Dark Souls 2 developer From Software isn’t purposely going out of its way to create a difficult game. There needs to be balance and a sense of achievement, says co-director Yui Tanimura.
Speaking with PC Gamer, Tanimura was asked how From Software hoped to achieve more Dark Souls 2 sales without reducing its broad appeal through difficulty.
He replied, “Dark Souls 2 will focus on streamlining the game play experience to more directly portray the pure essence of the Dark Souls experience. This includes elements such as the strong sense of achievement of overcoming the challenges in the game, and also the ‘loose’ connections players have with other players in the online space. Our goal is to really focus on having players deeply immerse themselves into the world, and fully take on their roles within the game play experience.”
When asked if the team may try to over-compensate for this potential issue by making the game overly-hard, Tanimura added, “Our aim is not to develop a difficult game. Our aim is to tune the difficulty to a level for players to be able to overcome and sense the highest sense of accomplishment possible. With this, the AI will be tuned to react more naturally to the player actions, but at the same time, the player controls and motions will be more natural and fitting to the actions carried out.
“I hope players will continue to learn from their mistakes and carry out multiple trial and error to conquer the challenges that await, and defeat the enemies that stand in the way. We try to tune so that the games difficulty is not a result of the players reflexes or ability to effectively use the controller, but will be based more on the player’s ability to learn from mistakes and be flexible in strategizing, and paying attention to all that happens around them.”
