Dark Souls II Additional Details Surface

I suspect we will have to wait a while longer to get actual solid info on the mechanics of Dark Souls II, but there’s apparently no shortage of obscure and vague details, with Gematsu listing some new ones they extrapolated from a Japanese interview on Famitsu*.

Here’s what they got out of it:

Dark Souls II will have the same world view as the first game, but the story won’t directly be tied to the original. The first game could be the North Pole, for example, while the second game is the South Pole. Dark Souls II is set in a different time period.

Weapon and item download content are unlikely.
The debut trailer was not in-game.
The keyword is (time.)
The game engine is changed. From Software is aiming for near-realistic representation and improved movement.
The team is investigating direct involvement between mutual players.

I honestly have no idea what “direct involvement between mutual players” might mean. Co-op, perhaps?

*Specifically, they actually got the details from a transcription of some parts of the interview on Japanese website Game Nyarth, so keep the Chinese whispers effect in mind and a saltpot in hand when reading this info.

Thanks, VG247.

Update: Polygon has their own translated version, which seems to elucidate some points and contains some additional snippets. I highly recommend you to read that and in its entirety, but here’s a snip:

“If we’re going to announce this as a sequel to Dark Souls then I think there’s certainly a core that we need to protect,” Miyazaki said. “I’m talking about how we think about the difficulty level and how you achieve things in-game; about the concepts behind the mechanics and level design. Outside of that core, though, I think it’s better to leave things to the discretion of the director. There’s a lot around that core that we need to fix or adjust, besides, and individual touches always tend to come out in the world setting and artwork, so I’m not meddling in that very much.”

…

“Setting up a dedicated server lets you retain your data, making it easier to share it with other players,” Shibuya said. “We’d like to evolve the asynchronous message-oriented online support from the previous game; we’re imagining a framework where players are able to directly interact with each other.”