"For Dark Souls 2, we don’t even expect any additional downloadable content because we want to deliver a full game, the full experience, to fans who purchase the package from day one. We did do additional content for Dark Souls, but generally downloadable content for Dark Souls II is not really being considered. Buy the package and you’ll get the full experience, and you’ll have as much fun as anybody else. Spending a couple dollars on certain items does not help the experience. So no free-to-play yet!”

“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 says. “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.

“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. It was more of a publisher (Namco Bandai) decision to say, ‘Guys, don’t worry about this – let’s just get it out and see how this works on PC.’

“I think the game experience was fairly similar. We did recommend using a controller, and if [one] used a controller the experience was a Dark Souls experience I think. But we did learn from it. 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.”