Good news for all you Dark Souls 2 defenders out there.
Elden Ring director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has defended FromSoftware’s most divisive game, Dark Souls 2, and said that its ideas «carried the rest of the series».
Although FromSoftware’s games are generally regarded as some of the best of the last few decades, there are a few titles from the studio that get a little less love. The biggest example of this is Dark Souls 2, which made a lot of changes to the first game’s formula that were less well-received, such as rolling being less useful at the start because of Adaptability, animations no longer making you invulnerable and opening you up to attacks, and there being so many consumable healing items, to name a few.
Dark Souls 2 has been more positively received by the community in recent years and earned a place among the rest of the series, but it wasn’t always like that and it was fair to say that a lot of players were pretty disappointed with it when it released, at least compared to how they felt about Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.
FromSoftware has previously made it clear that it knows the game is considered the outlier of the Dark Souls trilogy, but Elden Ring’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has jumped in to defend the title and all it introduced to the series. While talking to IGN about Shadow of the Erdtree, Miyazaki was asked about the one game in the Soulslike series that he didn’t direct — Dark Souls 2.
While noting that Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring have a few similarities, such as their focus on more open gameplay instead of linear levels, Miyazaki stood in the game’s corner, noting that it was a «great project» for FromSoftware, and that a lot of its ideas «carried the rest of the series» going forward.
«In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.”
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Miyazaki also pointed out that having different directors for Dark Souls actually helped the series, and that it helped to have those «different ideas» to make connections that the team otherwise might not have had. He goes as far as saying that he doesn’t know what the series would have looked like if Dark Souls 2 hadn’t done so many things as differently as it did.
