Too Human dev: “There is always hope”

“I think the state of our demise has been greatly exaggerated”

Chris KempMarch 25, 2012

Denis Dyack, head of Silicon Knights, the developer behind Too Human, says there is still hope for a continuation of the franchise.

For those unfamiliar, Silicon Knights is locked in a court case with publisher Epic Games, accusing them of not providing proper Unreal Engine support throughout Too Human’s development. According to the developer, Epic put the majority of their resources into Gears of War.

As Dyack puts it, he’s been “patiently waiting for five years” to have “Epic’s misconduct finally aired in the light of day.”

Too Human was supposed to be the first game in an Xbox exclusive trilogy, but it was torn apart by critics and the future of the franchise has been dubious ever since. Dyack feels differently though:

“I think as long as Silicon Knights is still around there is still hope,” he said. “You know, in some ways Too Human got a bad rap, and there are all kinds of details. A lot of what happened with Too Human is going to come out in the court case, which is May 14.”

“So as an example, this is not known at all – I’ll give you something no one’s ever heard before – but four-player co-op was done in 2008. Details of that and all that stuff will come out [in the court case],” Dyack continues.

Dyack goes on to discuss difficulties the team had in adopting the Unreal 3 engine so widely used by developers. “Bottom-line, and this is pretty public, we went through hell last generation by trying to adopt the Unreal Engine. It hurt us so dramatically that it affected us a lot, all the way through. You know, we’re hoping to fix that this gen. We’ve suffered a lot, that’s all I can say,” Dyack continued.

The reference to “this-gen” is due to the fact that Silicon Knights has already started developing for next-gen consoles, but Dyack isn’t ready to talk about the project yet.

“We’re really excited and we’re working on our next generation stuff. We’re working on an IP that’s our most requested and we’re really excited about that.”

Rumour around the internet is that this new project might be Eternal Darkness, but nothing is confirmed yet. Dyack concluded with a strong show of confidence:

“We’re smaller, obviously,” he said referring to staff cuts, “and we’re going back to our roots. I’m really looking forward to a point in time when we can talk about it, it’s just not today. That’s the current state of things. I think the state of our demise has been greatly exaggerated. Here we are. We’re here.”