Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls Director Not Directing Dark Souls 2

Hidetaka Miyazaki, director on Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, has announced that he will not be directly involved with development on Dark Souls 2. Conversely, he’s been placed into a supervising role, assisting with production scheduling.

Miyazaki told this to Edge Online, also mentioning that he’s looking into server-based multiplayer networking for the upcoming sequel, and hopes to simply move away from the P2P (peer-to-peer) system. Aside from this, he’s working on hammering out the game’s development and production schedule, saying that the motivation to do so was partially inspired by the criticism surrounding Dark Souls’ many post-launch patches.

“I’m aware that many fans were a little bit frustrated about Dark Souls in terms of the scheduling — more specifically speaking, about the patches that we’ve released,” Miyazaki said.

“I really regretted that, so I reviewed all those kinds of things that I worked on in Dark Souls to make sure that Dark Souls 2 is ready on time.”

The franchise’s developer FromSoftware and its publisher Namco Bandai made the distinct decision to appoint two new directors for Dark Souls 2 (as opposed to Miyazaki), those being Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura. Miyazaki expressed his sadness about not being directly involved in the game’s creation, but does anticipate experiencing it without the attachment level brought on by a game’s development. In the meantime spent not directing Dark Souls 2, Miyazaki is working in a director’s position for a new, unannounced IP.

“Miyazaki worked on Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but for the IP to evolve and provide a new experience within the Dark Souls world the new wind from directors Shibuya and Tanimura is key to providing players with [a] brand new Dark Souls experience,” said Namco Bandai producer Takeshi Miyazoe.

“In order to maintain the expectations and satisfaction and the rewards that players experience, this was the right time to bring in the new characteristics and taste[s of the directors] for this series to continue on evolving.”

[Source: Edge via Polygon]