Darksiders Devs Tout Sales, Patch

Darksiders developers Vigil Games has stated on its community blog that the action adventure title has sold 500,000 copies following its release in early January, which would indicate a major success for the original IP against stiff competition in the form of Platinum Games' Bayonetta, which released the same week. However, the article cited in Vigil's post uses independent "sales-tracking" site VGChartz as its source for the 500K number, which calls those estimates into question. There's no mention on Vigil's community blog about parent company THQ's internal sales tracking for the title. NPD's retail sales data for January will release later this month.

In other Darksiders news, Vigil also released a patch last week for the Xbox 360 version of the game to fix the significant screen tearing found in that version of the title. The Digital Foundry blog at Eurogamer ran an analysis comparing the game's performance before and after the title update was released. Via Eurogamer:

It's extremely rare that patches actually increase the performance level of a game. Cutting down screen-tear to an appreciable degree without impacting frame-rate involves some pretty substantial optimisations to the engine, so it was with some level of intrigue that Darksiders performance was put through the Digital Foundry frame analysis tools in both original and patched conditions.The result? Well, screen-tear is indeed dramatically reduced... the launch version of the game has 43.5 per cent torn frames. The new version is considerably improved, taking that number down to 21.6 per cent.

The Digital Foundry article includes a comparison video we urge you to check out as well. On a less scientific note, TeamXbox did detect a noticeable improvement in picture quality post-update, though there was a significant decrease in framerate (which The Digital Foundry also detected). This change seems perfectly acceptable, however, as the gameplay did not appear to be compromised. Darksiders received a 9.0 from TeamXbox in its review earlier this month.

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