Dark Souls 2 director, Yui Tanimura, reveals some details about From Software's follow up to its critically acclaimed RPG. It won't be easy, he says
Dark Souls is a series that lives and dies on its rock-hard difficulty. While From Software's RPG adventure offers players the usual enticements of the genre - level-ups, weapons, a dark fantasy environment to explore - its main appeal was the fact that it punished every mistake players made.
Not only that, but anyone hoping to complete Dark Souls had to retrain themselves in the way they thought about games. If you expected to breeze through Dark Souls regenerating health and spamming attacks you'd find it a frustrating experience. But if you learnt its mechanics, guarded your life preciously and treated every battle as though it was your last, it's rewards rolled out at a steady stream.
Recently, Dark Souls 2 was announced to the excitment of many core gamers. This excitement, however, curdled into anxiety when the sequel's director, Yui Tanimura, said the aim was to 'mould Dark Souls 2 into a more approachable form'.
At a recent preview event in New York, T3 got to sit down with Tanimura and ask him what he meant by this. If you're one of the Dark Souls faithful, don't worry - the news isn't as bad as you thought.
Q: When Dark Souls 2 was revealed last year, a lot of players were worried that it would be easier and more accessible than the last game. This presentation focussed a lot on the more challenging aspects of the game. In terms of overall difficulty, how do the first and second games compare?
A: By all means, we didn’t mean to communicate [the idea] that the game will be easier. Obviously, the game will not be easier. What we meant by ‘making it more accessible’ was that we want to streamline away all of the tediousness, I suppose. We want to cut away all the fat and deliver a lean, pure, challenging experience. So I apologise for using the word ‘accessible’ so casually. Please understand we will maintain the quality of Dark Souls.
The goal isn’t to make Dark Souls 2 more difficult. The intent is to provide a more rewarding experience in which players overcome difficulties [we set up for them]. It’s hard to predict if players will think it will be more difficult than Dark Souls, but it will be as difficult. We will try to maintain the experience Dark Souls is known for.
Q: You mentioned yesterday that Dark Souls – and Dark Souls 2 – is constructed as a multi-faceted deathtrap, where your success as a player hinges on your skill, but also on navigating your way through the game’s pitfalls. Is that where you start in your construction? Do you start with the traps and death scenarios?
A: The way I look at the design is, first of all, I try to concrete the concept of what I want the player to feel – what emotional feedback I want the game to have for them. With that, I will try to design different types of deaths they will face and what kind of challenges they will face and what kind of tactics we want them to learn.
So we’ll have that as a base, and then we’ll discuss how we want players to conquer the game, what sort of deaths they can face and what we want them to learn from the challenges in the game.
Q: In Edge, you mentioned you were thinking of implementing a weather system in the game. Has there been any movement on this?
A: It’s hard to give out too much information about that at this point. We do plan to have players experience some interaction with the environment – like trudging through water made the player(‘s movement) slower. One of the other things we want to play with is the use of wind.
We’ll give more details about this sort of thing later on. But it’s not weather, it’s more environmental interaction will be a key part of play.
Q: Obviously the build up towards the release of the next generation of consoles is now in motion. Did you consider a PS4 or another next-console version of Dark Souls 2?
A: We understand that the next-gen’s coming out and it would be a lie to say we didn’t consider it at all. But, right now there’s no attempt to put Dark Souls 2 on the next-gen. We feel the current-gen’s potential is still viable and we want to deliver Dark Souls 2 on current-gen.
Q: Can we talk a little about the relationship between From and Namco/Bandai? When a franchise becomes a hit a lot of developers can find themselves under pressure from the publisher to win over more audience numbers with the sequel. This can lead to compromising aspects which won over the core audience to begin with – Dead Space 3 was a recent example of this. Is From Software under any pressure like this? Or do you have the freedom to succeed or fail on your own terms?
A: If you look at the relationship between From and Namco/Bandai, it gives us a lot of freedom in terms of what we want to create. We’re able to really pursue what we want to deliver to our audience.
Obviously, From is a smaller company than Namco/Bandai, their ability to deliver feedback from the fans is a lot greater than ours. That kind of input from the publisher about what the fans want and are expecting is very useful to us. It gives us more to take into consideration when we’re deciding on certain aspects of the game.
I think the relationship we have between the publisher and the dev team is good because we’re give the freedom to create what we want to create, but they can process a lot more feedback than we could. We have the freedom to stay loyal to the core audience and core fans of Dark Souls and we’re not ordered to mass a large audience in the sense you’re talking about. We’ll continue to strive to maintain the core experience and reach out to our core fans.
Q: One of the main issues with Dark Souls was its frame rate. You showed off a new engine yesterday. Do you think that’ll solve this problem?
A: Yes, one of the reasons we implemented a new engine was to try and fix that. For this title, we’re hoping users won’t have to worry about that issue. We think the new engine will solve that.
Q: When players tackled the first Dark Souls online you got to learn about your fan base and how they played the game. Studying that information, what did you learn about your player base and how are you applying that to Dark Souls 2?
A: Darks Souls was more P2P game so we were unable to capture too many stats in terms of player behaviour, so that’s why we collate player feedback. It’s not that we’re going to answer all the player feedback but we do take it into consideration with regards to how we set about constructing Dark Souls 2.
Q: How much player content – equipment, covenants and so forth – will be carried over from Dark Souls to Dark Souls 2? And you’ve mentioned that online will be a big focus in Dark Souls 2; what details can you give us about that, if any?
A: Once again, about covenants and equipment we can’t give you very much information at this point. But there will be things that carry over from Dark Souls to Dark Souls 2.
In terms of online, there will information about that in the future. Because the game will be server-based now, we hope to implement aspects into the game that will make use of that.
Q: We’ve seen some concept art of a Grim Reaper figure. There’s also been a lot of speculation about a morality system. Can you tell us anything about either of those things?
A: We can’t say too much about that. But in terms of the design of the world, we’re carrying over the same aesthetic. What we want to communicate and the sort of deaths we end up putting in the game will ultimately dictate the kinds of enemies we end up putting in the game.
Q: During the presentation you showed a section where the player steps onto a bridge and then a Wyvern rips the bridge in half when they’re halfway across it, killing the player. Do you find it hard to maintain a balance between these ‘cheap’ deaths in the game and the overall sense of fairness in terms of the game’s difficulty?
A: It’s extremely difficult – it’s something we always have to keep in mind. But one thing we do focus on is this: no matter what sort of deaths we want the player to experience, the player needs to understand the reason that they died. Killing players is obviously very easy. You just make an enemy invincible or super strong and the player will die. But it’s important to allow the player to understand the reason for their death and they need to learn from their death. It’s a fine balance but we always keep in mind that we can’t make the game unfair.
The example you referenced with the bridge is a surprise kill. We the player to have the sense of ‘Oh my God! What do I do now? How the hell do I get past this part?’ Here, we want players to actually think about ways they could conquer that section.
We will leave hints and clues to allow players to anticipate what can happen. If they cross the bridge they may die, but hopefully when players play the game they’ll discover the underlying logic to it.
When you get to play the bridge section in Dark Souls 2, hopefully you’ll understand what we mean.
