Ori director and Moon Studios co-founder Thomas Mahler says Microsoft originally told him the beloved Metroidvania platforming series was too hard for a general audience, but Mahler insisted that the difficulty stay the same, believing the level of challenge was necessary for what he was trying to achieve.
Appearing on the Destin podcast (timestamped here), Mahler explained his game design philosophy, comparing it to Nintendo and FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki.
"Our approach is very similar to how Nintendo designs games, in the sense that it all has to be fun comes first," Mahler said. "Even in Ori, we had people constantly telling us, 'Hey the game is too hard,' especially more from the Microsoft side. It was a lot of, 'Oh my god, but the game looks beautiful. Wouldn't it be more fun if everyone could enjoy it?'
"But I'm on the Miyazaki side on this. That has to be really carefully tuned so that – there's this thing psychologically where you have to overcome challenge. You always have to have these moments were we present you with something and you feel like you can't do it, but then we get you to actually do it, and that is that moment of like, 'oh my god.'"
Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, are generally considered to be pretty tough games to get through, but in the context of Metroidvanias, they're middle of the pack in terms of difficulty. You'll certainly die many times playing them, especially during some notorious chase-style sequences, but it's all in the service of perfecting the precise timing needed to progress. Git gud, basically.
Mahler and the rest of the crew at Moon Studios are hard at work on their Diablo-coded early access action-RPG No Rest for the Wicked, and likely will be for many years, but they also aren't ruling out a return to Metroidvanias in the meantime.
