“From a marketing perspective, Demon’s Souls is a project that should never have been initiated,” its producer, Takeshi Kajii of Sony Computer Entertainment, told Edge in 2010. It was a slow, heavy, unforgiving fantasy game at a time when, as the magazine put it, developers were falling “over themselves to reward players for the emptiest of achievements”. Its first public showing went badly and its first week’s sales were poor. Then players found it, told each other about it and left each other notes inside it, and Edge was soon calling it “2009’s most unlikely global hit”. FromSoftware’s next game, Dark Souls, was built by the same team on the same ideas.
Fast facts
- Developer: FromSoftware, Tokyo.
- Director: Hidetaka Miyazaki.
- Producer: Takeshi Kajii, Sony Computer Entertainment.
- Released: February 2009 in Japan, published by Sony Computer Entertainment; October 2009 in North America, published by Atlus; 25 June 2010 in Europe.
- Format: PlayStation 3.
- Remake: by Bluepoint Games, a PlayStation 5 launch game in November 2020.
- Successor: Dark Souls (2011).
A lost breed of action game
The idea came from Sony. Kajii approached FromSoftware, he told Edge, “to rediscover a lost breed of action game”: “I’ve always loved the dark fantasy genre, from Wizardry right through to King’s Field.” FromSoftware had made King’s Field, a gloomy first-person role-playing game, for the first PlayStation. Miyazaki, who had worked only on the studio’s Armored Core mech games, took the project because he “always wanted to make a dark fantasy game that drew on the Fighting Fantasy series of books”. He had never designed levels before, and Edge reported that he did it by hand, day by day: “Every single day I would be like: ‘Make this door taller! Take this wall out!’”
The team expected Sony to rein it in. “We were sure we went too far in this,” Miyazaki said. “The team kept waiting for Sony to tell us to rethink our approach but that instruction never came.” One idea did go. “Initially the plan was to have the game feature perma-death, where death of the character would result in the save file being erased,” Kajii said, laughing. “We all agreed we probably went too far with that.” What stayed was a game built around dying and trying again. Miyazaki described it as “not a game in which you die a lot, but an experience that keeps you very aware of your surroundings”, in which players had to learn from failure: “to get to this point, you need failures, failures from which you learn.” The story was kept out of the way. “Our approach was really to try to sidestep preset narrative,” Kajii said. “There is no real story unfolding in front of you.”
How it played
Killing enemies earned souls, which served both as experience, spent on raising the character’s statistics, and as money for weapons, armour and items. Most actions drained a stamina meter, so every swing and roll had a cost. Dying cost more. The writer N’Gai Croal explained the catch in an Edge column at the end of 2009: “when you die you have to battle your way back to the bloodstain that you left at the site of your death, and if you don’t make it, you forfeit everything that you earned on your previous playthrough.” The friend who recommended the game to him told him to treat his first ten hours as a tutorial.
The game was not one continuous world. From a hub, the Nexus, the player travelled to separate worlds, each a run of levels ending in a boss. Edge later contrasted this “Nexus hub world and level-based structure” with Dark Souls’ single connected map. A hidden system called World Tendency shifted each world between “pure white and pure black”, changing it according to what players did, and Edge recalled that “you had to flee online to the Demon’s Souls wiki if you were to have any hope of untangling the mystery of how it worked”.
Miyazaki’s love of Western fantasy reached the voices too. He wanted British actors, and that led FromSoftware to the London localisation company Frognation, which went on to translate Dark Souls as well.
Strangers’ messages
The online features were in the design from the start, Kajii said: players could leave one another clues and hints, “in-game FAQs pasted to the environment”, and see “where and how other players died via ghostly replays”. They were also the hardest part to sell to Sony. “So many people queried why we needed an online aspect to the game if we weren’t planning on allowing people to form a traditional questing party,” Kajii said, and servers were expensive. Miyazaki agreed: “We tried everything, even using pictures.”
