Dark Souls 2 developers to increase focus on atmosphere

More information about the upcoming sequel to Dark Souls, unimaginatively named Dark Souls 2, has emerged. In an interview with 4Gamer, Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki and Dark Souls 2 director Tomohiro Shibuya revealed that the new iteration would have a better, more realistic atmosphere and that the story would be set in the same world, but in a different area with different people.

Two big decisions that From Software has taken in the development of Dark Souls 2 are the inclusion of a dedicated server, much like Demon's Souls, and not having new weapons and items in the DLCs.

Speaking about building a new world for Dark Souls 2 and how he'd like to evolve the experience of the previous games, Shibuya said, “Rather than focusing on shading and lighting technologies, I believe that having a more realistic atmosphere while showing better details of the monsters and their expressions would definitely have a bigger impact.”

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Dark Souls 2 will take place in the same world as Dark Souls

Back in December, Miyazaki revealed some of the new features of Dark Souls 2 and how it will still maintain the core of Dark Souls. According to Miyazaki, the core experience of the game needs to be protected. "I'm talking about how we think about the difficulty level and how you achieve things in-game, about the concepts behind the mechanics and level design," he said. "Outside of that core, though, it's better to leave things to the discretion of the director. There's a lot around that core that we need to fix or adjust besides, and individual touches always tend to come out in the world setting and artwork, so I'm not meddling in that very much."

The game should retain the feelings of solitude and desperation present in the earlier games. Miyazaki feels that the feelings were expressed well in the Dark Souls 2 CGI trailer.

He also commented on the evolution of multiplayer of the game. While it still won't have standard multiplayer modes, Dark Souls 2 will go back to being hosted on dedicated servers. While this was present in the first game in the series, Demon's Souls, the developers opted for a peer-to-peer system for Dark Souls. With the next game going back to dedicated servers, more things are possible, according to Miyazaki.

"Setting up a dedicated server lets you retain your data, making it easier to share it with other players. We'd like to evolve the asynchronous message-oriented online support from the previous game; we're imagining a framework where players are able to directly interact with each other," Shibuya said. "Having dedicated game servers will be the source of a lot of new potential in DS2. There was a lot with the original Dark Souls I wish I could have done if we had the ability to have those servers, so in that way I'm pretty jealous of the new director here.”

He added, "The concept behind online play in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls was pretty plain to gamers, so I'm hoping we can evolve on that concept here without removing ourselves too far from it."