FromSoftware games have always had a very distinct visual style, So much so, that it’s usually pretty easy to predict when that iconic “FromSoftware” logo is about to pop up after a sudden fade to black, even in an announced game trailer for an upcoming FromSoft game. This is thanks to the many talented artists at the studio, and during my time at their office, I got a chance to sit down with one of them, Concept and Environmental Artist Saori Mizuno, to talk about her inspirations, the art direction she was given for Elden Ring Nightreign, and how it differed from her work on previous FromSoft games.
IGN: So generally, what was different about working on Nightreign versus the base Elden Ring game, or and anything prior that you have worked on with FromSoftware?
Saori Mizuno – Concept Artist on Elden Ring: Nightreign: In general, for Nightreign, we would receive an order for a design and then if it was myself in charge of that particular concept, then I would iterate on that image that I had, that interpretation of the design and then I would align and collaborate with the other designers and eventually produce the final design. I think one aspect that changed a lot on Nightreign’s design process is that we had a lot of back and forth, a lot of brainstorming in person, actually speaking about these designs rather than just getting text-based feedback.
Interviewer:
Can you talk a little bit about the setting of Nightreign and how you approach making it feel distinct from the base Elden Ring game, despite it being a spinoff that uses a lot of the same assets?
We didn’t want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring, as it used that as a base for the design and the setting. But one specific direction we did get early on was to create something that first feels and looks familiar and gradually transforms into the unfamiliar and into the unknown. So that was a nice sort of policy or a direction that we had to approach with the design.
Elden Ring had this sort of very gorgeous painterly feel to a lot of the environments, but we wanted Nightreign to feel like at a glance beautiful, but if you look a little bit deeper, there’s something sinister and there’s something darker there. Elden Ring, maybe there’s a lot of bright colors in the scenery and in the sky box and such, but we wanted there also, the player to feel a sense of darkness there as well. So that was another aspect of the design that differed slightly from Elden Ring.
One of the locations that really stuck out to me was the Roundtable Hold, which is such a familiar location in the base Elden Ring, and it has such an interesting twist in Nightreign. Can you talk a little bit about what went into the new design for the Roundtable Hold and what were some of the inspirations behind some of those changes?
With Nightreign’s new kind of speedier, high-tempo gameplay, we wanted the Roundtable this time in particular to feel like somewhere you could relax and take your time and sort of cool off after that intense three day/night cycle. So we wanted it to feel, from a design perspective, more cozy and more welcoming, more at home. One inspiration was the Fire Link Shrine from Dark Souls 1, where you feel sort of more embraced by the atmosphere. You feel like you are coming home after these hardships, after a hard fought battle, and safe more importantly than anything.
So from a design perspective, we used techniques such as gentle lighting, a feeling of the surrounding environs as well as the Roundtable Hold itself. And also while a lot of the place is in ruins, we didn’t want it to feel completely destroyed and desolate. We wanted it to feel like it was a safe place to come home to and that the player could relax and take their time there.
Another impetus for the design of the Roundtable Hold in Nightreign was this feeling of early morning, so a sort of daybreak, dawn, the player setting off on a new adventure. So that came into some of the lighting and architecture choices that changed in Nightreign, and we wanted the player to be aware of this. We wanted them to be conscious of this when setting out on this new adventure.
So when the player hits day three, they’re transported to this brand new location that is really unlike any other in Elden Ring. One that is predominantly white, mixed in with a very colorful sky box full of orange, blue and purple kind of all mixing together. What’s the story behind this environment and what were some of the inspirations that went into that work? If you need a visual representation, I have this one.
So one of the first requests we got from the director regarding this environment was that it should feel like a sense of finality and we should get this feeling of buildup before a storm. And that we should also feel like the impression you got from the sky box is that the sky is falling, this calamity is coming to an end. So it’s the boss at the end of the third day, so we wanted the player to feel this tightness in their chest like they’re getting ready to embark on something greater than themselves and hopefully this culminates and comes through in the design.
To add to that, looking again at the colors and the composition of the sky, we wanted it to feel like something was about to be born from that chaos, from that chaotic scene. Again, the boss culminates at the end of that third-day struggle. We wanted the player to feel this from the use of color and the use of these design elements. And some of the inspirations we took from that were from real-life cosmic events. So something we can’t quite understand, something that’s very distant and abstracted from regular human perception and we wanted it to feel just as abstract and just as grandiose even within the world of Nightreign.
