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Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of Elden Ring at FromSoftware, assures that they have not tried to lower the difficulty of the game, but he does believe that more people will finish it.
In recent years, the debate on the difficulty of the video game has gained strength: do all games need more accessibility options or are there some that are superfluous due to their demanding nature? This is something that fully touches FromSoftware , a company specializing in particularly challenging experiences, and with the arrival of Elden Ring on February 25, the issue has once again come to light from the hand of Hidetaka Miyazaki himself, director of the project .
Miyazaki has granted an interview to the official PlayStation blog in which he has commented on various topics such as the difficulty of video games. When it came to answering that question, the Japanese designer explained that he considers it a legitimate debate that they have tried to take more into account in the development of Elden Ring , although he does not consider his games to be difficult just because they are, but rather to challenge the player.
“I think our approach to these games, not just Elden Ring , is to design them to encourage the player to overcome adversity,” Miyazaki begins in the interview, continuing, ” We don’t try to force difficulty or make things more difficult.” difficult just for the hell of it. We want players to use their cunning, study the game, memorize what’s going on and learn from their mistakes.”
Despite the fact that FromSoftware games have a reputation for being difficult, Hidetaka Miyazaki assures that they are not simply looking to annoy players: ” We don’t want players to feel that the game is unfairly punishing them , but that there is a possibility of overcoming a difficult challenge and progress (…) We try to design the games so that the cycle of repeatedly trying to overcome these challenges is pleasurable in itself.”
How does all of this apply to Elden Ring ? According to Miyazaki, the studio’s new game isn’t going to be explicitly easier, but it is going to have tools that will help players overcome those challenges, or at least that’s what they hope: “We haven’t tried to reduce the difficulty of the I play intentionally, but I think more players are going to finish it this time .” Some of those tools that he mentions are the possibility of leaving a difficult challenge to return to it later -thanks to its open world format-, the variety of different approaches not focused on action and the accessibility of multiplayer, which favors overcoming challenges. cooperatively.
Elden Ring will arrive on February 25 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One and PC.
