Dark Souls Interview

We’ve got used to Gamasutra’s in-depth interviews, and this recent one they did with Namco Bandai’s producer Kei Hirono on the upcoming Dark Souls is no exception, with three pages full of information for us to read. Here’s a sampling:

You’re gold on Dark Souls; how do you feel when you look at the final game and how it went?

KH: Oh, partly it’s a relief that something we worked right up to the line on turned out so well. I do think it turned out wonderful, though, really.

Did it exceed the expectations you had at the beginning? KH: It’s really nothing like we pictured it at the start. There were concepts that went unimplemented because, especially with the online component, you can’t really tell how some of it works until it’s actually in motion. It was really a difficult project because it kept on changing and evolving as we were developing it. A lot got attached to it, so it’s really a much greater project than we first conceived. I’m just glad it all came together.

…

In terms of the increased volume of content, is that a matter of the team having more staff working on it? Or is it a matter of a longer development cycle from the last game?

KH: In terms of the content volume, it’s not the team size or the dev time, I think it’s more the underlying concepts the team wanted to deliver for this game. We really wanted to emphasize the exploration and the RPG elements for this game, and for us to do that we really needed to expand the world — to provide the seamlessly connected environments for the players.

In terms of the difficulty, we wanted to really elaborate, again, on the accomplishment and satisfaction for the game, and with that we needed to increase the difficulty. In order to overcome that difficulty, we just needed to increase the number of weapons, increase the number of items, and increase the number of options for players to be able to explore it. So it’s not just the time and resources, but more the underlying concepts behind what we want to do, to make this game deep.