From Software has a particular talent for making dungeon-crawler RPGs that show little mercy to the player. Despite being a new franchise without much marketing, Demon’s Souls was able to do very well at retail simply by word of mouthnabout the game. Dark Souls continued the success by appealing to the new dedicated fan base for Demon’s Souls and attracting even more gamers by going multiplatform and releasing on the Xbox 360. But what’s next?
Speaking with Gametrailers, From Software’s head of research and development, Masanori Takeuchi, confirmed that there will be another installment to the franchise. Although gamers suspected that this was the case since the release of Dark Souls, this is the first official confirmation. As Takeuchi put it,
Of course, it’s not over yet. You have to go back to our roots, which is King’s Field. We’ve made many games in that series. We’ve always been enamored by dark fantasy action-RPG’s.
King’s Field is a franchise that was initially launched on the original PlayStation only in Japan. It made its way over to the western market with the release of the second game in the series. From Software isn’t content with only updated the Souls franchise, as executive producer Eichi Nakajima stated that the company is planning to expand to more casual platforms such as the iPhone and iPad. He explains:
We’ve always been about making games for the core gamer, and they weren’t necessarily games that did well financially, which is too bad. The success of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls – which have each sold over a million per title worldwide – has made us shift our thinking internally to not just core gamers, but to globalise our products, that they can be successful on a worldwide scale. [We are] considering future tablet and smartphone development, other new projects, and connecting our users with a lot of other publishers.
So, fans of the Souls series will have future installments to look forward to and anyone who enjoys casual iPhone gaming will soon be able to enjoy the work of From Software, as well…that is until they die for the 20th time in a row and then rage quit by throwing their phone out the window.
