The upcoming sequel to last month’s blissfully funny downloadable title sees everyone’s favorite Hero to the Downtrodden DeathSpank on his quest to find the “six mystical thongs”, which will be (no joke) the key to bringing balance to the universe.
“Bigger, longer, harder.” Those are the words that Director of Game Development Vlad Ceraldi said drove the team at Hothead Games into creating DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue. It will have more loot, more enemies, more locations, more guns. And believe it or not, it’s out in less than a month.
Yes indeed, EA and Hothead have announced that Thongs of Virtue will be out on PlayStation Network on September 21st for $14.99 while the Xbox Live Arcade version will be released the following day for 1,200 Microsoft Points, just nine weeks after the release of the first DeathSpank. The PC version is still at the hypothetical phase, depending on the demand of the market.
Also, according to franchise producer Hamish Millar, even though DeathSpank creator Ron Gilbert recently left Hothead, he was just as involved with the direction of Thongs of Virtue as he was with the first game, so hopefully the greatest item descriptions in videogame history will stay intact and you can expect the same style of humor.
Online cooperative multiplayer will not be included in this release, but the local mode that is present will have a new character, a ninja called Steve.
Although there have been a lot of additions, the most significant one goes “boom” — guns. In DeathSpank the only ranged weapons you could equip were a crossbow or a magic spell, but now you’ll be able to mow people down from afar with your sweet gun before getting in close to finish them off with a melee weapon.
Hothead has worked on improving the variety of quests, environments, enemies and loot drops for Thongs of Virtue. Millar noted that fetch quests will still be a major component of the title, but there will be a lot more of the puzzle-centric quests that were lightly sprinkled throughout the first title. Millar also explained that there will be numerous bosses, all sporting a different colored thong and that the mystery behind the power of DeathSpank’s own purple thong will be revealed.
