Dark Souls 2's new engine allows for subtler forms of expression, co-director says

Dark Souls 2's new engine will allow the game's soft-spoken co-director, Yui Tanimura, to fulfill his long-held desire to include new, subtler expressions in the game, Tanimura told Polygon at E3 2013.

At the macro level, the sequel's graphical upgrade will allow players to "dive in and immerse themselves within the actual gameplay and feel as if they are actually part of the game itself," Tanimura told Polygon through a translator. In the micro, the new engine allows Dark Souls 2 to include flourishes that weren't possible in the original Dark Souls engine.

"The idea of gimmicks in the game is now doable with this new engine," he said. "Things like representing an enemy that is perhaps off-screen but with movement of shadows, or that kind of expression in the game. It's something that [I] always wanted to do but wasn't able to do with the previous engine.

"There's a lot of ideas like that. We don't want to give everything away, but those kinds of things are small things that we wanted to express, and with this engine we think we can do that."

For more on Dark Souls 2, be sure to check out our hands-on impressions and our interview with Tanimura about being lost in translation.