Dark Souls II Director on Messaging System

GamesBeat chatted with Dark Souls II’s director Yui Tanimura about the game’s messaging system and in what ways it was used by the player base. Tanimura seems pleased with the cleverness of the players:

But what are the most popular messages across Dark Souls II? Is there enough of a sadistic subset of players making the game even more difficult by rating deceiving notes? Or do the more kind, helpful memos stay around the longest? Luckily for most of us, Tanimura says that it’s the latter.

(The majority are helpful messages or messages reflecting on the game,) Tanimura said. (The overall trend is for users to be helpful to one another and to share their thoughts and reflections about the game. Only a handful of messages are left to make other players slip-up.)

Even with a restricted vocabulary, gamers have managed to surprise Tanimura and the folks at From Software with their creativity. Some of the time, the surprise comes from a bit of dry wit in the midst of a very bleak game.

(I once laughed at a message near the corpse of a user who had suffered a painful death,) said Tanimura. (The message read ‘˜Friend,’ and was ranked very highly. There are many messages I look at and think it’s wonderful that these users are able to come up with such interesting uses for these phrases.)