"Eldon's Ring of Law" has become a hot topic in the entire game circle recently, as well as the editorial department of the mobile game, and the joy of shaking people to play bosses together during the lunch break is unforgettable.
After the launch of this latest jittery M god game, Miyazaki Hidego once again fell to the altar of the game world, the parent company Kadokawa Shoten and the distributor Bandai Namco HD stock price soared, Bandai Namco even directly announced from April to give all employees an average salary increase of 27%.
How did the Souls series of games come about? What kind of spirit and self does Hidetaka Miyazaki embody in Soul and The Ring of Eldon? What role did Martin play in the creation of The Ring of Law in Eldon? Is miyazaki the old thief a shake M or a shake S?
An accomplished novel can also be missed by a careless reader, and a movie and its plot can be misunderstood by lazy audiences. However, only the game has the right to punish the player for mistakes, if the player makes a mistake because of an uncomfortable jump, or sticks it to the face of the enemy, or fails to reach the level save point, the game can generously send him back to the starting point, let him lose his previous achievements, until the player passes the test, or retreats from the pit.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, a producer in his forties, is a leader in doing just that. In Dark Souls, which made him famous in 2011, players play as a witch running wild in the sewers and walking on thin ice in the forest. You'll be attacked by a giant wolf, a mushroom, a dangerous swamp, or a spider wielding a sword. If you fail to catch the enemy's flaws, or fall off the walls, you will be greeted by a crap-like message: "You Died." Then you're re resurrected by the campfire — scattered throughout the checkpoints of this mysterious, hazy medieval world — and every enemy you've destroyed before has been resurrected.
Regular players are usually sent back to the campfire frequently. Many games often use elaborate childish levels to please players, but Miyazaki's work forces players to taste hard-won proficiency and precision in defeat and patience. You can't rush to victory, each enemy has its own wisdom and deserves to be taken seriously, you have to carefully observe their attack patterns to counterattack, which is a test of endurance and control. With a moment of inattention, even the simplest enemy can easily send you back to the campfire. Like life, all struggles contain truth and consequences.
Dark Souls and its sequels are "notorious" for their masochistic difficulty. Even beyond the scope of the game, people will use "soul" to describe any particularly heavy task. "I've never been a master gamer," Miyazaki told me in a recent video interview. So, in my work, I want to answer the question: how do you give death in games a meaning above failure? How can we make the death of failure enjoyable? ”
Hidetaka Miyazaki was a very low-key man who rarely gave interviews, rearranging Three of The New Yorker's interviews. But even so, his fame is gradually growing. Last year, at the Golden Joystick, players named the Dark Souls series the best game of all time, rather than classics like Tetris, Doom, or Super Mario 64. Nearly 30 million copies of Hidetaka Miyazaki's game series have been sold, and his latest title, Eldon's Ring of Law, was officially released on Friday, making it one of the most anticipated games of the year.
Nevertheless, some people have conquered the monsters created by Miyazaki's old thieves, and some people have retreated from the pit in a sullen mood. "I do feel sorry for the people who suffered in my game," Miyazaki told The New Yorker reporter, holding his head in both hands and then laughing: "I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy of overcoming difficulties." ”
(Translator's note: Miyazaki is like a jitter S, but a few months ago he said in an interview that the levels he designed were "the way he wanted to be treated", generously admitting that he was a ultimate jitter M, see picture)
Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in a poor family in Shizuoka, southwest of Tokyo. As a child, he could not afford books, so he had to borrow incomprehensible British fantasy novels and science fiction novels in the library, based on plot and illustrations to make up the story scenes behind the brain. He then studied at Keio University, where he finished his social science degree in a humble manner and then joined Oracle, an American IT company. He told The New Yorker that he accepted the job just to pay for his sister's college.
Hidetaka Miyazaki also played games when he was younger, but the turning point in his fate came around 2001, when, on the recommendation of a friend, he tried Fumito Ueda's Ico, an elaborate minimalist fairy tale about a boy and a girl escaping from a castle. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game recreates the joys of his childhood, piecing together a story with text clips and illustrations. He decided to change careers, and at the age of twenty-nine, with no development experience, he took a sharp pay cut to join FromSoftware, an obscure studio in Tokyo. Starting as a programmer, he took over the development of a difficult project— a fantasy game with shadowy worlds set in obscure castles and elven monsters. He rewrote the game from the bottom, creating a mechanic whereby the player dies and returns to the beginning of the level, health is diminished, resources are lost, but enemies are equally powerful. "Even if my idea fails, no one will care," he told The New Yorker. "It's already doomed to be a failure."
