Ninja Gaiden 4 will be with us this time next week (look out for our review in the near future), and ahead of this big Xbox first-party release, a couple of developers have been speaking to Automaton about how challenging of a game it'll be.
Directors Yuji Nakao (PlatinumGames) and Masakazu Hirayama (Team Ninja) discussed with the outlet about how maintaining a "sense of fairness" has been crucial when it comes to balancing the difficulty, insisting that it's going to be a tough game with challenges that you'll need to overcome, but they'll still (hopefully) be fair challenges.
Here's a bit of what Nakao had to say about this:
“We focused not only on making the action feel satisfying, but also on offering the cathartic release of overcoming disadvantageous odds, that was a core part of development.”
"I envision it as a game where a certain level of challenge or hardship is scattered throughout. That sense of catharsis you feel when you overcome those challenges is something I truly value.”
Hirayama insisted during the chat that maintaining fairness is "crucial" to the design of Ninja Gaiden 4:
"Whether or not a death feels like it was your fault is a huge part of maintaining that sense of fairness."
We'll have to wait and see whether they've got the balance right - Ninja Gaiden 4 officially launches on October 21st (included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass), and we're hoping for another amazing entry in this classic series.
Stay tuned for our review, and don't forget about all the other Game Pass titles coming to us in October as well!