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Yargh, my last PS3 died before I got to play Demon Souls. I want to play both these games. This one looks gorgeous as well.

Guess that means I need to work on platinum-ing DS in the next few months huh?

With multiplayer, I might go with 360.

1Up has a preview - http://www.1up.com/previews/dark-souls-harder-brutal-demon-souls

Mini-bosses can now lock on and follow the player!!!!! I foresee many, many tears during the 2011 holiday season.

EDIT: According to GamesRader, the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, says that "the difficulty has increased greatly over Demons Souls".

I'd like to add the phrase "howls of anguish" to my preceding remarks about the tears.

I'm glad this is Dark Souls and not Dark's Souls.

I didn't much care for the hub-style world layout of the first game, so this sounds like an improvement.

I had a twinge of disappointment that it wasn't Dark's Souls.

Hey guys, bad news, you will die.

Interesting bits: emphasis on exploration, no world tendency, checkpoints of a sort, no more crystal geckos, but something similar.

Edit: another interesting interview here: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/02/04/dark-souls-qa-variety-is-the-s...

I find this bit pretty interesting:

Also...

Did many people think Demon's Souls had an intimidating control scheme? I found it to be extremely intuitive with just a small amount of practice. The short lock-on distance was the only issue that comes to mind.

Demon's Souls had great controls. I'm surprised anyone would fault them.

This is a must-get, probably for the PS3, too. I think DS is going to be a PlayStation kind of game for me always.

My friend was immediately put off by the targeting system the first time he tried DS, though I saw nothing wrong with it personally. Otherwise, the control is probably the most consistent of all similar games I've played.

@BishopRS

I even started wondering what tactics/weapons I might use to beat them... even though I have no idea what'll actually be available!

@Dyni

That interview raises a lot of issues and questions for me. I'm a little conflicted about the repetition issue. In DS1 - as I will now christen it - there was an awful lot of 'chipping away' at bosses. The dragons were a prime example of this; I think it took me more than 15 minutes to kill each of them. Granted, once in position it was a risk free battle, but it was tiresome.

However, I always understood that part of the point of DS1 was that once you had a winning strategy for any enemy or boss, then their Hit Points were irrelevant. You would always beat them eventually if you didn't make a big mistake.

I'm also conflicted about what appears to the creation of a checkpoint system. The high costs of failure was one of the subtle features that made DS unique. And having to respawn at the beginning was one of the biggest costs of all... particularly when you knew that you'd been lucky to get as far as you had (1-3, I'm looking at you).

If this isn't implmented sensitively there's a danger that levels and bosses will be overcome simply through brute force rather than observation, trial and error. After all, why bother with caution if you know that you can simply respawn at the preceding fog gate?

Finally, the question about the control scheme angered and saddened me at the same time. Over the past few years, I've noticed a trend towards 'sameness' in control schemes, driven - I suspect - by developer/publisher fears that gamers simply won't accept a different ways of controlling similar types of game... resulting in lower sales. The decision to give MAG exactly the same controls is a case in point. While I find it frustrating initially, I really enjoy learning a new 'language' for playing new games.

In any case, DS1 had two excellent tutorials: the obvious one, and then 1-1, which was a tutorial in all but name.

Knowing From Software, they're not putting in a checkpoint system without at least ratcheting up the difficulty substantially.

The first game was just too hard for me..I couldn't ever get past the first boss and having to keep clearing the same sections over and over became tiresome. Shame because I thought it was the best controlling and playing PS3 game I owned and would have loved an "ez-mode" for the sake of playing it through.

So this game being even more difficult means I won't even buy it this time around.

That's not what was said in the GT interview video.