A short interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki. The game’s keyword “freedom” refers to the freedom of the capture, story progression, tactics, and character build.

Special interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki

The long-awaited dark fantasy action RPG Elden Ring is finally less than a month before its release on February 25. Before the release of ELDEN RING, "The Overture of ELDEN RING", which is a collection of information from ELDEN RING, will be released on February 3.

This e-book summarizes the information based on the contents of the network test conducted last November. In addition, you can also enjoy a special feature that contains a lot of artwork for Elden Ring as well as the previous games such as Demon’s Souls.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of ELDEN RING, one of the highlights of this mook. Please check it out if you are looking forward to ELDEN RING.
(Date of interview: December 20, 2021)

Evolving Toward a New Sense of Scale

It’s almost finished. At this stage, all that’s left are the finishing touches. This isn’t something that’s unique to ELDEN RING—actually, it applies to every game I’ve ever worked on—but this period we’re coming up on, between the last stages of development and the release date, is always trepidatious. No matter what you do. Truth be told, it’s not exactly my favorite part of the dev cycle! But all throughout our work on ELDEN RING, I’ve told myself, “If we’ve captured a simple sense of adventure, we’re on the right track.” I think we’ve achieved that, at least to some extent. We’ve built a whole wide, unfamiliar world and loaded it with threats and mysteries, new encounters, drama, and mythology, and it’s all there for players to discover and explore, bit by bit. If you say so, that takes a bit of the edge off my uncertainty. That’s definitely something we hope players will feel from this game. There are two major things in particular. For one, this time around, we were collaborating with George R. R. Martin. We asked him to come up with the mythologies that form the underlying basis of ELDEN RING—events that took place in its world well before players step into the story. Building a game up from an existing backdrop like that was a new experience for me, and it was a thrill to break that ground. The second thing was the sheer size of the game. ELDEN RING is much larger than any game I’ve directed before, which means there was more that I had to delegate to other members of the team. That was something I’d anticipated from the very beginning. Actually, you could say that the fact that we’d built up team members to the point where I could leave things in their hands was a major factor in deciding to make a game of this scale in the first place. And of course, they met my expectations! The size of my team and the length of the development process both hit new highs for FromSoftware with ELDEN RING. But the important thing isn’t that we had more people to toss at the project; it’s that we’d built up a team that we could trust to get it done. Tons and tons of things, of course! The visual design of the Erdtree itself is one, for example. That’s the real appeal of working together to make something as a team; it’s one of my biggest joys as a game creator. Fundamentally, it wasn’t actually that different from how I’d directed games before. It all begins upstream, with broad concepts and designs; establishing all the separate parts that define the game’s overall direction, like artwork, level design, animations, and text. I tried to stay involved in those elements as directly as I could. But let’s take level design, for example. Once a certain area’s design is established to some extent, it’s time to hand more of it over to another team member. There was a lot to be done this time around, since ELDEN RING’s map is so huge. We’d been continuously testing some automation since before work ever began on ELDEN RING, but this time around, we automated everything we could—to make sure that our team had plenty of time to make the game more fun to play too. Some asset construction and placement, AI base creation, and even a bit of debugging was all automated. Naturally, a lot of this is stuff you’d want to adjust by hand in the end, so we still did that as well. To look at it from another side of development, we also honed our abilities to collect playtest data and put it to work in our adjustments and improvements. It was important to us that our fixes weren’t just based on hunches, but on actual data. Especially as the team grew larger and I had to delegate more and more things, that became a must. Yes, I suppose so… To tell you the truth, though, I thought we’d be able to automate more than we actually could. There was a lot that we had to get through on pure strength of will! But I think that also led to some nice, distinctive bits with a real FromSoftware flair, so I’d say all the hard work paid off.

The Hows and Whys of a Wide World

In this case, I’d say that the “sense of adventure” that I mentioned earlier is closer to what we’re after than exploration per se. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still exploration—but not so much in the sense of searching through every nook and cranny of the dungeons in the game. It’s something on a much wider scale than that. Yes, that’s it. “Freedom” is something of a key phrase for ELDEN RING. You’ll have a great degree of freedom in how you tackle each area, in how the story progresses, in the combat skills you use, and in how you build your character.

　For the rest of the interview, please refer to "The Overture of ELDEN RING", which will be released on February 3.

The Overture of ELDEN RING
Format: Digital Download
Page: 128 page
Price: $9.99 US
On Sale Date: February 3, 2022
Publisher: Yen Press, LLC