Part B.

Media Product

Chosen product - Dark Souls 3

The purpose of the product is that of continuing the dark souls franchise and also that of selling
more copies in order to turn the company a profit, the codes and conventions it follows are that
of the PEGI or pan european game information organisation, an organisation established to help
European parents make informed decisions on buying computer games for their children.
The primary audience of dark souls 3 is those above the age of 16 who are interested in a dark
fantasy work of returning fans of the Souls series which spans 4 games (5 if the playstation
exclusive Bloodborne is included) with the secondary audience being fans of difficult games.
The genre of the game is strictly fantasy, employing a dark theme and the use of fantasy
elements such as undead, living skeletons, wyverns and dragons with the style of the game
being on the side of realistic, using realistic swords, armour and other things such as stamina.
The meaning of the game is that the world continues even after death and that you can try to
change the world but in the end, the world will continue, using this in the game's mechanics as
once you die, everything resets to its prior state, the game also shows this by the placement of
the camera, with it being in third person, the camera is positioned in a way that it makes
everything look bigger then the character, showing how small and helpless they are within the
game's world, this is also shown in the sound and editing, all music used within dark souls 3 has
a distinctly fantasy vibe with a dark undertone.

The production process started sometime prior to the release of dark souls 2, with Hidetaka
Miyazaki retaking the lead on the overall production, the basic game features, direction, as well
as the visual design directions and Isamu Okano of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor director fame,
co-directing, supporting Miyazaki's direction as well as handling the mass production part as
well as the human resource control. The overall list of directors, composers and co-directors
are

Director(s)
Hidetaka Miyazaki
Isamu Okano
Yui Tanimura
Designer(s)
Shigeto Hirai
Yuya Kimijima
Hiroshi Yoshida
Junya Ishizaki
Programmer(s)
Takeshi Suzuki
Composer(s)
Yuka Kitamura
Motoi Sakuraba
The production process started back in 2013, with the aim of furthering and closing the dark
souls story that was started with FromSoftwares first dark souls game, development of the
game was left in the dark as FromSoftware aimed to keep the game a secret while another
team developed the standalone title exclusivly for the PS4, Bloodborne.

Survey Results

As can be seen by my results, the main demographic of the dark souls games are that of the
male gender, this may also be due to the small sample size.
The question in this section was to ask the survey takers age, as can be seen, this game is
more popular with those of the younger side of the predicted age range, that being between 18-
25
This question allows me to gauge the audience and to see if they play video games, as can be
seen by the results, all of the selected group play video games, reinforcing the stereotype of
young adults that are male generally tend to play video games.
This question was based on the multiple genres of games that many different people play, as
can be seen by the results, most of the selected audience tend to lean towards more strategic
games with some action and some role playing games
This question was asked to see the reach of the dark souls brand name and how many might
have heard it or even played the games, as can be seen by the results, 1 person out of the
audience had played all of the games with the rest falling into the heard of the series category
The question was aimed to see if the audience had heard more details about the dark souls
series, the results show that many players have heard about the difficulty of the game and its
various difficulty waves.
This question was to see if the audience knew who created the game, as the audience have
shown, not many of the audience know who made the dark souls series, meaning the darks
souls brand has outshone the creators