Dark Souls 3 is familiar, and that's fine

[Administrator]

Hidetaka Miyazaki isn't anything like I pictured him. I'm not really sure what I expected, but the image I had conjured up, of a quiet, brooding auteur responsible for the creation of nightmarish visions like the Gaping Dragon and Quelaag and Ebrietas, was far from the grinning figure who stands at the front of the room for our hands-off demo, bright-eyed, animated, and joking about PC malfunctions and Legolas from The Lord of the Rings.
The creator of Dark Souls and Bloodborne and now president of From Software talks candidly to the darkened room full of journalists, too - about how Dark Souls 3 isn't the last game in the series but that it will mark "a turning point" - partly because Miyazaki believes that it's "not a good idea" to continuously release new titles for the series, and also because it's the last From Software game to begin production before Miyazaki took on the role of president. He's co-directing Dark Souls 3 with Isamu Okano, who worked on, of all things, Steel Battalion, but the studio is keen to point out that Miyazaki is "taking lead on world-building and basic game feature direction, as well as visual design direction," while Ogano is "basically handling the mass production part, as well as the human resource control. The best way to explain is that Ogano-san is basically supporting Miyazaki-san's directions." Dark Souls 2 was not a Miyazaki creation, and many fans felt it suffered as a result. The studio, and Miyazaki himself, seem keen to avoid that perception this time around, and so, here were are, huddled together, to have the company president take us through a world that is at once both strange and instantly familiar.
The Souls games are not ones that take particularly well to being demoed. They are, unequivocally, about finding your feet in a hostile world inch by inch and in your own time, and the euphoric feeling of defeating a boss or a particularly taxing enemy - the reason we keep returning to these crumbling kingdoms - isn't something that can be experienced vicariously.
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