Interview: Julien Desourteaux On Styx, Variety & Difficult Stealth
Master of Shadows introduced Styx to a lot of people, whether they bought it at launch or decided to jump in during it’s time on PlayStation Plus and now Xbox Live’s Games with Gold.
The devious little goblin is back in Shards of Darkness –
read our early impressions here – and so we sat down with Lead Level Designer Julien Desourteaux to talk about the game and how Cyanide are looking to improve on the original.
TSA: After the events of the first game in the Tower of Akenash, what’s next for Styx? Where is Shards of Darkness set? Who is he going to stealing from and murdering this time?
Julien Desourteaux: Without too many spoilers – which is hard because Shards of Darkness is set between Master of Shadows and Of Orcs and Men – the green plague has been created and there has been the Goblin invasion. It’s a completely new situation for the people in this world, and so they try to kill them and to hunt them. That’s the start of Shards of Darkness.
Also, there is a huge lack of amber, and that’s why Styx, though he can still create some clones and he can still become invisible, you will see that it’s very rare to find those potions. But you find a way to find more, and that’s why you will have to travel. It’s not like in the first one where it was all set up in one location. We wanted the player to have a [journey]. [...]
