Hidetaka Miyazaki, the Japanese game director is known for his famous Soulslike games such as Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and the very recent Elden Ring. He is currently the President of FromSoftware and his games have gone to set high benchmarks in the gaming industry.
Even though all of his games have gone to be huge commercial successes, Hidetaka Miyazaki feels that a few aspects of some of his later games like Bloodborne are significantly better than the previous games and most of this has to do with the experience of building these games.
Bloodborne is better than games like Demon’s Souls, and Dark Souls
This revelation was made by Hidetaka Miyazaki during an interview with FuturePress. During the interview, Miyazaki was asked if there was anything he envisioned for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls that didn’t materialize and if was he able to make it happen in Bloodborne.
To this he replied,
There are a lot of things, both big and small.
He then goes on to talk about how armor parameters have significantly changed in his games over the course of time. Miyazaki states that Demon’s Souls had a major flaw with its armor parameter. This is because as the player goes on to a higher level, the armor remains with them but it doesn’t power up to keep up with the difficult battles. This is because the armor parameters were based on static values.
Therefore while the armor managed to serve its purpose during the initial levels, their level of defensive capabilities whet down as the player reached higher levels. According to him the players therefore started to feel “This isn’t very different from going around naked”.
To solve this the team went on to add an armor upgrade system in Dark Souls. Here the players were able to boost the stats of their armor as they leveled up in the game so that the armor retains its value. This however, didn’t go on to solve the problem completely as it became difficult to fine-tune this parameter with the limited resources available at that time.
So Miyazaki added that by taking all of these as an experience, they significantly improved this particular aspect in Bloodborne. This game’s armor parameters are based on percentage reductions. This means that even after the player increases their levels in the game, the percentage of the armor in the player’s overall defense will remain the same.
Bloodborne becomes a commercial success
Bloodborne which was launched back in 2015, was well-received by the industry with specific praises for its gameplay. The game was well-loved because of its high-difficulty gameplay along with the overall game atmosphere. The game had its own sets of problems in the form of technical performance however, they were all fixed in the later patches.
In less than 12 days, the game which was released on the PS4 managed to sell over a million copies, which made it one of the fastest-selling games on the platform at that time.
According to the last reports, the game generated net sales of $265 million for FromSoftware by selling at least 7.46 million copies. Moreover, according to some estimates, this makes it the 11th best-selling PS4 first-party game. This is likely that the game still holds this record today as the PS4 is now a previous-generation console.
