DANNY: Since Noclip began there
have been a number of studios and game series that we are
consistently asked to investigate. And one of the most common requests
is the work of FromSoftware, specifically their disconnected series
of action role-playing titles that we've come to refer to as
the Soulsborne games. But FromSoftware is one of those
studios who prefers the games to speak for themselves. So while
on a number of occasions we've reached out to them to
talk to them about those games, they've always politely declined. So when 2020's Demon's Souls for
PlayStation 5 was released, we saw an opportunity not only to
dive into the design of these games, but to make good on another common
request to explore the unique work of Bluepoint Games, the studio in Texas
responsible for some of gaming's most faithful remakes. This video is going to cover a lot,
from the technical work that goes into mirroring a game on a new console,
the redesign of various areas, bosses, use of sound, the responsibility of
creative license, and much more. Before we tackle all of that,
let's take a look at how we got here, how Sony's Japan Studio
who worked with FromSoftware on both Demon's Souls and Bloodborne,
came to have a relationship with Bluepoint Games, a studio in
Austin, Texas with a pretty solid track record of remaking PlayStation classics. GAVIN MOORE: There's been a long
history between Sony and Bluepoint, going way back, and particularly between
Bluepoint and Japan Studio. They really are the masters of the remaster,
and they've taken several of our internal titles and made wonderful
remakes from them, from Gravity Rush, Shadow of the Colossus,
and now obviously Demon's Souls. We always wanted to do Demon's Souls, but the problem was that I don't think
any of us thought we could tackle such a PlayStation classic or a PlayStation gem
until we saw the amazing job that Bluepoint had done on Shadow of the Colossus. And that gave us the go ahead
and the inspiration to say, okay, let's really go for this one and
make Demon's Souls. MARCO THRUSH: So yeah, our pickiness
really comes from the fact that we really want to enjoy the games we
work on. We want to make sure that no one else can screw them up.
So we basically want to like grab the games that we're most fond of. Like it had been in the back of our
heads, wanting to do Demon's Souls for awhile and knowing, you know, that Japan
Studio was responsible for that IP. That one, as soon as that
name come up, we're like, yes, that sounds like an amazing
project that we'd like to do. That's something we could get behind.
You know, everybody is excited about it. - Especially after finishing up
Shadow of the Colossus, and we felt like on Shadow of the Colossus,
that we had pushed our studio to a new height, and accomplished a new things,
and grown our art department and, you know, starting to look more at our design
department and in different aspects of the full-fledged studio rather than
doing, you know, smaller remakes. As different titles get thrown around,
what about this title, what about that title, the minute Demon's Souls came up
as an option, you know, I remember being in the conference room with our leads group,
and sitting around the table, and talking about like, okay, we think
Demon's Souls is going to be the title. And it was just like the excitement in the room.
It felt like a great fit because it was like, here's a title that's big in scope
that can utilize our team. It will force us to grow even further
than where we've gone and allow us to do better stuff than we were able
to do on Shadow of the Colossus. We live by this sort of mantra that like, we're only as good as the last title
that we published or that we released. Right? And so we look at, you
know, the Uncharted collection, we feel like at the time the Uncharted
collection pushed us, right? And it was a lot of work to get three
titles through the pipeline and to basically bring all three up
to the same sort of level. And then going to Shadow of the Colossus, Shadow of the Colossus was
a whole new hurdle for us, but it pushed us beyond what we needed
to do for the Uncharted collection. And so with Demon's Souls, we knew whatever
we did next we wanted to be bigger, and we wanted to push ourselves as a
studio to build more content to put into it, to refine more content within the game. And so it was just the scope of the
game really led to the strengths of our studio to basically say we've
been building our technology to work with these remakes
in a more elegant fashion. We've been enhancing and growing our art team, looking at our design staff, our concept
art, everything else, you know. And how do we utilize those departments,
and how do we continue to have them grow and flesh them out? And Demon's Souls was just that title that
it felt like here's something that is really cool, that a lot of
the studio can get behind. There's a lot of fans in the studio.
