While playing Elden Ring can, if you want, be a completely solitary experience, one of its best features is its multiplayer: PvP, PvE, and the esoteric messages players leave for one another that have become something of their own meme culture. Given the unique nature of all these multiplayer interactions, it’s only natural that director Hidetaka Miyazaki has been doing a lot of thinking about multiplayer technology, and how it’s used in games other than his own.
Speaking to IGN following Elden Ring’s five wins (including Game of the Year) at the 26th annual DICE Awards, Miyazaki brought up the subject of multiplayer when we asked him what new technologies, trends, or ideas in gaming he finds inspiring or exciting right now.
“I’m not really sure whether this is the latest trend, but the multiplayer elements that in terms of both technology and the game designs, we keep updating [them],” he said. “So I’m really interested in that as one of the fans and one of the creators. Especially speaking of [Escape From] Tarkov, for example. So I’m basically paying attention to those elements as a creator and fan of the game.
“Other folks in the industry, they keep updating multiplayer network functionality and the game design in order to change the way that the players are involved in the gameplay, and how the players are used as one of the resources for the gameplay. So that’s why I’m paying attention to these elements.”
Escape From Tarkov is a 2017 tactical FPS that melds tactical simulation and FPS with MMO elements, and became wildly popular several years into its early access release in no small part due to a promotion that offered in-game items to those who watched Twitch streams of the game. It remains both fairly popular and in early access now in 2023, and its developers recently had to crackdown hard yet again against a wave of cheaters develper Battlestate referred to as “scum of the earth” in an official post.
‘It’s very simple’
We also asked Miyazaki if Elden Ring’s incredible critical, award-winning, and financial success meant that we’d be likely to see more Elden Ring in the future — but Miyazaki told us that its success was not a factor in deciding what FromSoftware wanted to make next.
“Obviously Elden Ring is a commercial success,” he said. “Everybody’s aware about that, but it doesn’t really affect what we are going to create next. We basically keep creating the game that we want to create, and that’s our policy. It’s very simple.