This year, Koei Tecmo released two demos for its action game Nioh, coming to PlayStation 4 on February 9. These demos were used to extrapolate feedback which developers used to polish the game during its development.

Yet, not all feedback was implemented. Director Fumihiko Yasuda told DualShockers that one point in particular did not make it into the game, and that's a seamless open world.

"We believe that in game development, it is not a proper approach to just implement all feedback, and we had many discussions internally involving the concept and the unimplemented elements until we could determine what to proceed with.

Something that we decided not to implement was the adoption of a seamless open world. We avoided that because we did not want to make the load time too long in a game where the character can die so many times, and it would affect the accuracy of matchmaking. If Nioh becomes a franchise, we would like to consider that as an option so long as we can keep the intensity of the game intact."

Incidentally, similarities between Nioh and with the Dark Souls series are often brought up, and Yasuda-san explained where the main differences are.

"For starters, the protagonist of Nioh is a samurai. Because this is an action-centric game with that type of influence, we wanted to incorporate samurai-inspired elements into its design, such as a unique approach of "contrasting stillness and motion" born from the spiritual interaction between the player and the enemy. Hack-and-slash elements will also be a big difference, particularly regarding weapons such as katana and spears, and Japanese armor."

Yasuda-san gave us a lot more information about Nioh, and you can look forward to it in the full interview, which will be on DualShockers soon.