Dark Souls Interview

IGN has put together an interesting 2-pages article-style interview with From Software’s director Hidetaka Miyazaki about his team’s recently released console-exclusive action-RPG Dark Souls and also touches upon its predecessor Demon’s Souls, with emphasis placed on both titles’ primary characteristic: their difficulty. Here’s a few paragraphs to get you started:

“The attention can be pressuring it’s about a 50/50 combination of troubling and exciting,” says Miyazaki, asked how he’s adapting to all this sudden attention. “The pressure is like a muscle ache after you train: it’s painful, but it’s satisfying to know that you’re growing. In that way I’m really enjoying it.”

It’s partly because a game like Dark Souls begs so many questions. The fact that it even exists at a time when gaming is trending more and more towards cinematic experiences designed to entertain rather than challenge is remarkable in itself. Its world is made up of dark secrets and oblique mythology which feed your curiosity rather than satisfy it; the deeper into it you get, the more fascinating nuances expose themselves to you. How on earth did a game like this come to be? Wouldn’t any modern publisher run a mile at the suggestion of a game that makes a point of killing its players as quickly, creatively and frequently as it can?

Miyazaki laughs in recognition at this suggestion. “To be quite honest, we didn’t really mention that aspect of the game when we did the presentations to Sony,” he says, when I ask how FROM managed to get Demon’s Souls green-lit in the first place. “We knew that people at the publisher would feel that way, and that they’d make us change it. So in the product concept presentation I didn’t talk about it much. Of course I communicated with our producer at Sony, Kaji-san but he actually agreed with me. He felt that if we were too forthright about all the death, about this game concept, with the marketing people, they would have run a mile. So that’s why we had to be a bit sneaky about it.”