15 years after Dark Souls, Nioh 3 devs faced the exact same design problem: "That might be one reason some people felt that the game was a little bit easier"

Confession time: I hated Dark Souls the first time I played it. This was partly because I was young and stupid and resistant to change, but also, when I first tried it, I ran straight into the Catacombs area and promptly got my rib cage rotated like a rotisserie chicken. You aren't supposed to do that, you may have heard, nor are rib cages; you're supposed to go through the more sensibly scaled Undead Burg. How you navigate Dark Souls directly affects how difficult it feels. That's part of the magic.

The intersection of unflinching difficulty and freewheeling exploration creates fascinating peaks and troughs in challenge that convey a more believable world, and Nioh 3 is the latest game to navigate this balancing act – this time, weathering some cries of "too easy," as I heard from Nioh 3 general producer and Team Ninja studio head Fumihiko Yasuda, and Nioh 3 producer Kohei Shibata.

The similarities are striking. With Dark Souls, FromSoftware set about applying the bones of the level-based action RPG Demon's Souls to a seamless open-world game. With Nioh 3, Team Ninja had to adapt the mission-based action RPGs Nioh and Nioh 2 for an open-world approach with larger, but not Red Dead Redemption 2-sized maps. Dark Souls lacks the open-world markers and distractions that Nioh 3 embraces – camps, collectibles, bespoke quest logs, and so on – but the high-level design challenge is remarkably close.

I also think it's no coincidence that many players, myself included, felt that Nioh 3 was a bit easier than the first two. Its open world naturally offers more ways to tackle it, and the order you approach areas is a big factor in their difficulty. (It's also worth noting that this is the third game in the series, meaning fans like me had two whole games of experience under our belts going in.) Yasuda and Shibata respond to remarks arguing Nioh 3 is too easy, and exploration naturally comes up.

"We have heard those voices saying it does feel easier," Shibata begins (via interpreter). "In terms of the difficulty, that is something that we did struggle with. With the open-field aspect to it, I think we did adjust the difficulty level for it. The reasoning behind that is that if, anywhere you go in the open field, everything was difficult, I think players would probably feel very stilted and find it too challenging. They might feel that they have nowhere to go in the game. So to ensure that there is that freedom of exploration in it, we want to make sure that there are areas that people feel are easier to challenge, while retaining some difficult areas. I think that might be one reason some people felt that the game was a little bit easier."

Shibata also highlights the new samurai and ninja fighting styles in Nioh 3, which are now fully separated. Ninja style affords you immensely powerful ranged attacks that can make short work of nearly any non-boss enemy in a pinch, though you can't use them infinitely. And samurai style has only gotten stronger with added techniques and better blocking.

Within these combat systems, not unlike the power-ups offered in Elden Ring and its Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, exploration itself becomes a way to get stronger. Nioh 3 is filled with extra skill points and hidden abilities, and finding the right one might give your build the keystone it's missing or push your overall power level just over the line for a tough encounter. It's the Metroidvania dilemma: if you haven't found any power-ups, a boss might feel impossible, but if you've found everything, the same fight might be easy.

"There's a lot more opportunities, a lot more time that can be spent leveling up your character, becoming stronger," Shibata reasons. "I think because your character has gotten stronger compared to previous games, and players really have been able to level up in a way that they couldn't in the previous games, that might also be another aspect of why people might feel that it's a little bit easier."

However, "we didn't want to make it a one-way street," Shibata adds, stressing efforts to make enemies and bosses stronger to meet the new options given to the player. The final boss of Nioh 3, in particular, sent me back to a checkpoint multiple times. And if you are craving a taller task, keep your eyes on the Nioh 3 DLCs.

"It is something that we do hear," Shibata says of the difficulty debate, "and something that we will take into consideration while working on the DLC. Maybe make the bosses a little bit stronger, or have more challenging elements in the game."

Yasuda speaks to broader goals of difficulty. "The entire project team, including the producer and the director, will get involved just to make sure there is that fairness," he says. "In order to get to that level of fairness, there's a lot of adjustments that we make over and over again, so there's a lot of trial and error to that. We want to make sure that it is something that is challenging, but fun as well.

"There are times that we don't quite meet that balance, and so in those cases, that's where we work on future updates to help adjust that so that more players will want to take on that challenge and won't find it either too hard or too hard or too easy."

I've been interviewing devs for 13 years, and it's rare to hear someone say this about their own critically acclaimed RPG weeks after release: "Nioh 3 is a great game but it's not perfect."