A meeting with Hidetaka Miyazaki to discover the treasures of Elden Ring

BY JASON KILLINGSWORTH

Elden Ring’s creative director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, is hunkered down in his office at FromSoftware’s Japanese HQ, bundled up in a black padded winter vest. Despite a perennially youthful face, his demeanour this evening is unmistakably sober, alert. Behind his desk are shelves lined with the colourful spines of books he has no time to browse, the gap between his shelves and the ceiling stacked with board games he has no time to unbox and play. Crunch has arrived. There are just over two months left before launch, and pressure is mounting.

Miyazaki’s crowning achievement up until now, Dark Souls, was recently honoured via public vote as The Ultimate Game Of All Time at the Golden Joystick Awards, besting nominees such as Super Mario 64, Tetris and Half-Life 2. The Dark Souls franchise has sold close to 30 million copies, a surprising figure for a series that people continue to suggest, apparently without irony, caters to a niche audience.

Elden Ring not only has the potential to expand the ranks of the Dark Souls faithful, enlisting the worldbuilding talents of beloved fantasy author George RR Martin, it expands the design canvas of the Dark Souls franchise itself. Players lucky enough to land a spot in November’s closed network test spent dozens of hours exploring it and still flocked to YouTube and message boards to see what loot, bosses and tucked-away caverns they had inevitably missed.

Interviews with Miyazaki tend to conclude with a similar pang. You arrive with a scroll of questions in hand, hoping to excavate the recesses of one of the most fascinating minds in game development. Yet when time runs out, you know there’s a vast store of gold left behind, untouched. To our delight, this occasion is to be less constrained, and we are able to reach far into Elden Ring’s corners. Plenty of freedom to roam and explore the creation, symbolism and design philosophy of FromSoft’s most ambitious work to date.

Game Elden Ring Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release February 25

With the launch getting close, what’s your state of mind right now?

It’s not a pretty state of mind, I will tell you that [laughs]. This is a tough point in the development of any game, not just Elden Ring. At this point, just a couple of months from release, this is when I really start to have regrets and doubts about releasing the game into the wild, and seeing what everybody thinks. I start thinking, ‘I could have maybe done this better… I could have maybe approached this in a different way…’

There’s a lot of these thoughts that build up just on the cusp of a game’s release that are involuntary and they plague your mind a little bit as you’re finishing off work on the project. So it is quite tough. It’s a tough time, and it doesn’t get easier with experience. But particularly, looking at Elden Ring as its own piece of work, I’m really looking forward to people playing it and seeing how they react. It’s a big moment in our development history.

CREATION

What memories stand out from your first conversations with George RR Martin?

Yes, I have some good memories of those initial discussions. Not so much for the content but just the general feelings I had speaking with George Martin. He actually knew about the Dark Souls games. He was aware of them and what they were about, so that made me happy. That sort of gave me a little bit of a boost. I knew immediately from talking to him, it just became apparent his skill and his passion for the fantasy genre, and for games as well. There was a little bit of a generation gap between us, so I felt a bit apprehensive about going to these talks, but after a lot of these conversations, it was just like speaking with an old friend. And it just felt so fresh to have those conversations with someone who was so passionate about the same things, and to show that pure joy and sense of curiosity for these fantasy worlds. This was something that really captured my interest throughout all of our talks, and I was really thrilled to be working with him.

What were the environments for the initial meetings that took place?

It was usually us going to America and to his hometown or base of operations. I think it was a hotel where we first sat down and spoke. It was us going out to him to his home turf and having these kickoff conversations with him there in person.

“We started off giving George RR Martin these very broad ideas for the mythos that I had swimming around in my head”

What can you tell us about the creative brief you gave him before he set to work on the foundational parts of Elden Ring’s backstory?

Early on, we established a very good level of respect between each other, both in our personalities and the sort of work that we do. And this was really important in establishing that foundation for the game because Mr Martin respected the fact that we didn’t want him to write the game’s story or the in-game text. Because we felt like that would actually limit his creative output, and if it was limited to something that was already a game or already a concept in this way, then it would limit the inspirations we could possibly get from him. So we established very early that he would be writing that foundation, that historical element to the game, something that took place long before the events of the game itself. And this way he was able to much more freely flex those creative muscles and provide something that wasn’t restricted.

We started off by giving him these very vague and broad themes and ideas for the mythos that I had swimming around in my head, along with what kind of games we typically make, and the sort of themes we’d like to explore in our games. So it was all very loose and quite vague. Then he would come back to us with a lot of ideas: how about this, this and this? That back-and-forth started the exchange of ideas.