Just speaking personally, what’s something that you yourself are very proud of that you’ve worked on in Nightreign?
Personally, one of my favorite areas is actually the area we just talked about, the environment that you enter just before facing that boss at the end of the third day. One of the keywords we found while exploring the design for this environment was this concept of shedding skin. And so this was something that really resonated with me and stuck with me. This idea of personifying the surroundings and the building into something that was once living and has now since been petrified or gone through these ages of time and gone through this whole process. And we wanted players to feel this sense of age, this old fantasy feel from this particular set piece.
One of the things that surprised us about Nightreign was the environmental variety, despite it being a much smaller and more condensed kind of world. Was it difficult to achieve this kind of variety in such a small, confined space?
So generally with these kind of emergent map changes and these kind of terrain effects and events, we wanted it to feel like something immediately fresh and exciting, just at a glance. So the player will know there’s been an impactful change to the map and to the scenery and they’ll have an immediate idea of what they need to do to progress. So for instance, the volcano, the crater that appears, you’d need to sort of dig deeper into it. Or for the snowfield terrain change, you’d need to sort of climb right up to the top of it, this sort of thing. We wanted this to be immediately effective and change the way the players approach and behave in the map just by changing that sense of space.
And then personally as a designer, who are some of your favorite artists, either classic or contemporary, and are there any people that you can point to as being particularly influential on your work?
One of my personal favorite traditional artists, or classical artists is Zdzisław Beksiński. I took a lot of inspiration from his various expressions when designing my work. Also with the concept of Nightreign and battling the Night Lords after these repeated plays, I felt like this is inherent to the game design. And so I wanted this feeling to come through in the designs I created as well. And one sense I got from that was from watching the film Spirited Away from Hayao Miyazaki. This feeling of being unable to go home, unable to escape from a dream. This sort of feeling I wanted to kind of harness while designing these worlds and tried to get that through to the player as they play through the game.
Even when designing Limveld, that initial map, that initial environment on the first day, I wanted it to feel beautiful. Like from an outward glance, it looks beautiful and inviting, but pretty quickly you feel like something’s off or something’s not quite right. So I think that is a part of the inspiration that we definitely got across in the design of Nightreign.
So switching to video games really quick, can you just talk about what are some of your favorite video games that may have inspired your work as well?
I enjoy Diablo II and other such multiplayer games. I enjoy open world survival games where you have to sort of start from scratch and build your own house and things like that world. I like a variety of indies and I’ve also had a fondness for a Legend of Zelda since childhood, games like Majora’s Mask, which kind of are obviously really fun to play, but they sort of have this… again, this sense of repeat play and this kind of sense of darkness to them as well. I think that’s stuck with me since childhood. So yeah.
And then a final question. A lot of designers and artists like to make their own personal imprints on a game. Are there any secrets or Easter eggs that you managed to sneak in yourself into the game? Or is there maybe anything that you hope players will see and enjoy as they play?
Yes. I don’t think you’d call this a sort of a signature as an artist, but one important thing that I paid attention to while designing Nightreign was this sort of all encompassing theme of the night and how we go about expressing that. We obviously tried various things and various methods and Limveld is ultimately a place that you keep coming back to as a player. So we thought one way we could express that was these changes throughout the three-day structure and what players can notice as their journey progresses. What keeps them coming back and what keeps them interested.
And so to talk a bit more about that theme of night, we had to explore what night meant to us as designers, like as a base concept. So of course, night brings with it some negative connotations, like the dark and fear and the unknown, things like this. So we wanted at first when the player jumps into this world to feel those kind of negative feelings conveyed quite directly and have that sense of anxiety and that sense of fear of the unknown.
So we conveyed this straight up with things like the imposed time limit and the encroaching circle of rain, things like this. But we found that night is, we didn’t want it to be fully negative. Again, once the players get used to that cycle and they get used to what they’re seeing, we wanted it to be more than that. We wanted players to kind of begin to almost yearn for the night and sort of look forward to this encroaching darkness and maybe even feel a sense of comfort from it, from getting used to this rhythm and these aspects. So as the game progresses and the player is kind of getting used to these things, that’s definitely an aspect of the design that we wanted to incorporate and be a part of that player experience.
