darkSpyro

I think "Dawn of the Dragon" is better suited. I mean, "The Darkest Hour" seems a little sinister, even more sinister than my idea of "Twisted Darkness." "The Darkest Hour" seems to symbolize "no more hope; time is up," because "darkest" means the most evil, vile thing you can imagine, and "hour" represents time that is run out. "Dawn of the Dragon" says that this is a dragon story, and that a new dawn, a new light, a new hope is awakening. It gives the player a sense that there is still a chance to save the world, and that's why "Dawn of the Dragon" was put there.

...No,it was because they changed companies and the game in general was modified. It went from Krome's dark-but-heroic style to EL's heroic-and-dramatic style of writing and design. No need to overanalyze a title, though that worked so well the last dozen times I said you're thinking too much about a thing.

Quote: Bifrost

...No,it was because they changed companies and the game in general was modified.

That's the second most important reason. The first is my reason: the sinister tone in the name. I guess the new company just found it bothersome.

Your reason isn't important. If EL cared enough, they would've kept it because the name actually fits the other two. Three words, Article-Adjective-Noun, that kind of stuff. You're just overanalyzing it for the sake of another pointless thread.

all that 'the darkest hour' reminds me of is Warriors, so i'm glad they changed it

Except Krome Studios was more familiar with the story of LoS than Estranges Libellules. EL was inexperienced in animating dragon models from the looks of it and a lot of content wasn't added into DotD because of how rushed the game was.

Krome had about a year's worth of work done on The Darkest Hour when ActiVision suddenly switched developers. EL had a year to build the game from scratch, working with just the script Mike Graham and Chris Wilson gave them without any of the additional input of a dev team that had been working with the series since 2006. Also, none of the dev team at EL are native English speakers (most didn't speak English at all) which more than likely contributed to even more story issues.

Personally, I always thought Dawn of the Dragon was kind of a dumb title. It doen't mean anything, it doesn't reference anything, it's just a mash of words. By contrast, The Darkest Hour is meant to evoke its whole quote "the darkest hour comes before the dawn", which would have been more fitting for the overall tone of the game (which was grim and dark until the very end).

^Beat me to quoting the famous line.

Though that makes me wonder if the game was really THAT dark. Yeah Malefor was in charge of everything and you had goons all over the place. But that seems pretty tame, especially when various towns were able to live. Colors didn't have to be super dark and grim throughout, but the game felt more colorful and lively than even the previous two installments, making it seem less like a dark time and more like a normal adventure. I'm fine with the name change simply because while The Darkest Hour sounds good on paper, the game and its tone didn't live up to it.

Yeah but whatever it would've been,the storytelling would be probably beter than DOTD. The writers mentioned already in the Acti forums that they cut several character interactions and moments to estabilish them (Cynder putting her necklaces back) that would've made the plot much more bearable, not to mention the character designs went from as quirky and simple as classic Spyro to something out of a bad book movie adaptation. The tone of TEN and ANB was grim and spooky, but it'd fit the apocalyptic tone of the final part like a glove - not LENS FLARE all over the place and oversaturated colors because realistic. And let's not mention the nighttime CGI cutscenes where you can't see crap,again, because realism.
Sure, the two games before were just okay, but better do right what you know than to throw it to a bunch of guys with no experience that unsurprisingly do everything they don't know and do it wrong. A good story is only secondary to good gameplay to most, but a bad story and bad presentation overshadow even that.

I imagine on the basics The Darkest Hour would have been similar to Dotd, but the story and characters would have made a lot more sense. Given that the last several levels of DotD are so horrendously depressing, it would have gone fine with its original title and Krome's input, I suspect.

^Are they really that depressing though? I recall them being darker yes, but not depressing to the point where "Darkest Hour" is a very justified title. Maybe God of War spoiled me (and even those stages aren't all that depressing).

For a game about cute dragons, heck yeah, DotD is depressing. D: After Ignitus dies, at least for me, the whole game got this really grim mood to it that it never recovered from. Spyro and Cynder wander through the desolate burned lands (full of depressing music), then fly up to the broken floating islands (also full of depressing music and a very lonely atmosphere). When they finally beat Malefor, it is heavy implied that they are dead (even if they aren't, millions of innocent creatures are and so is Ignitus AND the Chronicler). Oh, and before all that, they went through the trouble of beating the Destroyer, only to have it come back and be fine. So, yeah, pretty depressing.

Yeah, I really hate everything from The Dam level onwards because the tone is soooo unrelentingly grim and it never gets any better. :/

I would have preferred it if Krome had made DotD, too. Reusing older elements for the game proper would have helped a lot with the consistency (DotD feels like it doesn't even belong in LoS in a lot of ways to me).

As for the story, Krome is actually the reason ANB and TEN had better character development. It turns out a lot of that came from the dev team adding stuff to the bare bones scripts they were given. EL, by contrast, only worked with exactly what they got. Most of the people in EL don't even speak English, and they definitely didn't know the characters the way the Krome dev team did.

lol my favourite level in all of DOTD was the floating islands, despite it's horrid lonely atmosphere. i just loved it's design.

and I honestly found the game sad and depressing as soon as spyro got rid of sparx and kept cynder. i hated burned lands because while i was playing that level i couldn't get over the fact that sparx was no longer there. :(

and yeah i do believe krome would have created a far better game.