i concur. i maintain that From took many of the mechanical sensibilities from armored core and fused them to the atmosphere and general thematic bent of king’s field in the development of demon’s
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hmmmm. I get the sense that there’s a sort of unstated tension sometimes between the people here who insist that demon’s souls came directly out of king’s field and those that don’t really want to have that discussion on the grounds that king’s field was always far more plodding and less broadly exciting or accessible, so it kind of gets shrugged off.
(for the record I consider myself in the second camp except I’m much more inclined to draw comparisons from souls to armored core in terms of shoulder button loadouts, a true idiot pariah)
I don’t know why it can’t be both
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it can be and is! I think for the purposes of this discussion it’s just a matter of “are the souls games sufficiently unique in their own right, or is their DNA substantially unique enough from king’s field, i.e. are their other inspirations more significant, that calling it an acceleration of king’s field rather than a slowing down of other genre staples is more useful to our understanding?”
certainly, if you draw a line with multiple points on it, with demon’s souls in the middle and bloodborne at one end, it makes sense to have king’s field at the other end, in terms of how the dungeon crawler design was incorporated and then streamlined (and in acknowledgment of the design documents that from already had on hand). but if you’re looking at dark souls as ur-modern-action-RPG, I’m not as certain.
DS doesn’t seem to have changed thematically from pre Miyazaki to post Miyazaki, so I’d bet he came in and changed the mechanics. The themes probably took a lot from KF, and so… there you have it.
i think in general we tend to take Japanese devs obfuscating their process & downplaying similarities to other work as meaning there is no actual cross-pollination of ideas whatsoever
It’s safe to say that Dark Souls is a successor to King’s Field in a lot of respects but equally i do not think it’s wild to suppose that other 3D third-person action games with a similar genre/style/combat engine etc. were looked at
i always felt the palpable high-quality in From games came out of the people developing it actually having played enough games to know what quality is
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It’s clear to me that the process that led to the Souls games involved an unusual openness and flexibility. Although it doesn’t go into mechanical design, Miyazaki’s willingness to trust and delegate key artistic decisions to his staff instead of micromanaging was what struck me the most in the Dark Souls Design Works interview. So you get games full of flashes of inspiration from a dozen game lovers rather than a single genius, and willing to meander and explore and make mistakes a bit while still staying within sight of overall themes.
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good post and succinct summary of why auteurism is bullshit to me
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At a certain point, given how people move around the industry, even studio-based auteurism becomes unworkable.