Developer explains new features in Dark Souls 2

After the comment about making Dark Soul 2 “more straightforward and understandable”, director Tomohiro Shibuya sparked concern in the minds of gamers all over the world. According to Eurogamer, Director of the previous games in the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has quelled some of the concerns in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu.

According to Miyazaki, there is a core experience in the games that need protecting. “I’m talking about how we think about the difficulty level and how you achieve things in-game, about the concepts behind the mechanics and level design,” he said. “Outside of that core, though, it’s better to leave things to the discretion of the director. There’s a lot around that core that we need to fix or adjust besides, and individual touches always tend to come out in the world setting and artwork, so I’m not meddling in that very much.”

The game should retain the feelings of solitude and desperation present in the earlier games. Miyazaki mentions that he feels that the feelings were expressed well in the Dark Souls 2 CGI trailer.

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There is a core experience that needs to be protected

He also commented on the evolution of multiplayer of the game. While it still won’t have standard multiplayer modes, Dark Souls 2 will be going back to being hosted on dedicated servers. While this was present in the first game in the series, Demon’s Souls, the developers had opted for a peer-to-peer system for Dark Souls. With the next game going back to dedicated servers, more things are possible, according to Miyazaki.

“Setting up a dedicated server lets you retain your data, making it easier to share it with other players. We’d like to evolve the asynchronous message-oriented online support from the previous game; we’re imagining a framework where players are able to directly interact with each other,” Shibuya said. “Having dedicated game servers will be the source of a lot of new potential in DS2. There was a lot with the original Dark Souls I wish I could have done if we had the ability to have those servers, so in that way I’m pretty jealous of the new director here.”

He added, “The concept behind online play in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls was pretty plain to gamers, so I’m hoping we can evolve on that concept here without removing ourselves too far from it.”

The advantages of dedicated servers could easily be seen in Demon’s Souls, where thanks to the server persistence, Demon’s Souls online worlds had a property called tendency. These tendencies could be black or white and changed depending on how many people were helping out other players by being white phantoms, or killing other players by being black phantoms. Some of the levels were only accessible when the world was of a certain tendency, and even in levels that were accessible, bosses could carry entirely different loot.

From Software had unveiled Dark Souls 2 during the Spike VGAs. Not much is known about the game other than the platforms it will be released for. Namco Bandai has announced that Dark Souls 2 is coming to the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC. The development is being handled by From Software once again, with series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki at the helm along with director Tomohiro Shibuya, known for working on the Monster Hunter series. “Dark Souls 2 will offer loyal fans exactly the kind of demanding challenges and never-ending struggle that became the hallmark of this whole series,” said the publisher.