I have full faith in Miyazaki and FromSoft. But I do have concerns of being able to go in “any order” as far as the 6 Kingdoms are concerned. I know they said “justabout any order”, but my concern is progression of difficulty. In games where you can go in any order, you HAVE to make the enemies and bosses easier than you would have normally in a linear progressing game. But like i said, I have faith in FromSoft and Miyazaki, so I’m sure this won’t be an issue.
Also, there’s some absolutely JUICY information in that interview:
Miyazaki: “We think rather than recommending a specific way for players to tackle each encounter, one of the things we wanted to stress in this game was, again, that freedom to choose how to take on encounters and how to approach these various situations. So there's a large variety of ways you can approach combat, and a large range of abilities you can acquire. We wanted to allow the player to combine these different elements to find their own strategy, and even take indirect approaches to combat if they wanted to. So yes, this is something that we wanted to explore more so than our previous games and really focus on, is this level of variety and this level of freedom in combat.
Miyazaki:. A part of making this new world with this new huge sense of scale was adding enjoyment to that sense of exploration, having players feel encouraged, and give them a desire to explore as much as they want. And so that could be through acquiring new weapons and magic spells and abilities such as the different spirit summons. We wanted to place these elements so the players will enjoy exploring the map and discovering these elements for themselves. There are cases in which you can buy them [arts, magic, etc.] at stores or learn them from NPCs, but generally they are hidden throughout the game’s world for the player to discover through exploration, rather than unlocking them through a skill tree as in previous titles.
I think one thing that's worth mentioning is the skills, which is a returning feature from previous games, but, again, we're concentrating on the level of freedom that it gives the player. So before, where there was a certain skill attached to a certain weapon, now you're actually able to freely interchange skills between a large variety of weapons. There are, I believe, around a hundred skills in total. Obviously you're free to combine your different skills with different weapons. You're free to build your character with different weapons and equipment. You're free to learn magic as well. So if you throw all of these things in, we think the build customization is going to be even richer and even more varied than before”
