Elden Ring – Hidetaka Miyazaki Interview

Following the recent gameplay reveal for Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki sat down with IGN to chat about his new game, its setting and story, as well as some of its new features. The resulting interview goes on and on and on, and tells us quite a bit about the highly-anticipated Dark Souls successor.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

IGN: Throughout the trailer, we see a bunch of different techniques. We see a horse leaping up a cliffside, an attack jumping off of horseback, and there’s a magic attack that extends your sword. Can you shed some light on these abilities, how they’re earned? Does acquiring a technique lend itself to exploring more of the world?

HM: Yes. A part of making this new world with this new huge sense of scale was adding enjoyment to that sense of exploration, having players feel encouraged, and give them a desire to explore as much as they want. And so that could be through acquiring new weapons and magic spells and abilities such as the different spirit summons. We wanted to place these elements so the players will enjoy exploring the map and discovering these elements for themselves. There are cases in which you can buy them [arts, magic, etc.] at stores or learn them from NPCs, but generally they are hidden throughout the game’s world for the player to discover through exploration, rather than unlocking them through a skill tree as in previous titles.

I think one thing that’s worth mentioning is the skills, which is a returning feature from previous games, but, again, we’re concentrating on the level of freedom that it gives the player. So before, where there was a certain skill attached to a certain weapon, now you’re actually able to freely interchange skills between a large variety of weapons. There are, I believe, around a hundred skills in total. Obviously you’re free to combine your different skills with different weapons. You’re free to build your character with different weapons and equipment. You’re free to learn magic as well. So if you throw all of these things in, we think the build customization is going to be even richer and even more varied than before.