Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s revealed that his team has already had to apply a bit of nip and tuck to the gritty RPG, due to some of the game’s content being deemed “too difficult” for players.
As the spiritual successor to the notoriously tricky Demon’s Souls, the game’s inherent hair-pulling qualities shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans of the original. We’ve already heard that the game will be even more difficult than its precursor, for one.
Miyazaki noted that the studio has certain rules that must be followed when calving out an appropriate difficulty setting. As such, anything that doesn’t adhere to these guidelines must be given the chop — and it seems that’s already been the case for some of the more "spicy" content.
"Yes, actually there was a lot [of content] that was too difficult and we had to pull," he told CVG. "You may not believe it but there are things that are a bit too spicy, aspects that prevent you from eating (laughs), we’re trying to avoid those."
"We have some set rules that we use to define difficulty, anything that doesn’t abide by those definitions isn’t included," he explained. "This is to stay with the core ideas and philosophies relating to the difficulties of the game.
"A good example is the player’s skill level, reflexes and control, which is something we don’t want to make a large factor that contributes to the difficulty."
Dark Souls brings a boatload of new additions to an already polished paradigm, such as increased field exploration, more complex level design, fresh weapons, items and spells, and much more.
The game’s out in late 2011 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms.