Dark Souls Interview

VG247 has an article-style interview with From Software’s game director Hidetaka Miyazaki centered around the company’s successful action-RPG Dark Souls, which was also recently released on PC with a less-than-satisfactory port. Here’s a snip:

Run hastily around a blind corner, raise your shield too slowly, or simply swing weapons like you’re playing Bayonetta, and you’ll find yourself extremely dead, extremely fast. Discipline is the key, so in many ways your biggest enemy in Dark Souls is yourself.

But when you succeed and land that final killing blow on a particularly tough boss that’s been putting you through hell for hours, man does it feel sweet. Gratification makes the punishment bearable, and few games can match Dark Souls’ level of risk-reward, because everything is a potential risk.

Miyazaki knows it too, and while this angle was entirely deliberate, it wasn’t a sly shot at the easy nature or lack of creativity in the industry today, (what Dark Souls is offering is a feeling of accomplishment. That is the game concept of Dark Souls, so it looks a difficult game. Dark Souls is a game offering a feeling of accomplishment which may be relatively rare among other games nowadays)

(However,) he adds, (this does not mean [the industry] lacks creativity, but a shift of values offered by games. If the game industry lacks creativity, this will result in a stagnation in value that games offer, but I believe that games are still a media providing players with new and diverse value.)