It turns out that everybody struggles with FromSotware’s tough-as-nails difficulty, even FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki. The studio head and creator of the Souls series revealed that in preparation for Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, he played through the base game and faced a lot of challenges, ironically of his own design. How’d he end up beating the game? Using every tool the game offered, and a little developer insight.
Miyazaki admitted his struggle through The Lands Between in an interview with The Guardian about the upcoming DLC and the future of FromSoftware. “I want to preface this by saying I absolutely suck at video games,” Miyazaki confessed. That is hilarious when you think about how the games he and FromSoftware have become famous for have garnered a community known for fawning over difficulty and creating the hateful phrase “git gud.” The director reveals that once he’s developed a game, he typically doesn’t pick it up as a player, but ahead of Shadow of the Erdtree he forced himself through Elden Ring.
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But if Miyazaki sucks so much at video games, how did he get through Elden Ring? “My approach or play style was to use everything I have at my disposal,” he says, “all the assistance, every scrap of aid that the game offers, and also all the knowledge that I have as the architect of the game.” While that last part about designing the game doesn’t apply to other players, Miyazaki’s play style has some great lessons for anyone hitting a wall in Elden Ring: It’s ok to use something if the game provides it.
Elden Ring takes the Soulslike formula and opens it up, quite literally, in the form of a sprawling world players can explore at their own pace. Per Miyazaki, this “lowered the barrier of entry,” and made the game more accessible to players. For some, that open design and the inclusion of mechanics like Spirit Ashes (which let you summon NPC aid) took away from the need to ‘git gud.’ Those people then began to accuse players who use those tools of not playing the “right way” or playing on easy mode. But with Miyazaki playing with those offered aids, it’s pretty clear that the right way to play is any way you want, and that the ‘git gud’ argument is bullshit.
Miyazaki and the developers at FromSoftware created every system with the intent that it would support players in surmounting the challenges they face, there is nothing wrong with using them. That is true in Shadow of the Erdtree as well: summon as many co-op players and Spirit Ashes as you need to pummel enemies into the ground. Just remember, it’s what Miyazaki would do.
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