Keza MacDonald article
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Really interesting article and comments, the whole thing is worth a read
Send me back to a bonfire if old
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The downside to making something critically revered and loved by millions is that it isn't easy to get out from under its shadow. For Hidetaka Miyazaki and the game development studio he now leads, FromSoftware, Dark Soulswas a golden ticket. In 2004, Miyazaki was a designer on the Armored Core series of mech games. By 2015, he was the company's president and the games he has directed – Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne – have been lauded as some of the greatest of the modern era.
"FromSoftware had made adventure games, before we acquired our recent reputation for the series everyone is familiar with," he says wryly. "One of them was Echo Night. We didn't want to just recreate it, but we know what makes a good adventure game, and we thought, let's see what we can do. I've observed some surprise in the reactions so far from people who were not aware that FromSoftware does other things besides Souls. This serves as a reminder to me that we have an established reputation – and that we should work on different games, so we can be more flexible and build a broader profile. That's how I see our future.
"We'll obviously continue to make the larger scale productions that we've become known for. That is our reputation. But at the same time we want to put out one-off, quirky, flavourful games. We are not always given the opportunity and the timing may not always be right, but I think that is who we would like to be."
Miyazaki cites classic Japanese girls' manga as an inspiration close to his heart – he has been reading it for most of his life – as well as Celtic spiritual tales by Scottish Victorian writer William Sharp, published under the name Fiona Macleod.
"It's creatively fresh for me personally. I am drawing from different sources of energy," he says. "But it's not just me, it's the staff too. People working on our other games find it a nice change of pace! Internally, it's been perceived as a breath of fresh air. As you can imagine, our other title, Sekiro, has a completely opposite mood and direction. The more time I spend working on Sekiro, the deeper I sink into this zone of blood and gore and conflict. But if I want to get out of it, I can walk over to the other side of the studio and ease myself into a completely different feeling when I work on Déraciné.
"But after a while with this very quiet and calm story, I start to feel like it's almost too far from the stress of real life, and I can't stay in it forever, so I throw myself back into Sekiro. I think there might be some people in the studio who think I must be slightly mad to be able to simultaneously work on two completely different games, but it gives me flow and balance."
"I had a chance to check out some of the games that were in development before the current VR headsets shipped, which gave me a very strong sense of how VR can transport you; it feels like you exist in a different space," he explains. "But at the same time, when you try to touch or feel something in that space, it's not there. There is a sense of disconnect; of being there, but not really. It's an uncomfortable feeling that I wanted to harness and overcome, so I went back to a game concept that I had about being between worlds, about being present but not quite present, and thought about how VR could help me to realise it."
Really interesting article and comments, the whole thing is worth a read
Send me back to a bonfire if old
