Players of From Software’s various Soulsborne genre of games have by now become very familiar with how that leveling system works. However, they’re going to get a bit of a surprise with the Sekiro leveling system, which is taking a different approach to the entire mechanic with progression trees, not stats.
In other Soulsborne games, players mainly ranked up by gathering souls/blood echoes/what have you from enemies that they defeat, rather than experience. This carried a certain amount of risk and reward; gathering more souls meant you could gain more levels. However, if you died, you lost your souls, and had to collect them again. If you died at that point, you’d lose your gathered souls forever.
Along with that, your Souls also functioned as currency, forcing you to strike a delicate balance between buying new weapons and armor and items for yourself, and leveling yourself up. This is the first true difference in the two different games; in Sekiro, your experience and your currency are different; using currency doesn’t affect your ability to gain levels. Whether you lose it on death, however, is still up in the air.
In the Sekiro leveling system, players collect experience points and use those to invest in multiple different skill trees that give them various abilities. Three such trees include ninja skills, samurai swordplay, and enhancements for the prosthetic arm that your character uses in the game. In order to access each of these different trees, you have to find a specific item in the world that will allow you access.
New weapons will also be a part of the game, too. Your prosthetic arm is very versatile and will be an enormous part of gameplay even outside the Sekiro leveling system. You can upgrade it with various tools, and equip it with weapons like an axe or a shuriken launcher.
From Software will likely tell us more about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in the future, but for now we’ll be waiting for information before the game comes out on March 22 for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC. When it releases, hopefully we’ll all be ready to die over and over and over once again.
