Dark Souls creator doesn't consider himself the father of the new action RPG genre

It is commonly accepted that the Soulslike genre was invented by the Japanese studio FromSoftware. After all, the "souls" in the name refers to Demon's Souls and Dark Souls developed by this team. Turns out, even the main designer of these hits, Hidetaka Miyazaki, isn't totally sure that he and his team should get all the credit.

The creator explains that the idea of making character death and the lessons learned from it a core part of the gameplay was not entirely new. Miyazaki thinks that players have been looking for something like this for a while, and FromSoftware just nailed it by creating a game that perfectly hits the mark.

The Japanese designer did not work at FromSoftware from the studio's inception. Hidetaka Miyazaki joined the company in 2004 and spent quite a while working on the Armored Core series. When the studio began working on a fantasy game that eventually evolved into Demon's Souls, it initially didn't go well, and the company's management believed the project would likely be a failure. This changed when Miyazaki took the lead of the team. He decided to introduce elements from the old King's Field series, added an online mode, and incorporated a death mechanic that allows players to recover lost currency (provided they avoid dying again before reaching them). All these decisions turned out to be spot on, and the rest is history.

As Hidetaka Miyazaki explains:

Of course, such stories are quite common. Games that change the entire gaming industry and inspire imitators are rarely completely innovative. Usually, these are just titles that find a fresh way to pull off interesting but not quite perfect ideas, and they end up becoming hits that inspire copycats. As an example, we can mention RTS games. Back in the '80s, there were quite a few titles that we'd easily call that today. Just consider The Ancient Art of War, Nether Earth, or Herzog Zwei. However, the genre truly emerged and was standardized only when Westwood Studios took these ideas and used them in a new form in Dune II and the first Command & Conquer.

Elden Ring

February 25, 2022

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• FromSoftware
• action RPG
• Hidetaka Miyazaki
• soulslike