Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice players can expect to die quite often throughout the ninja-style game, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki said.
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Considering the fact that the game comes from the developers responsible for both the Dark Souls games and the PlayStation 4 exclusive Bloodborne, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to imagine that you’ll spend a lot of time respawning in Sekiro. Speaking to Eurogamer about the various enemies and obstacles that players will encounter in the game, Miyazaki noted that there was one point in particular that a developer working on the game had to restart several times to get through. He added that dying isn’t just a part of the game, it’s an intended outcome.
“The intention is the player will die a lot,” Miyazaki told Eurogamer. “That is because of the concept of the ninja protagonist at its core; as a ninja you’re a little less equipped than the average samurai or knight, you’re always at death’s door. We want every battle to feel intense – we want players to feel that risk and trepidation associated with battle and fighting toe to toe with these enemies. And in order to do that, the player has to die a lot. But when they die and respawn and die again, and then retry, that doesn’t feel good. So, we needed something to address that, and that became the resurrection system.”
The resurrection system was something that’s been previewed in the past since the game was revealed at E3, a feature that lets players reswawn right where they died and keep the action moving. It’s not something that you can do all the time though as it’s limited by a resource, but the finer details of how it works haven’t been revealed yet. Players can time their respawns to wait for enemies to leave the area first and then get back up to avoid too much unnecessary combat or to make a decisive strike against enemies with their backs turned.
“We feel that as we integrated that and experimented with it, it became a part of the Shinobi protagonist’s character,” Miyazaki said. “It linked in nicely with that ninja ‘anything goes’ concept in that he can even use his own death as a strategic element in battle. One thing we want everyone to understand is we don’t intend to make the game easier as a result or make the challenge any less effective. This was not created in order to make the player feel numb to death or make the player unafraid of death. We want them to still have ‘the stench of death’ present in every single encounter, if you will, so this is something that will be tuned and tweaked as we go forward.”
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is releasing sometime in 2019.
