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Despite being described upon its unveiling as the final episode”, Dark Souls III does not in fact mark an end to the action RPG series.
It might, however, mark a change for From Software as it’s the last title that went into development before Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki was appointed president last year.
"This is not the final product for the Dark Souls series," Miyazaki said in a roundtable E3 interview, as reported by Eurogamer. "However, I believe it’s the turning point for the Dark Souls series.
First of all, Dark Souls has a really unique worldview. It’s not a good idea, continuously releasing titles for this series because of that factor. And this will probably be the turning point of From Software as a whole – it’s the last project we started working on before I became president. It’s basically From Software, they started working on this project when it was an older generation. So it’s a turning point. It’ll be a turning point, but it’s not final."
Videogamer, meanwhile, reports that development of Dark Souls III and Bloodborne overlapped by around one year, and that the two games have been largely produced by different development teams.
Elsewhere, Gematsu reports that the game will enjoy close ties with Dark Souls II, as hinted at by some of the characters and locales seen in the debut trailer.
Dark Souls III follows closely from II, so we kept the handy things from II,” Miyazaki told Famitsu. We’ve expanded the character builder and tactical options without sacrificing the feel of the series. We added new action elements that contribute to the sense of role-playing. For instance, we adopted the concept of rapid fire for the short bow, and the animation between rolling and walking has been smoothed out.
The speed of the action is slightly increased compared to the previous two games and balanced so you can move intuitively. I don’t think we’re going to employ the idea of agility, otherwise the action would be stressful until you raise your stats.”
The developer added that the game will feature slightly fewer maps than Dark Souls II, but each of the maps are on a much larger scale”.
