Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki discusses how ruin and decay in a damaged world can unite players and spark rebirth.

Hidetaka Miyazaki has redefined game design since 2020's Demon's Souls. His titles break convention through brutal combat, cryptic systems, and forbidding worlds. The "Soulslike" genre, named after Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, now influences major releases including God of War, Star Wars: Jedi, and Hollow Knight. His latest hit, 2022's Elden Ring, co-created with Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, moved over 30 million copies and drew the attention of filmmaker Alex Garland, who is developing an adaptation with A24. Miyazaki was named to Time magazine's "most influential" list, one of only two game developers recognized alongside Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki, now 51, has led FromSoftware as president since 2014, promoted after the Souls series transformed him into a company head. He has a boyish face and rarely gives public talks, preferring not to appear on camera. When he does speak, he answers softly and reservedly, keeping his head lowered and making eye contact only when others speak. Outside the Tokyo studio, Shinjuku stretches out in a maze of streets, while inside a gilded statue of Melania, one of Elden Ring's most challenging bosses, stands near a fireplace.

FromSoftware's worlds are built from fragments: enemies, locations, and item descriptions create an incomplete picture that players must piece together. No one fully grasps these settings, despite endless analysis from video game theorists and admiration from other developers. "Of all the many things Miyazaki and his team do well, creating a sense of mystery is the greatest," says Dishonored director Harvey Smith, who has logged over 40 days in Elden Ring. "It's so incredibly hard to do in video games, which are technical systems. But Miyazaki somehow creates an atmosphere of wonder."

His new project, The Duskbloods, is a multiplayer Switch 2 exclusive, departing from the single-player action games his fans have come to expect. Eight players battle nightmarish creatures while competing to avoid elimination, with three stages ending in a final three-way confrontation. The game arrives at a time when player tastes are shifting, presenting a considerable risk. "I'm very nervous," Miyazaki admits. "With every title we release there is this mounting tension."

The game begins with a striking image: one hand reaching toward another. A dejected male figure slumps in a chair, and a pale hand emerges to hold his wrist. Hands recur throughout Miyazaki's work; in Elden Ring, giant hands crawl from the earth, and are worshipped as gods.

"It might be something subconscious," Miyazaki says when asked about the imagery. "There's a rumour online that I have a thing for feet, and I'm not sure where it comes from. I feel like I'm trying to depict some side of human nature that is hard to describe."

Hands and feet could symbolize contact with the world: one person reaching for another, bare feet touching the earth. Since Demon's Souls, Miyazaki has explored this theme. The game's unusual multiplayer, where strangers aid each other through written messages, was inspired by an incident when his car slid on ice and a passerby helped push him to safety.

Though The Duskbloods sets players against one another, it includes temporary alliances and overlapping objectives, reflecting Miyazaki's enthusiasm for tabletop role-playing games. Players can even pledge themselves to one another. "It's less a traditional romance and more a sense of secure trust with a character in the world," he says. "It's not necessarily a romantic pairing; it's having someone you can ultimately rely on."

The game centers on ruin and rebirth, themes that run through From's catalogue. During the interview, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Kyushu, reinforcing how unstable ground can shape a person's worldview, a subject explored in Japanese works including the television show Shōgun. "That's an ongoing theme in a lot of my games, I realise," Miyazaki says.

He describes himself as a pessimist, a quality evident in his games, where players repeatedly die and return to try again, only to face bleak endings with little lasting change. "If we have two ideas of a brighter or dark future, I would tend to sway towards the darker one," he says. "[But] if you explore the ruin and the decay in those worlds, it also lets you explore some chance of rebirth, and I think having that tiny pinprick of light or hope can be something beautiful."

Sekiro, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring are distinct series that share a common structure. Each is reborn in a new form to examine different ideas while retaining FromSoftware's identity. The Duskbloods follows that pattern but borrows mechanics from games such as Escape from Tarkov and tabletop role-playing games. "There's no intentional FromSoftware mantra, because if you start to do that it becomes stale," Miyazaki says. "So I feel like what's worked for us is trying to adhere to what we find interesting first."

Early in his career, Miyazaki was a programmer on the Armored Core series before volunteering to lead the troubled project that became Demon's Souls. He overhauled nearly every aspect of the game, which went on to transform his career and the wider industry.

Asked if he has changed personally, Miyazaki says, "I don't intend to. But I probably have."