With From Software’s hugely anticipated ninja action title Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice rapidly nearing its March 22nd launch, the developer is starting to shed some light on the game’s more mysterious systems – and this time it’s the turn of player progression.
According to Game Informer, in conversation with Yasuhiro Kitao, From’s manager of marketing and communications, player progression is yet another area of Sekiro in which the studio is actively moving away from the (perhaps overly) familiar template of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. While those games, with their heavy RPG stylings, offered enormous breadth in the way that a character’s abilities could be personalised – by piling Souls or Blood Echoes into a wide variety of stats – Sekiro is far more concerned with focussed depth.
The first major departure from Dark Souls and Bloodborne is that currency (used to purchase new equipment) and XP (used to expand your abilities) are now distinct elements – and, notably, neither is dropped on death, meaning that corpse runs are also a thing of the past. XP, as you might imagine, is earned by defeating enemies and gradually fills a bar which, when maxed, will grant players one skill point. Points can then be spend to unlock more abilities in a skill tree.
