Not only is Eternal Darkness publisher Silicon Knights on the ropes, but it was an Eternal Darkness sequel that put them there.
Kotaku has received several anonymous sources who claimed to work for Silicon Knights during development for X-Men Destiny, the last and most critically panned Silicon Knights game. According to these sources, while working on X-Men Destiny, Silicon Knights was also working on a playable demo for Eternal Darkness 2, a project which siphoned off a large chunk of the development staff from X-Men Destiny.
“SK didn’t take the development of XMD seriously the entire time I was there,” a source says. “They were working on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo that they could take to publishers. While I was there, they were even siphoning off staff from my [XMD] team to work on it.”
Not only were developers continually siphoned off from X-Men Destiny, but the Eternal Darkness 2 demo was apparently not that great.
“The farthest they got with it when I left SK was, literally, one two-level church interior,” says one former employee. “It was really bad, as I recall. It took the side-team a long time to even get that far. Bad tech, combined with a team composed of people who had not shipped a title since Metal Gear really hurt that demo.”
It seems that it’s poor management that’s killing the Eternal Darkness beast, with President and founder Denis Dyack at the heart of the storm.
“He runs his company like a high school gym class or football team,” one [source] said. “He sets examples of those who offend him. He is incapable of celebrating others’ successes. He is irrationally competitive to a fault; for example, he has to sue Epic Games and gloat about it online . [In his mind] you’re either for him, or against him.”
It’s sad to see the developer of Eternal Darkness fall so hard, but considering the slow decline in quality since Silicon Knights left Nintendo, does anyone really want to see an Eternal Darkness 2 from them? Since most of the original team is long gone, it would probably be more Duke Nukem Forever than magnum opus.
