It has been a couple of months since Nordic Games purchased a majority of THQ’s major assets. The company has the rights to Darksiders, Red Faction, and plenty of other properties.
Reinhard Pollice, the man who is in charge of Nordic’s business and product development, told Joystiq about the next step:
“We want to carefully select which franchises are up for getting a sequel or new installment. We closely monitor the communities on that.”
According to Pollice, fans are showing the most interest in Darksiders, MX vs. ATV, Red Faction, and Titan Quest. Interestingly, Pollice himself has interest in seeing a new Deadly Creatures.
Nordic won’t be able to produce new games for THQ’s former IPs, as it is mostly a “middle man”. They’ll need to team up with other publishing partners in order to create new games.
As far as Darksiders goes:
“Darksiders is really big. We know we need a partner for that. An established development team that can pull out such a big action adventure. We obviously talked to former team members and, if they are free, we want to somehow involve them. If they are allowed to because, you know, some of them found other jobs or are with Crytek now.”
Darksiders is extremely important to Nordic. Pollice doesn’t want to mess up the series, nor does he want Nordic to ruin what was started with the first two games.
Just don’t expect a new Darksiders anytime soon; Pollice said: “I would not look for a Darksiders 3 before two years from now.”
Still, things are very early for Nodic:
“I mean, we just got two weeks ago the actual source codes and art assets. Before I went to E3, I was starting and getting to kick off internally what’s there. It will be a process over the next couple of months and then to discuss internally what route we want to go. We want to give fans they know from the past and they liked, but bring it somehow to the next level. What you as a player would expect from a sequel. We know we have to move one step ahead.”
Nordic may share its first round of news at Gamescom in August. At the end of the day, Nordic would love to have developers work with them on the games they had once created.
“We’d also love to make contact with former developers on these games. So, everyone who worked on one of these games get in touch with us. Obviously those guys have great experience in doing those games. They spent a lot of time and passion on creating that. Ideally, we’d like to team up with those former developers.”
