From Software has “no intention of decreasing the difficulty level” in Dark Souls

By Stephany Nunneley

Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of Dark Souls, has said the development team at From Software has no intention of decreasing the infamous difficulty level in Demon’s Souls with it’s spiritual successor.

Speaking in an interview with Sony, Miyazaki said From intends to “increase the difficulty of the game, but not simply by making the game more difficult, but by giving players the freedom to strategize freely and conquer that difficulty, and to be rewarded accordingly.”

“This is an analogy we often use: We are trying to create a game that is spicy. And we want to make it as spicy as possible. But it’s edible and tastes good and leaves you wanting more,” he said.

As far as the secret to creating a game that is rather difficult, but still enticing enough to keep gamers playing without rage quitting, Miyazaki said the team employs ways to prevent users from drifting away.

“Number one, the difficulty is not dependent on the skill level of the user,” he said. “We have not created a game where players who react faster or press buttons faster are better than others. Second, when a player dies, we try to leave a sense of ‘maybe if I try a different strategy I can succeed.’ Things that you lose in death can be outweighed by what you gain by trying again. We try to give players lots of freedom to design their own gameplay style, and we’ve implemented enough content to enable users to continue challenging themselves and continue making progress.

“One more aspect is the difficulty based on repetitiveness. We don’t want users to have to constantly carve away health from enemies. We’ve created all characters — including enemies and the player — to have high attack power but low defense. We don’t want users to hack and hack and hack away to defeat an enemy. It’s more strategic. We want users to think, ‘if I avoid this enemy, maybe I can overcome him.’ We don’t want players to be frustrated by doing the same things over and over.

Dark Souls was announced early in the week, and you can find all our coverage of it in the link dump below.

It’s out on PS3 and Xbox 360 this year.