Dark Souls 2 may end up being much different from the previous Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls: with a new director on board things are obviously going to change a bit. The new director, Tomohiro Shibuya, already stated that he wasn’t willing to touch up the difficulty of the game, which can be hard but also highly rewarding, as well as the overall atmosphere of the game would go untouched: in a new interview with Edge, he states that there are some things he would like to do differently.
A lot of the game’s mechanics are obviously quite obscure and not all players may have had the chance to understand them fully: the covenant system, for example, is never fully explained in game and this led to a lot of players playing almost blindly. Shibuya san wants Dark Souls 2 to be more direct and not only about the explanation of game’s mechanics: the story will be more direct as well, where it was told through subtle details in the previous games.
Even though he considers the control scheme to be somewhat offputting to new players, it won’t be changed, being a staple of the series: for the rest, we may be looking at an overall smoother experience.
Dark Souls 2 is around 25% complete: from the looks of thing, the game may hardly be coming during 2013.
