It’s been long enough since the initial excitement about Dark Souls 2’s announcement for the fanfare to fade a bit. What the original game announcement lacked was a lot of detail about the game itself, which is only to be expected.
Now we’re ready to start getting some more concrete information about what we can expect, and the game’s director, Tomohiro Shibuya, and the first game’s former director and now sequel’s supervisor, Hidetaka Miyazaki, have started delivering.
Evolving the experience
Tomohiro stated that he is looking to evolve the Dark Souls experience with the new game, starting with its graphics. As he put it,
Rather than focusing on shading and lighting technologies, I believe that having a more realistic atmosphere while showing better details of the monsters and their expressions would definitely have a bigger impact.
The game is confirmed to take place in the same world as the first Dark Souls, but it is not going to be a direct sequel and there is no word yet on any possible recurring characters, to we might need to look deeper than the obvious for most of the details that will be connecting the two games.
Familiarity and Feeling
Parts of the interface, at least, will be familiar. Shibuya is keeping the style and functionality of the map from the first Dark Souls. His main concern that he has been stating is a desire to remain true to the feel of the original. In his words, “My concept is to get Dark Souls and what made it great, and give it a major upgrade,”
Two other ways he’s looking to do that are the game’s size and its length. Dark Souls 2 not be notably larger or smaller than its predecessor, though it could end up being slightly larger in the end. Shibuya has also stated that he wants to keep the time needed to complete the game as close as is reasonably manageable to the prior title.
This all sounds like a good starting point to operate from. At least for those of us who can enjoy having to respawn a lot.
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