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168澳洲幸运5开奖网:FromSoftware's games are notoriously brutal. While not all of their games have this kind of data available, we know that at the height of its popularity, While for many players that level of difficulty is a reason to stay far away, FromSoftware diehards see the ability to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:effortlessly slay gaming's toughest bosses as the ultimate badge of honor.
For all the success of their recent titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring, you might be surprised to learn that FromSoftware's unique dark fantasy style was originally considered a failure before it even launched. Let's take a look at how the Souls series' fortunes reversed.
Before Souls
FromSoftware didn't actually make games for the first eight years it was in business. Originally incorporated in 1986, the company . It wasn't until 1994 that they moved into the gaming space, developing a hack-and-slash title for the PS1 called King's Field. The game's difficulty earned it a cult following, and FromSoftware began to focus further on the new direction they had taken.
While many of FromSoftware's titles stuck to fantasy settings, the first series to gain traction on a larger scale was Armored Core. This mecha series saw twenty-three titles between 1997 and 2013, forming a foundation of FromSoftware's business until the unexpected success of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Demon's Souls.
Hidetaka Miyazaki
Hidetaka Miyazaki joined FromSoftware in 2004, writing code for Armored Core games. As he , he had decided to change careers at twenty-nine and FromSoftware was one of the few companies that would take a new employee with his lack of experience. He kept his ear to the ground while working, though, and eventually heard that another of the company's projects was having trouble.
Demon's Souls was meant to be another dark-fantasy RPG similar to King's Field, but the team couldn't seem to figure out what exactly they wanted the finished game to be. Miyazaki, eager to work on a fantasy game like those he had enjoyed as a kid, such as Wizardry and Games Workshop's Fighting Fantasy books, asked to take over the project. He figured that since the company was already prepared to write off Demon's Souls as a failure, he could do whatever he wanted with it, and it wouldn't reflect poorly on him if he couldn't turn the game around.
Miyazaki would later that he wanted to make a game where character deaths were frequent but challenged the player to do better. At first, he even wanted the game to have permadeath — "if you die in a soul body, you will lose your character." The Souls system, whereby a player's progress would be lost upon death unless they could return to the same location and win it back, was developed as a compromise.
A Tough Start
The initial reaction to Demon's Souls was overwhelmingly negative. When the first playable demo made its debut at Tokyo Game Show 2008, reviewers assumed that the combat in the demo build was broken. The game's producer, Takeshi Kajii, as the game couldn't be learned in five minutes, but the developers were nevertheless disappointed when some players didn't even finish creating a character before walking away. Even Sony's president at the time, Shuhei Yoshida, without getting past the starting area, eventually giving up with the words, "This is crap."
Despite these early blows, Demon's Souls met with much better reception from gamers and critics once it launched in 2009. Many were quick to point out, as Souls evangelists would continue to do for later games, that once players understood that the difficulty was harsh but fair the game was actually rewarding and well-crafted. Sales and reception of Demon's Souls made it a surprise hit, one that justified a sequel.
Dark Souls
Since Sony had outside of Japan, Atlus and Bandai Namco had taken on the role of third-party publishers for Demon's Souls in those regions. This led to a potential impasse — Sony held the rights to the Demon's Souls series, and now that the game was a success they wanted to publish it in-house. Naturally, the third-party publishers were relܫuctant to give b👍ack the property they had backed from the start.
FromSoftware ultimately opted to continue working with Bandai Namco, creating a new series called 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls, free of the web of IP complications in which Demon's Souls was trapped. Dark Souls would go on to spawn two sequels and carve out a place as the gold sta꧒ndard in one of the hottest breakout genres of the 2010s.
The Present Day
After four games within the Souls settings, FromSoftware applied its now-tried-and-true formula to other universes. 2015's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bloodborne offered a Gothic, Van Helsing-style vibe, while 2019's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice brought the gameplay style to feudal Japan. The company's latest release, Elden Ring, is a return to Western medieval fantasy and has been met with a veritable tsunami of praise. While it looks like FromSoftware is currently gearing up to throw Armored Core fans a bone after almost a d⛎ecade, it's clear that for the foreseeable future the company's bread and butter will be Miyazaki's murderous masterpieces.