Dark Souls is recentelijk officieel aangekondigd en de informatie over de veelbelovende titel stroomt binnen. Hidetaka Miyazaki, director van de game, heeft aangegeven dat hij geen intentie heeft om de beruchte moeilijkheidsgraad in deze spirituele opvolger naar beneden bij te schroeven. In een interview met Sony zei Miyazaki dat hij de game juist meer uitdagend wilt gaan maken, alleen niet simpelweg door het spel moeilijker te maken, maar door spelers de vrijheid te geven “to strategize freely and conquer that difficulty, and to be rewarded accordingly”.
This is an analogy we often use: We are trying to create a game that is spicy. And we want to make it as spicy as possible. But it’s edible and tastes good and leaves you wanting more.Tevens onthulde Miyazaki enkele geheimen om een game uitdagend te maken, maar niet zo uitdagend dat gamers zo gefrustreerd worden dat ze ophouden met een spel.
Number one, the difficulty is not dependent on the skill level of the user. We have not created a game where players who react faster or press buttons faster are better than others. Second, when a player dies, we try to leave a sense of ‘maybe if I try a different strategy I can succeed.’ Things that you lose in death can be outweighed by what you gain by trying again. We try to give players lots of freedom to design their own gameplay style, and we’ve implemented enough content to enable users to continue challenging themselves and continue making progress.Dark Souls zal dit jaar uit worden gebracht op de PlayStation 3 en de Xbox 360.One more aspect is the difficulty based on repetitiveness. We don’t want users to have to constantly carve away health from enemies. We’ve created all characters — including enemies and the player — to have high attack power but low defense. We don’t want users to hack and hack and hack away to defeat an enemy. It’s more strategic. We want users to think, ‘if I avoid this enemy, maybe I can overcome him.’ We don’t want players to be frustrated by doing the same things over and over.