Demon Souls was released in a low-key release in 2009. The game's one-on-one battle is not suitable for demonstration at all, Miyazaki Hidetaka recalled, players shrugged and walked away after trying it. The cover of Devil's Souls shows an Arthurian knight falling against a wall — hinting at battle and defeat rather than heroism. The game's story and worldview are constructed from wisps of threads: a description of an object found, a monologue of a dying enemy. However, over time, the game's hazy fragment narrative, gothic style and high difficulty slowly allowed it to accumulate some word of mouth. In 2011, Demon Souls' spiritual sequel Dark Souls was a huge success, selling nearly 2.5 million copies in 18 months, propelling FromSoftware to Japan's top studio queue. Three years later, Hidetaka Miyazaki was appointed president of the company.
One theory is that Hidetaka Miyazaki's early life was unsatisfactory, and a series of hard-earned achievements, that many players resonated with him in his game. Hidetaka Miyazaki, whose face behind his glasses and flowing goatee, is actually young and cheerful, and he denies the conjecture: "I didn't describe my own life story in a grand narrative, or that those things affected the way I made games," he said. We all encounter problems in our daily lives, and finding answers and solutions to them is always a pleasure. But in life, there are not many things that can easily bring us this feeling. ”
The question of how hard a game should be is closely related to the question of who the game is for. Some argue that they should be smooth: with a friendly entry threshold for players with different skills, interests and stamina to adapt. Others would argue that games should have a maverick experience. At this level, it is the prerogative of the producer to choose a high degree of difficulty, and not every game has to be built to suit everyone.
Hidetaka Miyazaki's work is often cited by the latter because it represents a challenge rather than an escape. "It's an interesting question," Hidetaka Miyazaki told us. "We've been looking for breakthroughs, but, especially in our games, high difficulty is something that gives meaning to the experience. So it's not something we're willing to give up at the moment, it's our mark. ”
However, Hidetaka Miyazaki's new game, Elden's Ring of Law, also made some compromises, a way of "making the player feel that victory is a feat that can be achieved", he said, and all of his iconic features have been retained — unexpected encounters with giant enemies, difficult action battles, insisting that players improve their skills, not just enhance their characters in the game — but there are also some concessions that make the game more approachable, and now, players can summon ghost horses and escape a battle they don't want to experience. In the game before Miyazaki Thief, the player only had a few given routes, each with a powerful boss waiting for the player to challenge. In Eldon's Circle of Law, the world is truly open, and if you find one path too challenging, just choose another.
Still, you'll experience a lot of death: in the fiery breath of a dragon, under the icy hammer of a giant, whipped by a stranded Krussou octopus. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, the death of the game is an opportunity to create memory points and laugh points. "When I play games, I think about how I want to die. The answer is to be funny or funny, or to be able to create a story that can be shared," he said, "to die and be born again, to try and overcome – we want the cycle to be enjoyable." Death is a terrible thing in life. In the game, it can have a different meaning. ”
In Eldon's Ring of Law, Hidetaka Miyazaki meets with one of his heroes, George W. Bush. R· George R. R. Martin reached a collaboration— his work was already popular long before the Game of Thrones fire, before Martin was a well-known science fiction writer. Hidetaka Miyazaki contacted Martin through a board member of FromSoftware and was surprised to find out that Martin was a fan of his game. At first, Miyazaki feared that there would be language and age barriers between them—Martin was seventy-three years old. But as their conversation deepened, whether in the hotel suite or in Martin's hometown, the friendship that was very happy with each other blossomed.
Miyazaki Hidetaka imposed key restrictions on Martin's contribution. Martin is only responsible for the overall worldview of the game, not its actual script. The story of Eldon's Ring of Law takes place in a world known as the "Parochial," and Martin creates large settings, characters, and myths about it, including the destruction of the "Ring of Law" and the scattering of fragments. Miyazaki then refines the story at the literal level of the player's direct experience. "In our game, the story must always serve the player experience," he said. "If (Martin) had written a specific story of the game, I would have worried that we wouldn't have strayed from that. I want him to be able to write freely and not be bound by obscure mechanisms that may have to change over time during development. ”
It was a bit of a surprise that Martin, a writer known for his intricate, interlocking plots, had a collaboration with Hidetaka Miyazaki. Hidetaka Miyazaki's games are narrated by fragmented text, and in Dark Souls, a key plot detail may only appear in the description of the inventory, not in the dialogue, a technique that Miyazaki Hidetaka uses to stimulate the imagination of the player. "The power of imagination is important to me," he says, "and giving users a space to imagine creates a sense of communication among players, including communication between users in the community." I love seeing our game unfold and continue to influence my work.
