The release of the original Dark Souls on PC was rushed, reveals Dark Souls II producer Takeshi Miyazoe in an interview with Edge magazine. While the game’s issues were eventually addressed by a fan-developed mod, the original PC release of Dark Souls suffered from low framerates, locked resolution and poor controls.
“This is going to sound bad but our main priority was to get the game onto the PC as fast as possible, because people wanted it on the PC,” Miyazoe said.
“The PC market in Japan is so minimal that originally there were no plans to make it on the PC, but with the strong petition from the North American and European fans, even with the lack of experience of working on a PC platform we still did our best to try to get it out as fast as possible. [The problems] were expected to a certain extent.”
Miyazoe added that the decision to get the PC version out as quickly as possible came from the game’s western publisher, Namco Bandai.
“We did know there were PC-specific features like key-mapping and use of the mouse and keyboard, high resolution and higher frame rate, stuff like that, but… It’s not that we ignored it, but it would have taken too much time for us to implement it, test it and get it up to the level people expected,” he explains. “It was more of a publisher decision to say, ‘Guys, don’t worry about this—let’s just get it out and see how this works on PC.’”
This won’t be the case with Dark Souls II on PC, Miyazoe promises.
“For Dark Souls II we are developing on PC from the beginning. We realise what PC games typically require, and I can assure you that the PC version of Dark Souls II will be a good PC experience for PC gamers,” he says, adding that the PC version will allow you to use either a keyboard and mouse or a controller.
