IGN sat down and talked with Denis Dylack, the man behind Eternal Darkness. Check out what he had to say on this highly-anticipated game from Silicon Knights.

He said the biggest misconception about the game was comparing it to Resident Evil.
"Hopefully by today it's very clear that Eternal Darkness is just not a survival horror game at all." he said. He commented that he was a big fan of Resident Evil but Eternal Darkness "just doesn't play like it, feel like it or look like it."

On Joseph de Molay, the Knight Templar he had this to say:
"Well, basically as we were going through the development cycle we though various characters into the game, tried them, played around with some, changed some. But really he was put out as E3 material. There were some other characters and levels as well that we created that were not real.

One of the things with Eternal Darkness, and hopefully this is clear, is to merge the gameplay with the cinematics, with the entire story. And as we have continued to tweak things we've made changes, and there have been some minor alterations over the years of the development.

When we showed Joseph at E3, I don't know if you remember but I actually said to you 'this is an experiment with multi-weapon attacks.' And it's ironic because you said earlier today that you thought the characters moved much faster than they have in previous builds, and if you remember Joseph was very, very slow. So we experimented and made changes."

Dylack went on to say there was no chance of him appearing as a secret playable character, or something of that nature.

On making each character different he said:
"One of the things that is hopefully also clear is that we've taken a lot of time to balance every character so they should feel different. We want every level to have its own sort of feel. Just throwing in a character is something we can't do. We have to take the time to make sure balances and plays correctly. And that's something that stands out in my mind as why Eternal Darkness is such an ambitious project - just to balance and polish every character to play differently took a long time, and we're still working on it. We're not quite happy with it. But we're almost done with the game and it's just the final touches now."

He then said the game took up 15 memory blocks and that it supports progressive and 16x9 widescreen modes.

Then he talked about the story and how it unfolds.
"Certainly everything you do in the game, though it might not seem like it where you're at, has a significance to the storyline, and gameplay. How they play it, I won't say because I don't want to give away too many details. I want players to experience that for themselves. However, I think one of the very interesting things about Eternal Darkness is that at first the stories seem random, but you're about to the point where things start to come together. Where less questions come forth, replaced instead by more answers.

Of course, there are some huge surprises coming still where you'll be like 'Whoa! What's going on here?' But in the end, the game delivers a story about human perseverance and sacrifice. It's a story about some heroes and heroes die. I remember when we first showed this to you a long time ago -- I had people coming up to me and saying 'Do people die in this game?' I just looked at them and smiled because, as you know, we've obviously gone way over that line.

This is not a traditional Nintendo game. The storyline and the plot are very different. However, we, like Nintendo, are focused on solid gameplay, and in terms of that this is very much a Nintendo game. The amount that EAD and Nintendo have attributed to this game -- I just can say enough about it."

There has been very little revealed about the games magic system but Dylack was kind enough to delve some details.
"You can enchant weapons to make them more powerful", he said. "There are different kinds of enchantments -- there are advantages and disadvantages to each one. They look different, they sound different and they have different repercussions. We have shields that you can put over yourself and you can put up shield barriers you can put up if you're feeling overcrowded by enemies. There are all kinds of tricks that you can do to take advantage of the environment.

One of the things that we always found very interesting is allowing the player to truly explore the environment, and this is one of the main reasons we created the summons spells. We thought, what would the game be like if you could run around as the trapper? These are the kind of things that we really tried to bring out, and hopefully gamers will really like it. By using different magics, you will create advantages and disadvantages. It's not always the right thing to do, but hopefully the player will learn when to use them and when not to."

He didn't want to give away any insanity effects but he did have this to say on them:
"There are some insanity effects that last over an entire level. There are some of that are illusions. There are things like that. They do have an affect on gameplay. There are times when you think 'Oh man, I really don't want to go insane right now. I don't need this hassle.' And there are other times when players might want to go insane just for the fun of it. We're really not a survival horror. In a survival horror you really have to run through the environments as quickly as possible, and we're encouraging exploration, control, playing with the environment and experimentation."

IGN then asked him about the trapper universe that players can sometimes get sucked into, to which he replied:
"Well that's what the trapper does. He brings you in there. It's a puzzle-type environment, but there are some enemies in there as well. That's one of the things we've really tried to do with the game -- you haven't seen a lot of the enemies yet, but you've seen several. Each is very, very different. What we really wanted to do with things like the trapper is create a game where players look at the thing and wonder how to get around it, what's the best way to get through. And I think the trapper is another illustration that this is not a game about purely undead, but one that features otherworldly beings that are slowly coming to be."

Time zones play an important part in the game as Dylack pointed out.
"You may or may not have noticed that the game is not completely in chronological order, so we do jump back and forth. One of the characters you played was in the 1700s. But let's see, we have some World Ward II environments, we have some Desert Storm, we have some modern day stuff, some 1980s stuff, and periods in the 1400s, 1600s and more. What we always try to do is visit historical sites and events that are accurate. "

He then talked about how much space on the disc was token up:
"Almost everything, and probably the time we're done we'll take every bit that there is left [laughs]. With the amount of cinematics, music and content in the game, I look at the size of the discs and just can't believe that those little things hold so much. It's amazing technology."

Thanks to Nintendojo forum member The Dark Skull for the interview!

Source: IGN