamer about how relatively easy it was to get the the visuals to match the standards of the PS3 and 360 versions:

We're not trying to bump up or bump down... but we reached it, and it wasn't hard. Once we got it up and running it was like, "Cool, there it is."

Although it seems Nintendo has yet to get the final development kits out, Fitzloff spoke positively about what he thinks the Wii U is capable of:

We're still waiting on that final hardware and architecture, and help from Nintendo to figure that out... Right now, it looks like it's more [powerful] than the 360 or PlayStation 3, but there's still a question mark about how much you can squeeze out of it. You know how it is, a new system, tricks get learned as the lifespan goes along, so this is where we're starting, and it looks good.

Darksiders II centres on Death: one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Players will take on the role of Death as he tries to clear his brother War's name as the instigator of the apocalypse that took place in the first Darksiders.

The game's director Marvin Donald spoke to CVG recently and also suggested that the Wii U will be more powerful than the PS3, but exactly how much more he isn't sure as the development hardware has been frequently changing, which in turn has affected the studio's progress:

[Wii U] will be at least as powerful [as PS3] if not more but honestly we don't really know because the hardware has been changing a lot... We just got the generation two dev kits and there's no release date for the Wii U so we don't know how long the hardware development process is going to go on for, when they're going to stop and what they're ultimately going to be happy with. So it has provided some instability when working on it... When we got the new kits there were some things in the old build that wouldn't work with the new hardware and we had to wait for updates. So it's been a little tricky in that regard.

Donald continued to reveal what Darksiders II has been influenced by and hopes gamers don't get the wrong idea of what the game's all about:

I hope the fact that we're heavily inspired by and love Zelda very much helps [to find the game its audience]... when we marketed Darksiders we showed a lot of combat so people got the wrong impression about what kind of game it was. Now that it's a little bit more known maybe we'll have an audience there on the Wii U.

Darksiders II is scheduled for release on the Wii U in 2012.

[source videogamer.com, via computerandvideogames.com]