The concept of the game, the genre of the game, everything was
just, you know, it was a no-brainer. DANNY: Bluepoint Games are responsible
for a very unique type of game design, a craft where they are responsible for
not only making older games feel modern, but doing so in a way that doesn't
alter the core feel of the game. To reach their objective, they must battle
player expectations, heartfelt nostalgia, rose-tinted glasses, and foggy memories. So I was fascinated to learn how they
tackle such a unique and challenging task, especially given that this wasn't
the first time they'd done it. What processes do they have to
capture the feel of an original game? How do they create the foundation on
which they can rebuild Demon's Souls? PETER: I feel like we take a bit of a innovative
approach to handling these remakes. One way that you could do is just, you know, I've got a copy of the game
playing on my PS3, you know, and now I'm just going to look at it and
visually try to interpret everything and basically recreate the game from
scratch. You could do that, and there's most definitely games that do, but it's a dangerous perspective 'cause
there's a lot of interpretation that goes on. The way we like to structure
stuff is to basically get the package that the original game
developer delivered to, say in the case of Demon's Souls, for the
PlayStation 3. And we take that package, and from there, we're able
to extract all the data. The other thing we look for
is all the source code. Now there are certain things,
like if we don't have certain libraries or other things like that, we can balance and say, if we don't have the physics engine,
we can look at it and say, oh, well, we are going to upgrade the physics
engine and replace it completely anyway. Certain rendering things, yeah. We're going to replace all of the
rendering pieces of this game. So we don't need those.
But when it comes to the gameplay, that's where I feel like we have this
innovative approach where we take the gameplay pieces of the code base, and we're able to basically plug those
and integrate those into our engine. So what that gives us is it gives us
this really cool balance of we've got a modern day, but at this point
PS5 AAA engine that's, we then connect in with the original
gameplay of the original game, sort of merge them together. And then we're able to take the
original content and process it a bit, basically get the game up and running.
And so our first step is we just, we just want to get the original game
up and running in all of its original glory and flaws, and get that
up and running on the console. And then from there, then we start digging
deeper, and we start looking at like, let's extract all of the content
off of the disk version, and how do we get that into artists' hands? So how do we take the levels that are
there, and the models, and the characters, and the bosses. How do we extract
all of that, get that into Maya so our art staff can start work on it? A lot
of these projects, like take Demon's Souls. Like that's a, 10 year old old project.
13 now, it was 10 years when we started it. So you go back to somebody and you're
like, what did you do 10 years ago? If you go and ask me, what
did I do 10 years ago, I got to go look at a calendar. So I,
I don't know, let alone have a, you know, a digital history of what I did. And so a lot of times we go
back and we're like, well, what kind of resources do you have, or processes
do you remember of how you built this game? How did the game get in this
sort of shape? With Demon's Souls, it was really cool because they
actually had some decent archives. From there you could sort of see,
well, here's a, here's a concept art, or here's multiple concept arts
that they provided based upon where they were going with it.
