The puzzle elements aren’t entirely gone, however, but they have been reworked to create a less aggravating experience for players of Dark Sector. According to Josh, what is required to complete the puzzles is to figure out “what you have and trying to strengthen the player as a player.” The mindset behind D3’s idea was described by Josh as “when the learning stops the fun stops,” Josh said, so D3 is “trying the best to show you that you are constantly learning little things” or “get some new ability.” At level 7, for instance, you acquire the frost ability, which means you can freeze enemies and they’re bodies shatter.
While most of the gameplay elements in Dark Sector are a combination between what hardcore and casual players want, there is still the issue of challenge, which was the next point in the interview TheGameReviews.com did with Josh. It was something that Josh said was “pushed on” during the Dark Sector development process. The Dark Sector team had worked to ensure that the game had “enemies like that that would run in while you’re being fired at so [you’re] not constantly in this gun fire western thing where you’re like hiding behind cover and jumping to another cover.” This was necessary as the Dark Sector team wanted “to try and stay [away] from just doing that because it gets boring after a while with the same encounter over and over again.”
The gameplay aspect of Dark Sector was another crucial point for the D3 team as that portion of the game was created so that “every encounter will play out a little differently” in terms of “how the enemies attack you. When it came to multiplayer, the first plan for Dark Sector with the D3 development team was roughly 75-85% single player which a lesser emphasis on multiplayer but according to Josh the multiplayer mode turned out to be so addictive that their Quality Assurance tester wouldn’t stop playing it. Josh went on to relate that they had to say to the QA that “no, you’re going to play the freaking game and give us all of it, not just multiplayer.“
Concerns abounded at D3, according to Josh, that the development team felt that “we were going to have crappy lackluster nothing. You know, but it turned out to be a lot better than we thought.” And from what we have played ourselves, it has been great. Look forward to more of our Dark Sector coverage, as we continue to cover the upcoming shooter.