The devs behind THQ Nordic’s Destroy All Humans! 2 remake, out sometime next year, explained recently in an interview why the remake of the cult classic game is avoiding PS4, Xbox One, and Switch. The team decided to go for bigger, more detailed open world levels on next-gen consoles instead of sacrificing quality or size for the older machines.
Nearly a year after the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S were released the consoles are still hard to find and most big (and small games) announced so far remain cross-gen releases. Even AAA games from the console makers themselves, like Sony’s upcoming Horizon Forbidden West or Microsoft’s Halo Infinite, are dropping on both current-gen and next-gen machines.
So it might seem odd that a remake of a cult classic PS2-era game, Destroy All Humans! 2, is one of the few PS5 and Xbox Series X/S exclusives announced for 2022. In an interview with The Escapist, the dev at Black Forest games (the same folks who developed the original DAH! remake) explained why the team was focusing on only the new consoles. According to them, it’s so it could create bigger, better-looking worlds without having to compromise the game for older consoles like the Switch.
“That was a very hard choice to make for everyone,” explained Black Forest assistant creative director Stefan Schmitz.
“Either we would have had to ship the new game with potentially weaker visuals compared to the DAH!1 remake to accommodate the larger and denser maps of the second, or we would have to forego the old gen and gain back that optimisation time and give that time back to the team to make a bigger, better world and combat experience. We decided to go with the latter choice as this allowed us to take a big step forward for Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed in terms of visual quality”
Schmitz gave an example to The Escapist describing how the developers were able to put five times as many objects into the bigger levels, adding more depth and detail for players to discover while roaming about as alien invader Crypto.
Of course, as new consoles continue to be hard to find I except some fans will not be too happy about the decision to leave behind the old machines. However, I’m also happy to see devs being allowed to focus on the newer, more powerful hardware instead of having to make sacrifices to get a game running on nearly decade-old hardware like the original Xbox One.
You can read the full interview with Schmitz to learn more about what changes the team is making in the remake and how its experience working on the first remake helped them in developing Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed.
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