Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was a 3D Castlevania game that broke the tradition of previous 3D Castlevania games and did incredibly well, mostly because it was basically God of War: Germanic Mythology Edition. This led to the equally successful Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate, which our own Jeff Neuenschwander really liked, and a sequel to Lords of Shadow coming later this year. In an interview with EDGE Magazine, David Cox explained why his team at MercurySteam decided to shake up the Castlevania formula as drastically as it did.
We needed to make a change, so we did. The Castlevania series wasn’t going anywhere, sales were dwindling and it was appealing to only a very small hardcore base of fans. That’s how franchises die. The success of Lords of Shadow proved to everyone that there’s life in the series yet and that people could accept us going in a new direction, and we can do that again. We have to take these risks if Castlevania is to survive, otherwise it’s just going to be like Mega Man.
That’s definitely going to sting for fans of the Blue Bomber, but consider the state the Mega Man franchise was in before the Mega Man Legends 3 cancellation. Outside of that game, most of the games Mega Man has been in were sequels and re-releases of older titles. Since then, Capcom has had more cancellations than game releases. The few games it did release were a fan-game that it had nothing to do with outside of publishing and a game that was so despised by fans that fan outcry actually prevented it from being released internationally.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 will be available later this year on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. You can read the full interview with EDGE here.
