15 Years of Demon’s Souls: How FromSoftware Changed Action Games Forever

The year is 2009, the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation is in full swing, and developer FromSoftware teamed up with Sony to create a brand-new fantasy title. There’s only one problem — the development of the game was in turmoil.

“The project had problems, and the team had been unable to create a compelling prototype.” Said Hidetaka Miyazaki in a 2015 interview with The Guardian. Miyazaki was a director at FromSoftware who had some experience under his belt as director for several games in the mecha action series Armored Core.

On the 15th anniversary of Demon’s Souls, Techopedia looks back at the genre-defining masterpiece and its road from reveal to release.

Demon’s Souls Was a Failure Before It Was Even Released

“But when I heard it was a fantasy-action role-playing game, I was excited. I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure.”

In 2007, action games were all about regenerative health: From Halo’s shield mechanics to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Lower barriers for players to engage with a title were becoming increasingly popular and, arguably, increasingly toothless. Demon’s Souls gameplay was something entirely different.

This significant decrease in mainstream titles with more active friction is debatable, but its enduring popularity birthed titans like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Assassin’s Creed II, which is the de-facto blueprint for so many open-worlds to come after it.

With those design trends in mind, Demon’s Souls was going against the grain of just about everything else that was going on in the games industry at the time. “To be honest, while the game was still under development, we weren’t fully understood, and it was very difficult for us,” Miyazaki said in a 2010 interview.

“We wanted to stay clear of current trends… we thought it would only be judged by a handful of core players. Without meaning to attribute special significance to the game, now that there are so few games of its type, we thought that there was definitely a need for it, and we also felt that it was something that the current games industry needed. With all these ideas in mind, we created Demon’s Souls,” he continued in his first-ever on-record interview.

PlayStation Boss: “This Is an Unbelievably Bad Game”

It was at TGS 2008 that the first-ever Demon’s Souls trailer debuted. However, internally, things were not going well when Sony publisher tried playing through the title. Shuhei Yoshida, at the time PlayStation’s boss of Worldwide Studios, wasn’t impressed, as revealed in an interview with Game Informer.

“For my personal experience with Demon’s Souls, when it was close to final, I spent close to two hours playing it, and after two hours, I was still standing at the beginning of the game. I said, ‘This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.'”

So, the company dropped Demon’s Souls from Sony’s international publishing schedule, was not set to be published in America or the EU, and had a disastrous 29/40 score in Japanese Magazine Famitsu. But, the Asian release also included an English translation, and following its release in Japan and Asia, international players started to perk their ears up.

Soul Reprieve

Demon’s Souls’ obtuse game mechanics and unflinching approach to design was something seldom seen in other titles at the time. If you died within a level, you were sent straight back to the start, with half of your health and limited healing items that you had to seek out from defeating enemies.

The Demon’s Souls combat mechanics were more akin to a Monster Hunter-lite, rather than the fast action combat seen in Devil May Cry or the counter-based combat of Western action games like Assassin’s Creed.

This animation-based system had a light and heavy attack for each arm, much like King’s Field and Shadow Tower, titles that FromSoftware had previously released under director and producer Naotoshi Zin, but from a third-person perspective. The pace was extremely slow, with stats and mechanics affecting everything from how fast you dodge to your ability to parry or withstand elemental attacks.

This all sounds familiar to anyone who has played a Souls game or a Souls-like game now, but back then, it was deeply engrossing once you allowed the game to play by its own rules.

Combined with mechanics like World Tendency and innovative concepts such as asynchronous multiplayer through the use of Phantoms and Messages, something began to click with players.

A Cult Classic Turned Genre Juggernaut

Cult message boards and forums began talking about Demon’s Souls with a level of reverence only usually reserved for huge releases. In the west, Wikis attempted to decipher Demon’s Souls, and it began gathering steam.

It was only three months after the game’s initial release that Atlus West picked Demon’s Souls up for release in the US, with Namco Bandai picking the title up for an EU release a year afterward.

Thanks to those releases, Demon’s Souls picked up accolades from mainstream western outlets and was awarded the coveted Game of the Year award from GameSpot in 2009.

From Software later signed on to do a three-game deal with publisher Namco Bandai under the working title Project Dark, which carried on the legacy of Demon’s Souls. Project Dark was later finalized under the title Dark Souls.

At E3 2014, Shuhei Yoshida went on stage at Sony’s E3 presentation, announcing a new game “near and dear to my heart.” Sony’s latest first-party title and newest collaboration with From Software, Bloodborne.

Over time, the blueprint that Demon’s Souls laid became new genre staples, inspiring games like Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Lords of the Fallen, Nioh, Hollow Knight, and many more.

Sony eventually published a lavish remake of Demon’s Souls as a PS5 launch title, but even the pixel-pushing power of the PS5 couldn’t quite capture the lightning-in-a-bottle that Demon’s Souls was back in 2009.

The Bottom Line

The fate of Demon’s Souls hung on a thread as it dared to defy conventional genre norms and expectations. But, after all the strife of its release and subsequent successors, Demon’s Souls is one of the most influential modern games released over the last 20 years, right next to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Assassin’s Creed II.

Nowadays, (arguably) the best way to play the game is through the Demon’s Souls remake on PS5. With all said, the reverberations of its release and influence are now ingrained in almost every aspect of modern gaming. Umbasa.

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