Dark Souls 2 engine upgrade allows for fancy graphics tricks

Dark Souls 2 director Yui Tanimura is pleased with the new graphical flourishes From Software is able to implement now that it has upgraded the RPG's engine.

"The idea of gimmicks in the game is now doable with this new engine," Tanimura told Polygon.

"Things like representing an enemy that is perhaps off-screen but with movement of shadows, or that kind of expression in the game. It's something that [I] always wanted to do but wasn't able to do with the previous engine.

"There's a lot of ideas like that. We don't want to give everything away, but those kinds of things are small things that we wanted to express, and with this engine we think we can do that."

As well as these neat little touched, Tanimura is enthusiastic about the general graphical upgrade afforded by the new tech.

Dark Souls 2 is headed to PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in March 2014. Phil had a go at it lately and came away thinking of it as a great party game.