The first time I met Hidetaka Miyazaki was in Tokyo, in 2011, a few months before Dark Souls was released. He and his team are busy in an open area, with a digital photo frame on his desk, nestled between a row of plastic figurines, surrounding an unopened bottle of whiskey. The screen loops with text, and each paragraph is a criticism made by the game testers during the development process, which is a challenge to the team's efforts to develop. In the months leading up to the release, Hidetaka Miyazaki only occasionally left the office to take a shower. At work, he also believes that the whole-hearted struggle will amplify the sense of accomplishment.
Hidetaka Miyazaki himself admits that he is a micromanager. He calls his leadership a "total direction," and he can advise on anything from the button style of clothing to the precise angle of a steep hill. "I learned a lot from Hidetaka Miyazaki," concept artist Masanori Waragai told us in 2015. "Too many to count." Hidetaka Miyazaki often had opinions on fonts and menu layouts, and even directly performed the action performances of game characters for animators.
Such a president is very rare: the need to run a business can easily stifle creativity. But Hidetaka Miyazaki considered himself an outsider to the management class. He observes CEOs like an anthropologist, and he jokes that they are sometimes used as inspiration for monsters. He is also an approachable leader — his team often calls for personal advice — and he is acutely aware of the pros and cons of his own grip on power. "What I value most is the openness of the team and I will speak frankly about my own mistakes," he said. "Because of my influence in these games, people are often reluctant to give their authentic opinions, even though that might be very important. So I try not to exert coercion and try to build the trust of the team. ”
This co-op mode can also be seen in Hidetaka Miyazaki's games, where he encourages players to interact and encourage in subtle ways to overcome the challenges they face. In Demon Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki allows players to leave a simple patchwork of words in a stranger's world to guide each other. In this way, a teenager far away in Kansas can warn engineers in Shinjuku to pay attention to trapdoors, and pranksters can also trick players into assuring them that the dangers about trapdoors are deceptive.
In Eldon's Ring of Law, if you play online, the ghostly silhouettes of other players occasionally flash on the screen while you hang out, showing you that this isn't a completely lonely experience. Players can also summon another player or NPC for help on a difficult route. Players cannot talk to each other, so in the face of difficulties, everyone can only build complete trust. After the boss of this route is defeated, the summoned player dissolves in a burst of light. The idea stemmed from Hidetaka Miyazaki's experience many years ago, when his car was trapped in the snow on the mountain, and a group of strangers appeared to help him push the car to the top of the slope, and then disappeared into the night silently.
When I first played Dark Souls, I was a young man with a toddler going through an unprecedented low. The game is like an ointment: in this small world, everything can be in order, and with time and effort, everything will move forward normally and in an orderly manner, especially in Miyazaki's games. In a world where all forces are trying to expel you, fight to resist and then overcome the feeling of all kinds of difficulties, giving people the strength and inspiration of reality.
I've often wondered if Hidetaka Miyazaki was trying to convey similar feelings when he used the game as a way to control the player. "I love the process of solving problems, and I know that problems can be solved," he told me. "Impossible challenge? No, it's the boundaries of my creation and the place where I feel stressed. Either way, I'm very fortunate to be able to practice this process by creating games. ”
When I asked his family if they had ever played his game, he laughed and said his daughter was only three years old. "It's not big enough," he said. But there's another reason: Miyazaki worries that behind the abstraction his work contains something too personal to reveal. Full control of the player means full exposure to one's own risk. "I don't want my family to play my game because I feel like I'm going to let them see my bad, and that's probably annoying," he said. "I don't know, I might feel embarrassed. So I ruled at home: Dark Souls is prohibited.
Hidetaka Miyazaki's desire to know the boundaries between his work and real life is a paradox. Compared to the challenges of everyday life, the game is made up of fictional challenges, and many of them are clichés and out of touch with reality, and Miyazaki's achievement is to close the gap between them. By rooting the game in the human experience—in shame, failure, and even death—the game is brought closer to life.
Original: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/hidetaka-miyazaki-sees-death-as-a-feature-not-a-bug