Nioh Game Director Discusses How His Team Tests Difficulty

When it comes to figuring out just how tough a game is and how to balance it with “fairness” it appears Nioh developers Team Ninja have taken a bit of a page out of the book used by From Software. From, you might remember, From Software the creators of the Dark Souls series, where the games are famous for having some truly tough to beat enemies.

Eurogamer recently sat down with Nioh‘s director, Fumihiko Yasuda to talk about his own team tests just how hard one enemy or another is in the game. Eurogamer pointed out that From judges a boss fight fair when their best tester can defeat that boss completely unscathed.

When asked about this, Yosuda said, “We have a few different approaches in our game testing as well. One that I can definitely tell you is that we’ll basically fight a boss unarmoured. And if the tester can beat the boss, then it’s fair. And with some of the toughest stages, if somebody can beat it, then it’s beatable. Because it’s meant to be tough.”

Nioh still doesn’t have an official release date but it’s still expected for the PS4 sometime in 2016.