Nioh 2 - Interview - Prepare to Yokai

Gamingbolt interviewed the devs of Nioh 2 about the game.

Difficulty and accessibility in games is something that’s become a pertinent topic over the last year, especially in games like Nioh that seem like they’re designed around challenging the player. What’s Nioh 2’s approach to difficulty in light of that?

Because Nioh is an action RPG franchise, our top priority was pursuing the response time of the actions. Next, to ensure the exhilaration from victories, we set out to find the perfect balance between game difficulty and options of various solutions for single play, including RPG elements that help strengthen the characters.

On top of that, if RPG elements are still not enough to overcome game difficulty, or one cannot invest too much time and effort into character development, there are online features that allow players to enlist help from others in order to progress in the game.

It seems like greater enemy variety is something that Nioh 2 is putting a great deal of emphasis on. How does that play into things like combat and progression?

As a game of battles, enemy variety is indispensable in delivering a rich gaming experience.  Learning about your enemies is the biggest part of understanding the game. Once you know about an enemy inside and out, defeating it should become easier. And in an effort to keep the game engaging, we created a variety of maps and situations, as well as enemy combinations for players to take on. This is not only for keeping up the challenge, but also to ensure that the game is visually interesting, bringing depth to the world of Nioh.

Nioh’s focus on Japanese history was one of the most interesting things about its setting, but with Nioh 2, it looks like things are going to be a lot more fantastical- what sort of a balance does the game strike between those two aspects?

The period in which the story takes place is the most interesting time of the Japanese history. Having such a background, we cannot ignore the actual historical events nor not take advantage of them. That said, it was important to interpret the time from Nioh’s perspective with its own fantastical touch. The defining factor for that would be the setting of “two individuals, one Hideyoshi.” The identity of Hideyoshi that people are familiar with is only one of them, and the success of Hideyoshi was also built on our protagonist’s contribution, bringing about a fresh tale without conflicting with the well-known historical facts.

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