You might have noticed that, unlike many games out there, the Dark Souls series doesn’t have any difficulty settings to choose among – one of the things that make the franchise a lot more challenging than other action RPG around.
In an interview with GameSpot, From Software’s president and series creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki has shared the reasons why this happens and the mental process behind the decision leading to make a game like this as tough as a Souls game is.
“We don’t want to include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment,” Miyazaki said. “So we want everyone … to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player.”
“We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there’s different difficulties, that’s going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It’s been the same way for previous titles and it’s very much the same with Sekiro.”
So it’s really a matter of not leaving anyone behind, surprisingly, as in one big community there’s a sense of accomplishment anyone shares, and a kind of assistance and help veterans can provide the others all over the Internet.
It’s an interesting reasoning, and one we are really looking forward to seeing how it’ll work in the upcoming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice when it releases on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019.
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