And so that really helps our art staff and our concept design a lot
because they're able to look at what was their train of thought that they
were going through when they built this. And so when we look at like a PS3 model
and it's missing detail, or we have to interpret the detail, we're then able
to not just look at like that one model, but then also look at their concept pieces
and other things to basically extract and try to figure out, you
know, where were they going? - We tried to get the GearNT data, the
thing that shipped on the disk, right? That's our starting point. So we try to
extract that data out of the package, or back in the day, we would get
it directly from the disk images. Back in the day when we were
doing remaster, it was more important because you needed to get the actual
data that was on the disk to then improve it. But we'd always, if source data's available,
we always try to use the best that's there. So then we actually had comparison processes
where we had, okay, here's a text you extracted from the disk. Here's a source text that we
believe should be the same, but due to the extra compression or
other other things, like back in the day, palletized textures were really, really
common, which aren't a thing anymore. But you know, you'd have
textures limited to 256 colors. You know, source textures
don't have that limitation. So we did image analysis back in the
day comparing the source data version that we were provided as part of an
archive to what's actually on the disk. And if it's truly just, this is
better high resolution, we would use that as a starting
point to have the best possible data. We try to always work
backwards from the disk. There's a lot of data mining involved, right. 'Cause also, if you look at it
from a code perspective, code could be written to support
any kind of different scenario. And if we had to support
every one of those scenarios, we might potentially do a lot
of work that's not necessary. So we do a lot of data mining to
figure out, okay, from this feature set the engine provides, what is actually
used on the data in the disk, right? 'Cause it's not uncommon to have
game code where you have like five, six movie players embedded in the
code, but only three of them are used. So you can save yourself
some time porting some code. Usually the way you start
is you get a code base, and it doesn't compile
on the latest compiler. So you're forced to go
through and it's like, okay, let's make this compile
in the first place. So a lot of it turns into like here's
a function to make that compile and actually be able to run. There was
a decent chunk of work involved. So you insert kind of like a break point
at the top. If that code ever gets hit, it basically like fails and crashes. And so you kind of stop out a
bunch of stuff as you go through. And eventually when you get to the
point where the game finally compiles, so you can hit run, then it's like, okay,
what's the first thing that crashes? Right? And then start
fixing things along the way. That's another method where you
kind of go through and like, make sure you don't do redundant
work as much as possible. Obviously the original code base is Japanese. So is the original development team.
So when you were saying like, here's a dump of design documents,
none of us can read them. So there's actually a not, not insignificant effort involved in
actually translating when we've got high-level flags. It's like, this
is an interesting design document. There might be something
useful in here for us, right? Sony went through and
actually had this all translated. So we'd get these gigantic translated
documents back to then try to make some use of. But It was kind of,
it was kind of sad, right? 'Cause you look at them and you're
like, this might be interesting. And then some poor guy has to go
through and translate the whole thing. And then in the end it may turn out like, oh,
this was an outdated document. You just never know. PETER: Once we get that initial code base and
we start getting everything to compile and run, like the very first step that
we do is we get the original art assets, you know, converted maybe to our
formats, all of the original data, we get the game up and running. And then we do parity tests with
the game compared to the PS3. So we'll have our QA department
playing our version of the game on our target console. And then we'll have QA also playing on
the PS3, and recording videos, and doing side-by-side playthroughs, and
verifying that everything's the same. That's where we go through
and we find out that, oh yeah, that assumption that we made about the
data when we converted the data to our formats, and we were like, I
don't think this is really used, or we think it's being used in this way. And then you get over to the game
and you're like, you know what, nobody can climb ladders. Somebody
needs to go find the ladder code. Where's the ladder code,
right? Or, you know, bosses won't die correctly, or they don't
disappear, or fog doors don't open. Who knows, right? There's always, there's always something.
We go through and we play, and we basically, we spend a good couple
of months just making sure that we have parity with the original game. Then start looking at what systems
does the original game have, what systems do we want to pull over into the Bluepoint
side and completely replace. It's really just looking at it from a
quality perspective and saying what pieces really need to be done. Like in Demon's Souls, we knew that animation, like increasing
the fidelity of the animation, adding new animations, adding
omni rolling, you know, increasing the bow aiming, like
animation was going to be huge. So we knew that whatever we
did with our animation system, we needed that to be on the Bluepoint side.
You know, that was a no-brainer. Other things like what does
the boss AI look like? That's very ingrained into the
Demon's Souls side of the code base. So for that perspective, it's like,
well, let's leave it over there. But even every system that we leave over there, we're tweaking, and fixing, and
modifying, and enhancing, and going over there to make the appropriate changes
as we go through the game. It's really this fluid thing of
what system needs to be improved, how do we improve it? And
then at the same time, our QA staff is so diligent about
playing through the PS3 and our version the entire time and saying, "this
isn't working right. You broke this. And I don't think that's intentional." GAVIN: The guys are working so hard
around the world to get the game done. And there are bugs, and you're
trying to get everything fixed. And, you know, people want to
do the best they can, and put out the best product they can and that.
