Styx: Shards Of Darkness Gets Delay, Gameplay Trailer
Magical murders
That's the thing about stab-happy goblins: you can never be sure quite when they'll pop up. Styx was meant to continue his merry little adventures in Styx: Shards of Darkness [official site] this year, but nah. Instead, Cyanide's follow-up to the 2014 fantasy stealth game Styx: Master of Shadows will now arrive in early 2017. While we'll need to wait longer to sneak around ourselves, today we can watch someone else do it, thanks to a new eight-minute gameplay video:
The video shows the edited highlights of the first half of a mission set around an airship port in the side of a honking great mountain. As before, Styx's stealth involves a lot of going up and over things and down and around - more than many stealth games. Oh, and he's got magical powers, able to go invisible, hock up clones of himself and possess them, and so on.
Patrick Pligersdorffer, CEO of Cyanide Studio, explained the delay thusly:
"With this new episode of Styx we updated our engine from Unreal 3 to Unreal 4. This update has brought so much to the Styx series, from graphical enhancements to new gameplay mechanics and features. The engine transition has required some time for our team to adapt to. We're dedicated to providing the best stealth experience possible for players, so in agreement with our publisher Focus, we are delaying the game until the first quarter of 2017."
Given that Cyanide's games tend to have interesting ideas but rarely the polish to let them shine, a delay sounds hunky dory. Along with jumping to a newer, prettier engine, Shards of Darkness is meant to have a higher budget than the first game.
Graham quite liked the first Styx though he struggled with its flaws. He said, "But sometime five or ten years from now you'll be talking about stealth games with a friend and you'll go, 'Oh, hey, remember Styx? That was pretty good."