Hidetaka Miyazaki, the mastermind behind beloved titles like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Bloodborne, continues to mesmerize and challenge gamers with his unique approach to game design.
After discovering what he said in a 2018 interview, it seems that we’ve only gotten a taste of his true capabilities. While he gave us more information about his narrative process, he also dropped a hint about how he’s been holding out a lot of ideas from us so far.
Hidetaka Miyazaki Has a Lot of Ideas We’ve Yet to See
As the anticipation builds for the upcoming Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, Miyazaki’s words in this 2018 interview with Xataka resonate more than ever. The interview mentioned Miyazaki’s childhood love for reading and how he came upon his unique style of narration in video games.
Miyazaki confirmed that his reading habits were the root of it all, and he learned a lot from that period. He said:
I have accumulated so many things from my reading experience, from learning from books, that yes, I must keep many secrets in my mind.
As a child, he would read adult books that he couldn’t fully comprehend yet, and he’d flex his imagination and make things up to make sense of the parts he didn’t understand.
The way FromSoftware unravels its plot for players is deeply rooted in this habit of Miyazaki’s. So, we know that part of what makes Miyazaki’s games the way that they are is because of this childhood. However, it seems he’s only just getting started:
….there are many things I have learned from literature that I have not reflected in our titles yet. So I actually accumulate a lot more ideas than people can imagine.
Miyazaki also spoke about how the “sense of creating a universe” and the “sensation” that it gives you is very difficult to share with people, even as he leads a team of professionals. For any type of artist that makes original work, these are certainly words that would resonate within them.
Looking Toward Shadow of the Erdtree Expansion
Typically, in FromSoftware games, we’re not upfront told a lot of things that happen. We have to pick up on nuances that the game indirectly gives us and make the connections ourselves.
That’s why, when you look up the lore for a FromSoftware game, there’s usually not one canon lore for the most part; it’s more of a collective of interpretations of canon events that happen in the lore.
With Miyazaki having revealed that there are still a lot of ideas he’s picked up from his love for reading that still haven’t been used in his games, the hype for the story that Shadow of the Erdtree will tell only grows.
It’ll be interesting to see how Miyazaki’s formula is implemented in Shadow of the Erdtree, and whether he tries anything new remains to be seen.
Do you have any narrative desires for the Elden Ring DLC? Let us know in the comments below!
