Demon's Souls for PS5 - What we would like in ...

Index

Restoring the cut content Some optimizations More current controls What we would like in ... is a monthly column dedicated to the games most awaited by the public. But compared to traditional previews, it treats the topic more widely, imagining what a title might look like, or how you'd like it to be, rather than what it will be like.

Demon's Souls, the spiritual father of the Dark Souls series and in general of all those games that fall into the category called soulslike, will soon be back in a new guise as one of the launch games of PlayStation 5. Developed by Bluepoint Games , the title should be something more than a simple technological adaptation of the original, but even a real makeover, with some additions and tweaks to the gameplay, along the lines of what we saw long ago with Shadow of the Colossus, remade from team in question on PlayStation 4. While waiting to have it in your hands, let's try to suggest some ideas to make the new edition of this authentic gem originally born on PlayStation 3 more beautiful.

Restore the cut contents

Demon's Souls is world-structured, and does not have a markedly interconnected map like that of Dark Souls or Bloodborne. These big levels are reached through doors present in a main hub called Nexus, where many of the non-player characters useful for the main character also reside, such as the Maiden in Black needed to upgrade it. To use the portals it is necessary to exploit the so-called archstones, and from this point of view, one of the first things we would like is certainly the restoration (and completion) of all those features eliminated in the original, starting right from the sixth archstone.

In the Nexus, in fact, there were half a dozen of them for as many macro-zones, but only five were functional. The sixth, called Archstone of the Giants, is visible but charred and broken, therefore inaccessible. For the plot of the game the reason was due to the fact that that area was now too saturated with the evil power of demons, and therefore the situation was now irreparable. But for many fans it was just a narrative ploy to justify the failure to complete the map during development. And in fact, over the years, thanks to the patient work of some dataminers, this theory has in some ways been refuted by the discovery of areas, objects and characters that never appeared in the final adventure.

The Arcipietra dei Giganti seems in this sense to open the doors to a snowy world populated mainly by giants, of which various assets had been created. Creatures similar to Yeti but with the mouth at the height of the belly, witches with magic sticks and transparent beings with long claws with female and male humanoid shapes (larger). And again, knights, non-player characters and a large boss similar to a pot-bellied gargoyle, armed with an ax, all scattered in snowy areas, or inside a huge medieval fortress carved into the rock and connected to what looks like one of his city ​​appendage made up of arches, stairways and brick walls.

Some optimization

As if that weren't enough, there seems to be even an extra extra area, a cut-out portion outside the Nexus. In light of all this, Bluepoint would have the opportunity in this remake to build on these elements, inserting new ones and reworking the old ones (since much of the material seems to have been recycled in Dark Souls) to create completely new content compared to the original game. , expanding and refining it as it deserves, without distorting its spirit.

Even more so considering that, as logic dictates, the game code will be cleaned of those annoying glitches that prevented you from fully enjoying it or living the experience in a "clean" way, such as the one that allowed you to multiply all infinite (or almost) the Demon Souls and various objects, even rare ones. Continuing our analysis and also listing our wishes for the new Demon's Souls, we sincerely hope that the development team does not overturn the style of the original too much in terms of color palettes and effects.

It's okay to take advantage of the power of PlayStation 5, mind you, but without eliminating that color typical of the PlayStation 3 version or changing the lighting or climatic conditions of certain areas and bosses. By changing the artistic direction they would lose, and a lot, the atmosphere and the narrative sense of the adventure. Let's not forget that the lands of Boletaria in which the game is set are shrouded in a mysterious fog that is consuming the lands due to the evil influences of an ancient demon that the player must drive back into the oblivion of his eternal sleep in the depths of the kingdom of the dead, to bring back the light. Making everything too colorful and not very decadent would distort the work and its world.

More current controls

Again with this in mind, we would not mind some tweaks to the behavior of the enemies and certain related mechanics, to modernize some aspects and make the controls less cumbersome, but without exaggeration too here, so much so that we would absolutely keep the weight of the items in the inventory, as in the opinion of the writer it was a basic gameplay mechanic. Especially the enemies would take advantage of this, since at that point the old tactic of the user of turning around the opponent in turn to try to beat him would be less, and clearly the level and variety of the challenge, which thanks to more advanced behavioral routines and the need to use different tactics from time to time would be more exciting. Especially if at the same time, as written before, the controls of the character are improved and, we add now, there was an increase in weapons and armor, very few in the original edition.

The world of Demon's Souls was constantly changing according to the actions of the gamers: there was in fact a sort of meter of the level of Good and Evil present in the various areas in which we moved, which took into account itself of the hero's deeds. If he killed demons and similar amenities, then the explored area tended to have a positive status which resulted in particular optimal conditions for the player, such as enemies with fewer HP or a lower level of physical and magical strength, or opponents no longer present in points where they previously stopped. Conversely, ignoring bad opponents and slaughtering some innocent ones, the indicator tended towards black, and all around the world fomented by hatred and malice made the mission difficult. The level of goodness or badness in a given area also depended on the actions performed by all online users, if playing with the internet option enabled.

The original Demon's Souls boasted a unique feature at the time: players could play permanently connected to the Net. And in addition to what was described a few lines above, in this way they could leave messages for others in the game world, scribbled on floors and walls. They could warn of dangers nearby or deceive other users into death. A brilliant implementation that incorporated social elements into a single-player game, but with its usefulness. Well, assuming we want to find this feature in the makeover, we would also like the online experience to be significantly tweaked, adding some extra features or options. Without revolutionizing, excessively modifying anything, but only with a couple of tweaks, ultimately in our opinion the new Demon's Souls would be perfect.