Not if it declines into a regular, streamlined fantasy hack and slash. But there's not enough info yet to say. I will remain optimistic until I hear more.

The Souls games have a lot of room to get more accessible without getting easier. Dark Souls is my favorite game of the last generation, but it's also way more opaque than it needs to be about a lot of things. If Dark Souls II has menu icons that make sense, covenants that can be experienced without consulting an FAQ, NPC's that don't disappear and/or try to kill you for answering a nonsensical question with the wrong nonsensical answer, and a replacement for World Tendency/Humanity that isn't impossible to figure out, I'll call it a win. Hell, if they make some of those front-end things more direct, they'd have wiggle room to make the meat of the game -- the combat and exploration -- even harder.

The thing about Dark Souls is, it is such a magnificent game that it has plenty of room to decline while still being a fantastic game. Even if they go overboard streamlining it and add a stupid story with more cutscenes, all they have to do is keep the same combat system and it will still be an excellent game (the combat system is THAT good.)

And that's IF they make some dumb decisions... however, Miyazaki is still overseeing the project so I don't forsee a huge decline. To be fair, making the mechanics less obtuse will not hurt the game at all, and may even be a good thing. And there's already been one very promising piece of news: Dark Souls II will go back to using dedicated servers like Demon Souls. That alone will be a huge improvement over Dark Souls and is reason to get excited about.

Overall I think this is the best possible gaming news we could expect.

@Muir

True. It depends entirely on what exactly they mean by more accessible. To me, a big part of Dark Souls was the exploration and feeling of being lost. Just being dropped into a world knowing not where to go and not immediately having a clear objective was very engaging, a bit like the original Zelda. If they make it a streamlined story with lots of guidance, I will be sad, even if the game remains hard.

You can effectively "turn off" invasions by just not being in human form while you are in an area with an active boss. The only single-player reason to become human is in order to kindle bonfires, and if you need to do that you can just kill yourself to return to undead form afterwords, or use that time to play around with the PVP system for fun. If you need to turn human to summon help for bosses, then there's always the risk of invasion, but at least you'll have help.

The most Japanese thing about Dark Souls for me is the difficulty. Japanese have traditionally seen games as "games," and have not been afraid to challenge the player, whereas western game philosophy has tended to see games more as "experiences," or interactive movies, and doesn't like the idea of punishing the player for failure. Dark Souls is all about punishing the player for failure, and that missing element from most modern games is what makes Dark Souls feel so exciting to explore, and rewarding to beat. So in that sense, I'd say it is very much Japanese.

However, I wouldn't say it's a very "Japanese" game. IMO it's much too unique to be categorized like that... it rises above 99% of the games that come from either country. It's a unique animal.

Well, it is a lot more like Zelda or Monster Hunter than it is Skyrim or The Witcher.

Yet in some ways it's more like Skyrim than Zelda/Monster Hunter, like with the gritty tone and more realistic designs. It also holds your hand less than any of those games. It's so different from most modern games, both Japanese and western, that I think it really can't be categorized so easily.

I meant gameplay wise, and earlier Zeldas. It also reminds me quite a bit of Symphomy of the Night, for example in way NPCs are scattered in the world and you run into with them from time to time.

I'm just saying we're probably more likely to see a game like Dark Souls come from a Japanese developer than a western one, and that it draws more from other Japanese games than western ones.