Someone in the bowels of FromSoftware had the difficult task of playing Demon's Souls and Dark Souls before they were out. Imagine being those playtesters; the Undead Burg must be seared into their brains. A researcher at CD Projekt Red wishes he could've been a part of that team, just to see how the findings impacted the games.
"Either the original Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, even though I'm not a Soulslike player," says Dawid Zalewski, research operations coordinator and senior UX researcher, on the CDPR AnsweRed podcast, when asked about what game he wishes he could've seen early builds of. Zalewski has experience on both Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 4, according to his LinkedIn profile.
"That would be a very interesting challenge, because it was something new," he believes. "It was people waiting in queues, and some saying this is the worst experience they ever had, and the other going back to the queue to play it again and again."
Within that divide, what would've been illuminating is finding just the right amount of push-and-pull for players. "Where do you draw the line between challenge that motivates you to push forward, to try again and again until you reach the mastery?" he muses. "And at what point it becomes plain frustration and you need to change something."
As he says, "the game is supposed to be challenging," so how are changes decided? What's a problem and what's something where people simply need to get better and understand what they're up against? Necessary debates, and things I imagine the devs at FromSoftware agonized over extensively for both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, all overseen by Hidetaka Miyazaki.
There aren't many simple answers, and the general obtuseness of those games will tell you From has no problem being vague or esoteric. The studio certainly found a good balance for those releases, and maybe one day developers like Zalewski can get insight into the research involved to help their own endeavors - or just defeat From's bosses quicker in future.
