14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at From Software working on Dark Souls 2 says that it is not actively trying to make Dark Souls 2 a hard game on purpose, but to create an experience that will challenge gamers to use their skills to overcome complex situations.
Yui Tanimura, a co-director working on the title, tells PC Gamer that, “Our aim is to tune the difficulty to a level for players to be able to overcome and sense the highest sense of accomplishment possible. With this, the AI will be tuned to react more naturally to the player actions, but at the same time, the player controls and motions will be more natural and fitting to the actions carried out.”
One of the main attractions of the first title in the series was its difficulty level and many fans were disappointed when the studio announced that it was trying to make the sequel more accessible.
Since then, From Software has explained that streamlining is not a way to make the game easier, but only an attempt to make the experience appeal to a wider audience.
Tanimura adds, “I hope players will continue to learn from their mistakes and carry out multiple trial and error to conquer the challenges that await, and defeat the enemies that stand in the way. We try to tune so that the games difficulty is not a result of the players reflexes or ability to effectively use the controller.”
The team has previously explained that its wants the community to continue to use sites and forums to share strategies and information about the game world.
The difficulty of Dark Souls 2 is being tweaked based on data that the developers have gathered from the beta testing phase.
The game will be offered on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 in March 11 in North America and three days later in Europe, with a PC version set to arrive later.