If there’s one thing that people know about FromSoftware’s games, it’s that they’re hard. Like, really hard. The developer behind titles like Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and now Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has built up a reputation for making games that push a player’s skills to their absolute limits, and there’s never a way for those players to ease up the challenge in any way. In a recent interview with GameSpot, FromSoftware explained exactly why that is.
Speaking with GameSpot during this year’s E3 event, FromSoftware’s president Hidetaka Miyazaki was asked why none of the studio’s games have adjustable difficulty levels. After all, wouldn’t offering players a choice in how hard they wanted a game to be make that game more appealing overall? In response, Miyazaki gave an insightful justification as to why From’s games force players to adapt to a steep difficulty scale:
“We don’t want to include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment,” Miyazaki said. “So we want everyone … to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player.
We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there’s different difficulties, that’s going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It’s been the same way for previous titles and it’s very much the same with Sekiro.”
Miyazaki’s answer may not satisfy everyone, but it definitely makes sense. If you manage to overcome the many challenges found in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, you can be satisfied knowing that you did so even when the game threw the best it had at you. Not only that, you can share in that accomplishment with thousands of other players since you know they overcame those exact same challenges with that exact same level of difficulty.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is scheduled to launch for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC sometime in 2019. For more on FromSoftware’s previous games, be sure to read about the hidden boss rush feature that was ultimately cut from Bloodborne, or this Dark Souls 3 streamer who became the first female streamer to complete an entire no-hit speedrun of the game.