First Nioh demo leads to complaints from players over tutorials, balanced difficulty

Weeks after players tested out the first playable build of PlayStation 4 action game Nioh, Team Ninja has published the results of a related online survey, which collected feedback about the demo from players worldwide. The results indicate how the studio plans to improve the upcoming action game — although not every region felt the same way about what Nioh gets right and wrong thus far.

850,000 people worldwide downloaded the limited-time demo, Team Ninja said. Although it didn't offer how many of these players filled out the subsequent survey, the studio offered a round-up of respondents' most frequent suggestions. These include the need for tutorials to better explain how the game works, reworking controls and the camera, changing up the user interface and balancing the difficulty at the beginning of the game.

How players felt about the Nioh alpha's difficulty varied by region, however. Team Ninja has emphasized Nioh as a "brutal action game" since it was first announced 10 years ago. In its alpha state, the player's character can be knocked out after a single hit, and maintaining stamina is crucial.

According to a series of graphs the studio published, the majority of Western fans found these challenges to be just right; you can see how fans in American countries responded in the following chart.

Asian fans, on the other hand, were far more critical: Nearly half of respondents cited the "difficulty and game balance" as a negative, as seen in the breakdown below.

Overall, players in the Americas and Europe warmed to Nioh, rating the game as "very good" overall. Across the board, though, Eastern demo testers hesitated to rate the game as highly in a variety of categories. Check out the following graph to see how players worldwide felt about Nioh in its current state.

Team Ninja is currently taking the feedback to improve the game, the developer said. Nioh, which is set during wartime in samurai-era, supernatural creature-laden Japan, will have a chance to make another impression on local fans when it launches on PS4 later this year.