There was no chat. Players wrote messages from a fixed set of phrases, and Wireframe remembered how strange the early ones looked: instead of “press circle to roll”, players found “imminent enemy”, “try jumping off” or “praise the sun!”, with a rating from other players. Most were honest help. Some were not: a message rated highly enough to stay around might say a path was safe, “until you suddenly got your face kicked off”. Other players could also be summoned to help or could invade to fight. The PlayStation 3 servers were shut down in February 2018, and with them the messages went silent.
A slow start
The first demonstration, at the Tokyo Game Show, was “nothing short of a disaster”, Kajii told Edge. Visitors expected an action game that handled like Sengoku Musou, few finished the demo, and some put the controller down at the character-creation screen. “Initially, sales were poor,” he said. “We sold between 20-30,000 copies in Japan the first week.” Word of mouth turned it round. “The contrast between how we felt around the time of release and when the game broke the 100,000 sales mark was gigantic,” Miyazaki said.
Atlus published it in North America in October 2009, and it reached Europe in June 2010. By the end of 2009 Croal had decided that “for people who derive the most pleasure from the pain of lost time, the PlayStation 3 RPG Demon’s Souls delivers in spades”.
After Demon’s Souls
Work on Dark Souls began as soon as Demon’s Souls was released, with most of the same team. It had a new publisher and a new name, but it kept the messages, the bloodstains, the invasions and the souls. The style spread to other studios. When Edge looked at permanent death in games in 2013, Teddy Lee, designer of Rogue Legacy, said: “Demon’s Souls influenced us a lot in this regard. We thought the way [From Software] handled death in the game was really brilliant.”
Bluepoint Games remade the game for the PlayStation 5, and it came out with the console in November 2020. Wireframe called it “FromSoftware’s first go at what became the Souls-like genre” and found that the remake “loses nothing of what made the original so special”, with new graphics and better translations.
Sources
- Edge issue 216, July 2010, pp. 12–15: feature with Takeshi Kajii and Hidetaka Miyazaki (the “lost breed of action game”; Wizardry and King’s Field; waiting for Sony to object; sidestepping “preset narrative”; Armored Core and Fighting Fantasy; Miyazaki’s first level design; the permanent-death plan; the Tokyo Game Show demo; the online features and servers; first-week sales and 100,000; “should never have been initiated”; European release on 25 June).
- Edge issue 209, Christmas 2009, p. 157: N’Gai Croal’s column (the bloodstain, losing what you earned, the first ten hours as a tutorial).
- Edge issue 223, January 2011, p. 85: Demon’s Souls listed with publisher Atlus; “Black World Tendency”.
- Edge issue 226, April 2011, pp. 52–56: Dark Souls studio visit (“2009’s most unlikely global hit”; messages “almost always used as generous advice”; work on Dark Souls beginning straight after release).
- Edge issue 234, December 2011, p. 106: Dark Souls review (the “Nexus hub world and level-based structure” of Demon’s Souls).
- Edge issue 242, July 2012, p. 16: Miyazaki and Frognation’s Ryan Morris on British voice actors and localisation.
- Edge issue 249, January 2013, p. 68: World Tendency and the wiki.
- Edge issue 261, Christmas 2013, p. 68: Teddy Lee on Demon’s Souls and Rogue Legacy.
- Wireframe issue 47, January 2021, pp. 112–113: “Killer Feature: Demon’s Souls” (the messages, their ratings and their lies; the servers shut down in February 2018).
- Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 94: next-generation round-up, Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 5.
- Atlus, press release announcing the North American release on 6 October 2009, reproduced by GameBanshee as “Demon’s Souls Now Available” (web, secondary): North American release, the Nexus. https://www.gamebanshee.com/8wwh
- Kakaku.com, Demon’s Souls product page (web, secondary): Japanese release on 5 February 2009. https://kakaku.com/item/K0000008902/
- “Demon’s Souls”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates and publishers; five worlds reached from the Nexus; souls as experience and currency; the stamina meter; the PlayStation 5 remake on 12 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon%27s_Souls