Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is From Software’s big next game. While it will be different from the Dark Souls series in a number of ways, there are still lots of elements that have been maintained. For instance, talking to Eurogamer at E3 2018, Hidetaka Miyazaki reassured fans that they’ll die a lot in Sekiro, even with the new resurrection system the developers have designed for the game.
The intention is the player will die a lot. That is because of the concept of the ninja protagonist at its core; as a ninja ,you’re a little less equipped than the average samurai or knight, you’re always at death’s door. We want every battle to feel intense – we want players to feel that risk and trepidation associated with battle and fighting toe to toe with these enemies. And in order to do that, the player has to die a lot. But when they die and respawn and die again, and then retry, that doesn’t feel good. So, we needed something to address that, and that became the resurrection system.
One thing we want everyone to understand is we don’t intend to make the game easier as a result or make the challenge any less effective. This was not created in order to make the player feel numb to death or make the player unafraid of death. We want them to still have ‘the stench of death’ present in every single encounter, if you will, so this is something that will be tuned and tweaked as we go forward. It’s going to have its own restrictions and limitations, and we’re going to have our own death penalty that fits this concept.
Miyazaki then explained one major difference Sekiro will have compared to Dark Souls. Unlike that game, there’ll be different options to approach combat and that should it make more suitable for more gamers than just those who have high reaction times.
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It relates back to what we were saying about the ninja, and how they have a lot of things at their disposal and they have to master every part of their arsenal in order to confront these different situations. So we feel that this time, there are a lot of tools that we have prepared for the player, of various skill levels so that if they want to run in there head-on, they can do that and clash sword-to-sword. If they want to use the Shinobi Prosthetic to outsmart their opponents and find that one weakness, they can do that. If they want to use stealth to circumnavigate an encounter and get the drop on the enemy and then engage, they can do that too, so there are a lot of ways they can approach battle – it’s not just about being this high-reaction, twitch-based gamer.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is currently scheduled to hit PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One early next year. You can check Kai’s preview from E3 2018 if you want to learn more about it.
