Ahead of its release later this year, developer Nordic Games has lifted the curtain on our first look at the remastered Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition, showcasing the graphical leap between the soon-to-be-released port and Vigil’s 2012 original.
Much like remakes in a similar wheelhouse, the revamped version of Darksiders II will run natively at 1080p on current-gen hardware, though there’s ample room for improvement beyond simply visuals. In a statement, Nordic detailed some of the lighting alterations and texture changes making their way into the re-release, and the studio released a trio of images to illustrate the jump between the old and the new.
“When we thought about what we wanted to do for the Deathinitive edition of Darksiders II, obviously we wanted to run in native 1080p and increase the resolution of the textures,” design director John Pearl said in a statement. “Additionally, we decided to rewrite the renderer to be physically based like a lot of other current generation game engines.”
“What this means visually is metal, leather, stone, and skin look and respond to light as you would expect them to in the real world. This new rendering method meant we revisited every texture and surface in the game, reworking and re-authoring them for the new renderer. To take full advantage of these texture changes, we’ve also gone back and relit the entire game.”
Bundling together all previously released DLC, Nordic’s Deathinitive Edition is being handled by Gunfire Games, a development studio made up by many of the staffers that worked on the original release three years ago before THQ filed for bankruptcy.
Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition is expected to launch for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this winter.
