Speaking as part of a keynote during Reboot Develop, a boutique games industry event held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki - best known for Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and more recently, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - talked at length about his wish to work on a story-focused game someday.
Appearing alongside Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda, Miyazaki shared his design vision in defining the gameplay as the soul of a game, often eschewing direct stories with convoluted plot, lore and excessive world building that is only revealed as you play the game.
Speaking through a translator, Miyazaki says that the creation of a game world and levels can affect the overall story, so it makes less sense to start from there. However, he is quick to point out that this is not the only way he sees game design, and that is when he expressed his desire to make a game inspired by an unlikely muse.
According to VG247, the two Japanese game developers discussed their design philosophies, with Miyazaki specifically namedropping Red Dead Redemption 2, a recent critically-acclaimed release from Rockstar, as his inspiration for a narrative-driven game that he hopes to make in the future, in a bold move to shy away from his gameplay-focused stories.
With the recent release of Sekiro, it became quite evident that Miyazaki is already trying to move away from Souls-like stories that are often open-ended and raise more questions than it answers. Sekiro, for one, has no actual RPG elements and instead relied on a single named protagonist, who can also talk, making Wolf the first ever protagonist in a Souls-like to do so.
The story is also more straightforward than other Souls games, albeit slightly more open-ended due to multiple endings. These multiple endings also serve to pad out the narrative, along with characters with clearer motivations and more grounded stories. There are still some elements of backstories provided by item descriptions (an actual element of Souls worldbuilding) as well as NPC dialogue, compounded with the new eavesdrop ability.
Whatever his next project be, it is quite exciting to see Miyazaki and team branch out into new and different horizons while still keeping the charm of what made them one of the best game developers today.
