Here´s an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls´ creative director:
http://www.edge-online.com/features/dark-matters-0?page=2
Here are some parts:
Given your refusal to compromise the game’s difficulty in so many other respects, was it a hard decision to nerf the curse’s stacking ability in a subsequent patch?
We may have gone a bit overboard with the curse. Once you reached a quarter of your health bar, we didn’t think that anybody would be cursed further than that, and they’d be able to cure themselves. We expected very few people to reach 1/8th or 1/16th of their health, but it turns out a lot of people found themselves in that situation. When we balanced the game, we had all our testers play it, but after a certain amount of playing, test players get immune to all the difficulty in the game. We didn’t think it would ever happen. For people who did get cursed down to 1/8th or 1/16th health prior to the patch, I’ll say this: it’s an important experience you’ve had with the game.
Certain areas of Dark Souls – particularly in the New Londo Ruins and Blighttown – suffered from crippling frame-rate drops. Did the scope of some of these environments prove difficult to manage on the technical side?
Yes, there were technical difficulties. I don’t believe that it’s okay to have them, but realistically speaking, it was quite a large-scale game – even in terms of budget and expectations. So we’re very sorry for the trouble we’ve caused by our processing errors and bugs from Japan. It was a title that we haven’t really experienced in all aspects, so there were areas where we felt our technical side couldn’t keep up with the game’s scope, like an increasingly growing ache. I didn’t mind the growing pains. We accept the game as it is, and that it’s just a part of the learning curve.
Are there any discussions underway about making another game set in the Dark Souls universe?
We don’t even know if we’ll have another chance. We have the confidence that we can improve from our mistakes this time and create an even better Dark world, but we don’t know if the users will forgive us for the mistakes, so I cannot give an exact answer
