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Former Tekken series lead Katsuhiro Harada says FromSoftware boss and Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is a "unique" developer with a "'mad scientist' side," thanks to his "deeply serious, obsessive approach to creativity." However, when it comes to Dark Souls, it's not the notorious difficulty that makes Miyazaki's creation stand out – it's the world.

Harada and Miyazaki are both legendary games industry veterans in their own right, but asked about the Dark Souls mastermind on Twitter, the ex-Bandai Namco dev has plenty of thoughts to share.

"Miyazaki is a rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer," Harada begins, noting that the FromSoftware lead "didn't become a game developer until he was almost thirty years old," meaning he wasn't even in the industry for "the dawn of the polygon era" – making his impact on the scene "remarkable." It's that latter part that makes Miyazaki's career path "exceptionally unusual," Harada adds.

As for Dark Souls, it's not the difficulty of the game that stands out to him – in fact, Harada actually hits us with a 'skill issue' midway through his essay, as he notes his belief that "Dark Souls has fairly simple action mechanics, and I don't actually consider it to be an especially difficult game." Damn, OK. Rather, Harada says, "Miyazaki's true creativity shines through in the world he created."

To be fair, I'm sure Harada's not the only one who thinks this. The Dark Souls games aren't just notoriously difficult; they're also famously complex when it comes to their world-building and storytelling. As Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead Guillaume Broche discussed recently , the majority of Souls players will "finish the game the first time and haven't understood a thing." However, look a little closer under the surface, and you can uncover deep, fascinating lore and cleverly built locations full of details.

It's no doubt partly thanks to this that the series has cemented itself as such a firm favorite amongst fans, especially over time. Speaking from his experience "overseeing both production and marketing" of the Dark Souls games and Elden Ring , Harada says: "Dark Souls didn't suddenly become a massive success overnight. It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles."

In fact, there were times when "his team were struggling," which Harada looks back to now that Miyazaki "receives offers from all over the world," making him feel like some folks have had "complete reversals in attitude" to FromSoftware's work since it's become so successful.

From my perspective, Miyazaki is a rather unique, yet extremely serious game developer.His career did not begin in the game industry. In fact, he didn’t become a game developer until he was almost thirty years old.Even among developers of my generation (those of us born in… https://t.co/YjgDysT9u1 July 5, 2026

Reminiscing about Miyazaki's approach to game development, Harada also looks back to the creation of the VR game Summer Lesson (which was released in 2016, and sees you take on the role of a tutor for a high school student), when the Dark Souls lead tried an early build of the game.

"While everyone else was laughing, chatting, and having fun with it, Miyazaki alone played it with incredible seriousness," Harada recalls. "Then, after everyone had finished and started discussing their impressions, he remained completely silent, staring intently at the preview monitor, deep in thought.

"Everyone became curious and finally asked him, 'Miyazaki, what are you thinking about?' He suddenly smiled and said, 'Oh… I got completely absorbed in thinking about what I would do if I were making this, and what kind of game I'd create,'" he continues. "What he talked about after that was, in the best possible sense, completely insane. It was one of those rare moments when I caught a glimpse of what I'd call his 'mad scientist' side – his deeply serious, obsessive approach to creativity."

The former Tekken boss wraps up by discussing why Miyazaki tends to avoid appearing in live streams and video interviews, and it might not be the reason you'd expect. As well as disliking seeing "himself moving around on video," which any camera-shy person can understand, Miyazaki apparently thinks there are "many people in this industry who know games far better than he does," which makes him believe "his own understanding is still shallow," so "he's not yet in a position to be the one talking about games."

This is, of course, a wildly modest thing for the creator of Dark Souls to think, which Harada acknowledges. "I mean… it's common for well-known developers to say, 'I still have a long way to go.' But whenever someone like him says that, my reaction is always, 'Come on… if you say you're still not there yet, then the rest of us won't feel qualified to talk about games at all.' (laugh)"

In the same enormous post, Harada also speaks about Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai, who he clearly also has immense respect for. In what might be the best form of compliment, he compares him to a Dragon Ball Saiyan "who genuinely believes he's just another ordinary human" – and apparently sometimes says things that make him sound "exactly like Goku."

Hideo Kojima and Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki's games have something other AAA titles don't, former PlayStation boss says: "You can tell it's their visions."

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Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.

In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal , an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars — and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters — throughout vast swathes of cosmic time.

Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us . The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.

"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."

Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web , the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons .

Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)

Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.

Data from the new COSMOS-Web survey (left) compared to the previous iteration (right). JWST's sensitivity and depth has allowed scientists to map the cosmic web in unprecedented detail. (Image credit: Hatamnia et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2026) Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.

Revealing celestial birth and death

Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" — dying and quenched of their star-forming potential.

This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets .

Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.

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In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.

Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher , a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement .

The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.

This article was first published May 18, 2026.