But in the back of your head, there's, well, there's a drop dead deadline,
and we're all up against it. And when that date comes, we all
have to down tools basically and say, we've done what we can. And it makes
you second guess yourself all the time, which is the worst thing you can do, right?
Because you're trying to please everyone. And what you need to do is please
the game, right? For instance, how do we incorporate the
haptics into the game, right? And you're making a new game, that's easy
because you can write features and put that in the game. But this, we have to try and implement it in a
way that it would complement the game, and it wouldn't detract from the game.
Evaluating every step to make sure you weren't harming what is a PlayStation
classic and making sure that you're complementing the classics instead. [SLICE] [GROAN] [WOOSH] [GRUNT] DANNY: Talking about this game provides us
with a terrific opportunity to show design changes across the board, from art to
audio, animation to user experience. To make all of this happen, Bluepoint worked with a global team of
Sony's partner studios over the course of a number of years, but all
stories have their first chapter. Just like the game, the work on
Demon's Souls remake started with the first area that the game serves you up,
a level designed to teach you how the game works. It gives players their first challenge
and it provides an epic first impression of the world of Demon's Souls. PETER: Boletaria Palace is the first area
of the game that you're exposed to. So it's also naturally, it's the first
area that we really, really focused on. It's the area of the game that we really
used to sort of set the visual quality. All five regions have very different
looks, and they have very different atmospheres, and so on. But Boletaria
Palace was really where we pushed to say, what is the quality bar for a PS5 title? What does a next generation
title really look like? And that is the area that we spent the
most amount of time looking at from all of our various systems to, you know, what does fog, and lighting, and
tessellation, and everything else in our post effects and everything
look like in these levels too. It's got tight corridors. So it's like, how does
the camera behave in these areas? You know, how does the character, and how is
the interactions with the dredglings and that sort of combat? If there's one character that's been killed more
than anybody else in the entire game during the dev cycle, it's the dredglings
that are on that first bridge section. The other thing is we knew that it was
going to be a first impression piece, even going to, you know, we have
conversations about the intro dragon, and how the dragon comes in and swoops down.
And we've made modifications from the original, slight modifications to make it
work a little bit better for us. You know, I really wanted that thing to
be a standout piece to adding footprints in the ground where
the dragon left his imprints that weren't there in the
original, but they're little puddles that you can see. And they're
sort of this reminder, every time you go up the staircase
that, oh, yes, this is where the, where I first encountered my first dragon. That's really an area that I
think we spent more time in than, than anywhere else. MARCO: Definitely had a lot of unique challenges. Like the fire of the dragons, that went
through several iterations until its final version. It was also the most complex of the level
when it came to the number of AISsand just sheer number of stuff. So
it was also like it was the same. The studio was always, if this
level runs at performance, everything else will be a piece of cake. Sight lines was definitely a thing.
It was a sheer production effort too, because you can pretty much see across
all three sections of the whole world from the very beginning.
And if you're at the very end, you can look back and pretty
much see the whole level again. So until you build the final version of
that next level, you can't really build like the low poly imposter version of it. So it was also one of the last levels
to essentially complete fully because it needed all of the sections from the very
beginning all the way to the very end. And the art style, like showed changes. In the
very beginning, it's all primitive looking art, you know, the stones are like more
crumbly, more destroyed, you know, there's more battles on the outer walls
of the, of the whole palace complex. And then as it goes in, it
goes into like more fancy areas. The architecture changes. So there's a lot of also like manpower
involved in creating all those assets. And again, it wasn't until like basically
everything was built at high poly that we could then really focus on,
okay, now let's build the efficient versions to actually get the final sanity check. Is this all going to run at performance?
And luckily it did. GAVIN: I think what's really interesting
about the, well, Boletaria in general is the art change from the original
to the PlayStation 5 version, and taking it from a kind of
Roman neoclassic squared off look, British kind of castle to a much more,
not Gothic, but leaning towards a Gothic style. And that was something that I definitely
endorsed and something that I love that Mark Skelton, the art director, wanted
to push. And I think it worked out really well. And the reason that I was okay with that
is that I think gaming trends change. Games change, and what we like changes.
