According to Japanese media reports last week, the total global sales of the "Elden Ring" DLC "Shadow of the Golden Tree" have exceeded 5 million copies within three days after its release on June 21. According to the price of DLC at 198 yuan per copy, the total turnover in these three days will reach 990 million yuan, taking into account the DLC bundle, DLC deluxe set, and the discount promotion of the game itself, the actual total turnover will be higher.
According to SteamDB statistics, the number of concurrent online users in Elden Ring has reached a peak again, reaching a peak of 780,000 at the peak, not far from the peak of 950,000 concurrent online two years ago.
And at the end of February this year, Bandai Namco, the publisher of "Elden Ring", revealed that the total global sales of this game have exceeded 23 million copies, so it seems that the sales of DLC are far from reaching the upper limit today. With 1 billion turnover in 3 days and 780,000 people online at the same time, it can be said that both the producer Hidetaka Miyazaki and the developer FromSoftware have won again.
As we all know, the success of Elden Ring is inseparable from its unique design, as well as the accumulation of a series of games such as Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware's past Black Souls series, Bloodborne, and Wolf. This uniqueness comes from the oppressive gameplay design, as well as the game's thick world view and art style.
Recently, Hidetaka Miyazaki was interviewed by foreign media, and clearly mentioned his personal aesthetic concept: "In essence, what I want to depict is always something beautiful. The understanding of beauty depends on the way each person sees things, but I believe that beauty doesn't have to be something that looks attractive and beautiful on the outside, but something that resonates with you on a deeper level. ”
This concept seems a bit strange, after all, after careful study, the initial contact with Miyazaki Hidetaka's past works is indeed difficult to make people immediately associate beauty. Those gray worlds are always full of elements that are not beautiful, but more old, decayed, weird, dark, and evil...... At first glance, it looks more handsome and cool, but it is not intuitively beautiful.
"To be honest, I think that beautiful things cannot be separated from ugliness, and "beauty" needs to be supported by depravity and tragedy." Hidetaka Miyazaki feels that this kind of beauty is more realistic: "I prefer to incorporate something small and beautiful into something rotten, and create beauty in tragedy." Because for me, things that are plain on the outside, always maintain beauty, are not real enough. ”
Hidetaka Miyazaki prefers to portray contrasting beauty: "When you have a pile of gemstones, one of them looks inconspicuous, but if you find one in the mud, it will be worth a lot more to you." Therefore, the light in the darkness looks more beautiful, and when something beautiful appears in a wilderness, we appreciate it more. ”
So we can see that the world portrayed by Hidetaka Miyazaki is always tinged with a strong pessimism. "Personally, a happy and bright world is unrealistic, and while it sounds like I've been traumatized, I believe that the world in general is just a wasteland and not kind to us." He said bluntly in an interview.
The style of "focusing on the portrayal of both beauty and ugliness" is widely used in Miyazaki's works, but it is also very rigorous. In fact, while the game is full of weird and curious things, they rarely use elements that make people intuitively disgusting. That was true ten years ago, and it is still the same.
In Dark Souls Art Canons, concept artist Athens of the Valley mentions a development vignette: "When I was drawing an undead dragon, I submitted a design that depicted a dragon surrounded by maggots and disgusting objects, but Hidetaka Miyazaki returned the design, saying, "It's so undignified." ”
Miyazaki believes that the concept of immortality should not be portrayed by the element of disgusting, but should convey "deep mourning for a magnificent beast destined for slow and even endless destruction".
"When I said that, most people didn't understand it, but it was very important to me to have a sense of restraint, elegance and dignity, and I would often tell designers that FromSoftware would never accept completely grotesque or quirky designs. It's my personal insistence, and I apply that feeling to every design I endorse. In Miyazaki's view, even if something is ugly, it is necessary to make it ugly with dignity.
This design principle adds a thick sense of story to the characters in the game. Some players sighed: "One of the reasons why I like Hidetaka Miyazaki's design the most: none of the bosses you encounter are standing in their heyday waiting for you to challenge." In fact, they all met: the mad General Ratarn, who was left with his last breath by the Rotten Knights, Ludwig, who was once the first hunter of the church and is now a monster himself, and Eldritch, who has just finished eating the demigods and is full. Each boss's state presents a fragment of its story, giving the player a strong sense of involvement in history. ”
Take "Elden Ring" as an example, George W. The addition of RR Martin has brought them a lot of surprises and materials. Hidetaka Miyazaki did not limit George W. R.R. Martin's depiction of the Elden Ring origin story depicts demigods in their original form closer to humans.
FromSoftware is responsible for thinking about "how their adventures were shattered", "how the pollution fragments eroded and distorted them", and "how they went from demigods to these inhuman monsters". "Our job is to 'twist' these great heroes into what they are, to shape these flawed, very human, and dramatic heroes into deformed, grotesque monsters, and the process is very interesting for me personally," Miyazaki said. ”
Of course, it is not easy to balance the expression of beauty and ugliness, and Miyazaki Hidetaka believes that the best example of this design is the boss "Greck" Grick, who has golden blood but weak divine powers, and who has been defeated repeatedly and amputated limbs of different species to himself in order to gain power: "I like the way Grek was full of sadness and frustration at the end of his reign, but still desperately trying to keep his power. ”
There are also many players and fans in China who are also quite touched by this design, and some art practitioners believe that the beauty of soul taste lies in not being afraid of the use of ugliness, and making their works appear ugly and flawed, which is resistant to many people and cannot do it. And the expression of ugliness also needs to be restrained in order to balance the expression of beauty.
Some players also questioned the art style of domestic games: there is contrast to produce beauty, and the beauty of many projects is just piling up an absolute value, resulting in the final content that is only superficially beautiful, or can only make the characters handsome, dragged, and beautiful, but not the inner beauty.
In general, it is necessary to rebuild order from the ruins, to shape life from decay, and to chase the light from the darkness...... Hidetaka Miyazaki's aesthetic ideas can be broadly mapped by these concepts. And this kind of precious beauty, the beauty that countless characters spend everything to pursue, may be the essential reason that impresses countless players.