Updated 21 May, 2013, 11:09 am IST

Dark Souls 2 concept art revealed

24 Dec, 2012 | by Shunal Doke |

After the unveiling of Dark Souls 2 earlier this month, all eyes have been on From Software to see what the company will do with the new game. According to Games Thirst, the company has released the concept art for its upcoming game.

The concept art shows some of the ideas for environments that the developers are thinking of. It also shows some armour and weapons as well as different designs for new enemies. One of the enemies seems to be a butcher kind of affair, while another seems to be riding a chariot that is pulled by a horse with two heads. Yet another seems to be a mix between a zombie and a xenomorph, with extra spider-like appendages coming out of its back.

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Earlier this month, the developers of the game explained some of the features of Dark Souls 2. Director of the previous games in the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, had also talked about the core experience of the games.

According to Miyazaki, there is a core experience in the games that need protecting. "I'm talking about how we think about the difficulty level and how you achieve things in-game, about the concepts behind the mechanics and level design," he said. "Outside of that core, though, it's better to leave things to the discretion of the director. There's a lot around that core that we need to fix or adjust besides, and individual touches always tend to come out in the world setting and artwork, so I'm not meddling in that very much."

The game should retain the feelings of solitude and desperation present in the earlier games. Miyazaki mentions that he feels that the feelings were expressed well in the Dark Souls 2 CGI trailer.

He also commented on the evolution of multiplayer of the game. While it still won't have standard multiplayer modes, Dark Souls 2 will be going back to being hosted on dedicated servers. While this was present in the first game in the series, Demon's Souls, the developers had opted for a peer-to-peer system for Dark Souls. With the next game going back to dedicated servers, more things are possible, according to Miyazaki.

"Setting up a dedicated server lets you retain your data, making it easier to share it with other players. We'd like to evolve the asynchronous message-oriented online support from the previous game; we're imagining a framework where players are able to directly interact with each other," Shibuya said. "Having dedicated game servers will be the source of a lot of new potential in DS2. There was a lot with the original Dark Souls I wish I could have done if we had the ability to have those servers, so in that way I'm pretty jealous of the new director here.”

He added, "The concept behind online play in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls was pretty plain to gamers, so I'm hoping we can evolve on that concept here without removing ourselves too far from it."

The advantages of dedicated servers could easily be seen in Demon's Souls, where, thanks to the server persistence, Demon's Souls online worlds had a property called tendency. These tendencies could be black or white and changed depending on how many people were helping out other players by being white phantoms, or killing other players by being black phantoms. Some of the levels were only accessible when the world was of a certain tendency, and even in levels that were accessible, bosses could carry entirely different loot.