After its release on Feb. 25, ELDEN RING, developed by Japanese game company FromSoftware, peaked at more than 890,000 people on Steam. According to SteamSpy, Eldon's Ring of Law Steam sold more than 5 million units in its first week.
FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki explained in a recent interview with The New Yorker why difficulty is an integral element of the company, saying: "Hardship and hardship can give meaning to the gaming experience. While death in other games is a sign of defeat, Hidetaka Miyazaki sees it as an important part of the player experience.
"I've never been a very skilled player," Hidetaka Miyazaki confessed, "I've died many times." So, in my work, I want to answer the question: If death is more than just a sign of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death pleasurable?"
His answer to this question lies in overcoming death: "I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy of overcoming difficulties."
"We're always looking for improvement, but especially in our games, difficulty is what gives meaning to the experience, so we're not willing to give up now, it's our identity (traits)."
Although for every additional conqueror under Hidetaka Miyazaki, another person would put down the handle depressedly. However, Hidetaka Miyazaki's new game, Eldon's Ring of Law, offers a compromise, a way to "make people feel that victory is a feat that can be achieved," and all of FromSoftware's features have been preserved —dramatic encounters with huge enemies, harsh battles, and insistence on allowing players to improve their abilities rather than just enhancing the characters on the screen —but there are also some concessions that make the game more approachable. Players can summon ghost animals to their side or ride a horse to escape a losing battle. In games prior to Miyazaki Hidetaka, players were assigned to a number of specific paths, each blocked by a powerful boss. In Eldon's Circle of Law, the world is truly open, and if one path is too difficult to follow, you can choose another.
Still, players die many times: under the white-hot snort of the dragon, under the icy weight of the hammer, under the whipping of the stranded octopus leg. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, death in video games is an opportunity to create a memory or a witty remark. "When I play these games, I think, this is the way I want to die — in a fun or interesting way, or to create a story that I can share," he said. "Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming – we want the cycle to be enjoyable. Death is a terrible thing in life. In the game, it can be something else. ”
Hidetaka Miyazaki does not think that death is meaningless, it is always a journey full of pleasant experiences. "When I play these games, I think, this is the way I want to die — in a fun way, or to create a story that can be shared," he said. "Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming – we want the cycle to be enjoyable. Death is a terrible thing in life. In the game, it can be something else. ”
Around 2001, Miyazaki tried Ueda Fumio's ICO on the recommendation of a friend. For Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game recreates the joy of piecing together stories from his childhood with text clips and mysterious illustrations, and he decides to switch careers. At the age of 29, with no relevant work experience, he took a pay cut to join FromSoftware, an unknown studio based in Tokyo. He started out as a programmer and later took over the development of a troubled project— a fantasy set in a shadowy world with looming castles and quirky monsters. He rewrote the game and created a mechanic whereby if the player dies, they will return to the beginning of the level, their health will be weakened, their resources will disappear, and their enemies will become stronger. ”
Demon Souls was released in 2009, but it didn't cause a sensation. The game's lengthy and precise battles are not suitable for the demo version; Hidetaka Miyazaki recalled that players shrugged and walked away. On the cover is a knight of King Arthur who slumps against the wall —the painting suggests struggle and defeat rather than heroism—and the game's narrative is based on a few vague threads: a description of a discovered object, a monologue of a dying enemy. But over time, the game's ambiguity, gothic design, and fierce bets earned it word of mouth. In 2011, its spiritual sequel, Dark Souls, was a hit, selling nearly 2.5 million copies in 18 months. Three years later, Hidetaka Miyazaki was named president of FromSoftware.
In The Ring of Eldon, Hidetaka Miyazaki collaborated with one of his idols, George W. Bush. R· R. Martin collaborated. Hidetaka Miyazaki loved Martin's work long before fantasy novels like Game of Thrones appeared. With the help of a board member of FromSoftware, Miyazaki finds Martin and is surprised to find martin as a fan of his game. At first, Miyazaki worried that language barriers and the age gap — Martin is 73 years old — would make communication difficult. But as their conversation deepened, whether in a hotel suite or in Martin's hometown, friendship began to sprout.
Hidetaka Miyazaki set some key limits on Martin's text contributions. That said, Martin will be responsible for writing the game's backstory, not the actual script. Set in a world known as the Middle Ground, Martin provides textual fragments of its background, characters, and mythology, including the legendary destruction of the Lord of the Rings and the spread of its fragments, known as the Great Runes. Hidetaka Miyazaki can then explore the impact of that history in the story that players experience directly. "In our game, the story must always serve the player experience," he says. If Martin were writing the game story, I might be worried that we might stray from that direction. I wanted him to be able to write freely and not be bound by some obscure mechanics that might need to change during development. Interestingly, Martin— a writer known for his intricate, precise plot — collaborated with Hidetaka Miyazaki, whose games are defined by vague narratives.
In Eldon's Ring of Law, if your game system is connected to the internet, the ghost silhouettes of other players occasionally flash on the screen as you roam, and players can even summon other players to help in battle. Players cannot converse with others, so it increases the difficulty of trust; Upon completion of the challenge, the summoned player disappears in a beam of light. A few years ago, Hidetaka Miyazaki's car was trapped in the snow on the mountain, and he had such a thought. A group of strangers pushed the car to the roof and then quietly disappeared into the night.
Hidetaka Miyazaki's desire for boundaries between his work and the world is a paradox. The game is made up of fictional challenges that tend to seem trite and distant compared to everyday life. But Miyazaki's achievements have narrowed the gap between them, bringing the game closer to life by ingraining the game in human experience—in shame, in failure, and even in death.
All in all, difficulty is the reason why The FromSoftware game is unique and exciting, and it's not going away any time soon.