Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed why he has yet to play Bluepoint’s remake of Demon’s Souls and how the team at FromSoftware was so impressed by the game’s visuals that they felt extra pressure when developing Elden Ring for PS5.
As reported by VGC, Miyazaki was interviewed by Edge magazine and shared that the Demon’s Souls remake’s focus on graphical fidelity was not something FromSoftware puts as a top priority on, and that’s why his team – specifically the graphics creation staff – felt this extra pressure after the remake was released. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t up for the challenge and Miyzaki has all the faith in the world in his team.
“And not just with Elden Ring, but with all the games we make,” Miyazaki said. “Graphical fidelity is not something we put as the top priority. What we ask for on the graphics side depends on the systems and requirements of the game itself, and it takes less priority compared to the other elements of development.
“So this is always an area where I feel a little bit apologetic towards my graphics team because I know they work extremely hard. And they’ve worked extremely hard on Elden Ring – our graphics-systems team and our programmers have been pushing a lot of new features to create the best-looking games we’ve ever made.”
He then explained why he has yet to play the Demon’s Souls remake, despite the original being another game he was the director of. What it boils down to, according to Miyazaki, is that he is not a fan of replaying his old work.
“As you say, I was not directly involved in it, and I haven’t actually played the Demon’s remake,” Miyazaki said. “But this is because I just don’t enjoy playing the games that I’ve made in the past,” he explained. “It brings up a lot of old emotions, a lot of old memories, and this gets a little bit overwhelming, and it doesn’t feel like playing any more. So I have not played the Demon’s remake, but I am very glad to see it get this fresh look, these brand-new current-gen graphics.”
He concluded by saying that while he’s happy to see the game modernized for both a new and old audience, he was a bit nervous as Demon’s Souls development was not the smoothest one.
“It was an old game, so to see it get remade in this way and have new players playing it was obviously something that made me very happy,” Miyzaki said. “It was a rough game back in the day, with a relatively rough development, so I was anxious that new players would not enjoy it in that same way. That was a cause of concern for me when it was re-released but, you know, in the end, I’m just happy to see the reaction and happy to see people enjoying it.
“One thing that was really fun was seeing [Bluepoint Games] come up with things we didn’t consider and to approach certain elements of the game its visuals and its mechanics in a way that we either couldn’t or didn’t back in the day. So to see them researching and applying these new thought processes and new techniques, this was something that was really exciting and interesting for me.”
Fans won’t have long to wait to see how the team rose to the challenge of making Elden Ring FromSoftware’s best-looking game yet as it is set to arrive on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on February 24, 2022.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.