Dark Souls Interview

The folks at EDGE have a 2-page interview with From Software’s creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki on Dark Souls, the spiritual successor to the equally successful Demon’s Souls. Among the subjects tackled are the action-RPG’s seamless world, the game’s oft-discussed level of challenge, the balance changes made in the patches, the chances of seeing a sequel and more. Here’s a sampling:

The vast, seamless world of Lordran is one of the game’s greatest achievements. What kind of design principles guided its construction?

Because the entire world in Dark Souls is connected, it had to look natural as players walk from one area of the map to the next. However, we didn’t want to bore players by having everything just look the same, so our design process this time was executed with emphasis on providing variation in the map within a reasonable scope and introducing changes naturally.

Demon’s Souls was divided into five sections and therefore we were able to simply cut things into five pieces. However, this time we were actively considering how to connect everything together and lose that sense of disconnection. We tried to take advantage of the continuity by letting players feel the differences as they travel from one area to another. The idea was that the higher-up area would be more beautiful, more fantastic, then as you literally walked down the stairs into a deeper, nasty, muddy area like Blighttown, you’d be able to experience the change. If you’re just jumping between areas, you immediately see the contrast but you don’t feel the change gradually happening.

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Certain areas of Dark Souls particularly in the New Londo Ruins and Blighttown suffered from crippling frame-rate drops. Did the scope of some of these environments prove difficult to manage on the technical side?

Yes, there were technical difficulties. I don’t believe that it’s okay to have them, but realistically speaking, it was quite a large-scale game even in terms of budget and expectations. So we’re very sorry for the trouble we’ve caused by our processing errors and bugs from Japan. It was a title that we haven’t really experienced in all aspects, so there were areas where we felt our technical side couldn’t keep up with the game’s scope, like an increasingly growing ache. I didn’t mind the growing pains. We accept the game as it is, and that it’s just a part of the learning curve.

Are there any discussions underway about making another game set in the Dark Souls universe?

We don’t even know if we’ll have another chance. We have the confidence that we can improve from our mistakes this time and create an even better Dark world, but we don’t know if the users will forgive us for the mistakes, so I cannot give an exact answer.