Demon’s Souls Dev: “We Went Too Far”

In today’s age of developers wanting to do everything to please their base, games are usually beaten in less than a day. No more are there difficult titles that challenge the gamer to think really hard on what his next decision will be; instead, although entertaining, the experience doesn’t really challenge one’s mind too hard.

And that’s okay. I mean, who wants to play a game over and over, and each time you die, all your experience points, all treasures collected and so fourth get lost, forcing you to collect them all over again? Not me, for sure.

That’s unless the game is Demon’s Souls.

The PS3 exclusive directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, is one of the most unforgiving titles you’ll ever play this year, and the developers knew it from the start. In fact, they were sure that they “went to far” and thought Sony would come knocking, demanding they tone it done much.

“We were sure we went too far in this,” Miyazaki confessed in a recent interview with next-gen. “The team kept waiting for Sony to tell us to rethink our approach but that instruction never came.”

SCE producer Takeshi Kajii took over: “At Sony we try to deliver games that can touch the widest possible number of users, so there was a critical decision to be made: do we to ask From Software to make the game more accessible, or do we let the team pursue the creative road it set for this project? Of course, we chose the latter and, mercifully, it was the right decision.”

Indeed. The team, however, had even more cynical ideas in mind, ideas like perma-death.

“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 laughingly.

Adding: “We all agreed we probably went too far with that. But it demonstrates the lengths we went to in exploring the meaning and mechanisms of death in the game when tuning that rewarding feeling the game was supposed to provide.”

Demon’s Souls has moved over 280K units in the US since its release, according to Atlus, 205K more than the 75K originally projected by the company.

The game released in Europe on June 25th, and according to Namco Bandai, has been performing beyond their expectations in that region, too.