Player feedback? Hidetaka Miyazaki ain't reading all that.
. Your guess is as good as his, apparently: Miyazaki said he hadn't"analysed it much," and that while"It’s true that sales were higher than those of [FromSoft's] previous games," he has"no idea what the reason was". Probably theIt's probably for the best, because it sounds like Miyazaki is determined to keep directing games according to his own tastes, rather than cleaving to whatever seems popular.
In fact, Miyazaki seems absolutely determined not to let external factors influence the direction of his game design. The director said—in a lesson we should probably all take to heart—that he deliberately avoids being too exposed to player feedback."it might affect my future decisions as a developer, which I find rather unsettling," said Miyazaki, so he tries to"avoid being directly exposed to too many opinions".
It's an eminently respectable philosophy, and one that seems better-suited to making novel and interesting games than design-by-focus-group. Still, I can't help but wonder how recently Miyazaki adopted this outlook. Dark Souls 3 in particular felt like it was made in direct response to the myriad criticisms that players threw at Dark Souls 2 in so many aspects that I struggle to believe Miyazaki hadn't engaged with feedback to some extent.