Associates, it seems that Hidetaka Miyazaki and I are mainly the identical individual. Each of us, when individuals like our work, react with a form of happy befuddlement. The Darkish Souls director says he hasn’t the foggiest why Elden Ring has been so profitable, which is just about the identical as when I was stunned by good marks for essays I wrote the night time earlier than the deadline. Type of. A bit. Look, simply let me have this.
Miyazaki was talking at a Q&A session throughout the Ps Associate Awards (by way of IGN (opens in new tab)) when he was requested to clarify Elden Ring’s phenomenal success (opens in new tab). Your guess is pretty much as good as his, apparently: Miyazaki mentioned he hadn’t “analysed it a lot,” and that whereas “It’s true that gross sales have been increased than these of [FromSoft’s] earlier video games,” he has “no concept what the explanation was”. Most likely the pope turtle (opens in new tab).
It is in all probability for the most effective, as a result of it seems like Miyazaki is decided to maintain directing video games in accordance with his personal tastes, fairly than cleaving to no matter appears widespread. Miyazaki mentioned he tries “not to consider it an excessive amount of,” as a result of he reckons it’d “be a nasty concept to analyse it deeply and to consciously attempt to replicate it in one other recreation”. So do not go anticipating one other large, open-world FromSoft recreation simply because Elden Ring did so nicely.
In actual fact, Miyazaki appears completely decided to not let exterior elements affect the route of his recreation design. The director mentioned—in a lesson we must always in all probability all take to coronary heart—that he intentionally avoids being too uncovered to participant suggestions. “it’d have an effect on my future choices as a developer, which I discover fairly unsettling,” mentioned Miyazaki, so he tries to “keep away from being straight uncovered to too many opinions”.
It is an eminently respectable philosophy, and one which appears better-suited to creating novel and fascinating video games than design-by-focus-group. Nonetheless, I am unable to assist however surprise how just lately Miyazaki adopted this outlook. Darkish Souls 3 particularly felt prefer it was made in direct response to the myriad criticisms that gamers threw at Darkish Souls 2 in so many features that I battle to consider Miyazaki hadn’t engaged with suggestions to some extent. Then once more, possibly he simply had somebody to do this for him: speak about a bearer of the curse.
