One of the great hallmarks of the Soulsborne produced by FromSoftwarelies in the fact that it is possible to activate the online mode with which to live the adventure in company or receive an assault from an evil player. The system has been very popular throughout the different installments, including in the beginning with Demon’s Souls.
Such genius, strange as it may seem, arose in the mind of Hidetaka Miyazaki during a heavy snowfall that he suffered. This is how he explained it to Eurogamer more than 14 years ago:
“The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hill after a heavy snowfall and started to slide. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind me got stuck. Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home! except.
But I couldn’t stop the car to thank the people who gave me a push. I would have been stuck again if I had stopped. On the way home I wondered if the last person in line had made it home, and I thought I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we had met somewhere else we would have become friends, or maybe we would just fight…
You could probably call it a mutual aid connection between transient people. Interestingly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. “Simply because it’s fleeting, I think it stays with you much longer… like the cherry trees that we Japanese love so much.”
These very particular circumstances generated a lesson for Miyazaki that he managed to translate into his RPG projects. “Because Demon’s Souls is a game with a lot of deathsurely that kind of fleeting cooperation should emerge from all the death: ‘We’re all dead, so let’s help each other,'” the developer explained in 2010.
“It’s a simple concept. But you don’t know who you’ll meet. Maybe the next person will be an enemy. That kind of encounter is part of the bigger story. There are constant surprises… (…) Because you can cooperate and aggravate through the unique multiplayer system, even if 100 players are role-playing, everyone will have different experiences. Whether you behave as a friend or enemy depends on a person’s character.”
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