And that's true to art styles too, and art looks as well. And moving it
in that direction meant that it gave the artists a lot more freedom to
create this much more realistic world, you know, on the PlayStation 5, where you
felt that, you know, as Marco said, there was a change from the
outer walls of the castle. As you move through all the way up to the
king's palace, how more decorative it got, how they started to change from using
just roughly cut rocks and wood to much more innately carved pieces of metal, ornate
stuff that would have been extremely expensive put into the design. So I think both areas are
really standout pieces. Well thought out storytelling, you know,
as a director, it's like, oh yeah, I can see myself moving through
this world. It's telling a story. And that was one of the things that we
always talked about was everything in these levels had to tell a story.
Every room had to tell a story. It had to have a meaning. What did
they do there before the fog came? And what happened when the fog came? And I think Boletaria tells
that story really well. DANNY: Remaking a beloved game is a
pretty delicate and complex operation. So for the sake of simplicity, let's
break this down into three sections. Technical changes, gameplay
changes. and artistic changes. Obviously there are a lot of things
that need to be done technically to have Demon's Souls feel like a game made in 2020.
From cutscenes to animation, sound design, graphics, and a million
other things we don't even think of. From a gameplay perspective,
Bluepoint had over a decade of players playing the game to learn from. So were there aspects of the original
games that didn't quite click, or are there ways to surface some of the game's
more obscure mechanisms? And lastly, how about artistic innovations?
Games looked a lot different in 2009. So Bluepoint were tasked with
interpreting much of the work done by FromSoftware, from changing the way
areas look to adding new details, such as the ghostly wisps that show
the human form of Boletaria's fallen demons. So let's explore some of those changes,
where Bluepoint felt they got it right, and where the community
think they got it wrong. GAVIN: After the great work that the guys
had done on Shadow of the Colossus, which is heavily Japanese
game style and gameplay, in the way the story is told, I
think we at Japan Studio felt that the guys were ready to tackle something, which is just, even though the world
is Western, the way the game plays and the story is told is very, very
Japanese and very, very subtly told. That was another reason, not only
their ability and their technical prowess, but also that we knew we could trust
them with something so delicate. So adding something like
those figures above the bosses, we were fine with that because the lore
states that each one of those bosses was a hero of King Allant, who had,
then that's what they'd become. And so as you freed them, you saw they'd
have real form for a split second before they were dispersed, so to speak.
So that sort of subtlety, I think adds to the lore and it adds to the story.
Because the story was already there, we're just doing it visually. We're not writing
anything new into the world at all. We're just visually showing, oh yeah,
okay. That's a reminder that that creature was once a knight
of the king, for instance. MARCO: So yeah, at the beginning
of the project, we look just like, we are fans ourselves of the game, right.
We have our perspective for like, oh, here's the things that annoyed us,
you know, like 4-way rolling was one
of those things for sure, right. [SPIDER SCREECHING] We do, like at the beginning of the game,
we get started on a project. We scope everything. We get, scour all
the content that's available on the internet. You know, we watch playthrough
videos from people. We read every single Demon's Souls wiki
there is out there from beginning to end. We look through forums, you know,
discussions, Reddit, et cetera, et cetera. We gather everything there is, all
the complaints. We discuss it. And then we have our design talent
look at it also from their perspective, from their experience of like, okay,
what are valid concerns? What are people, you know, just challenges in the game,
you know, that you have to deal with? But there's a lot of subtle
stuff, you know, we kind of tweaked. We very slightly changed some of the pickup
drop rates right before Phalanx, for example, to make it easier because we realized
from looking at trophy stats that a lot of people stopped playing the game before ever
beating Phalanx. And to us, it kind of felt where it's like once
people actually defeat their first true boss, the game really starts to
click, and you kind of start to get what it's like to actually do something,
have a challenge, and overcome it. Right? And so we kind of
made some subtle tweaks, even in the beginning
before Phalanx, you know, increased the drop rates of some fire
pickups to give more people a chance. Like looking at trophy stats now it kind of
shows a lot more people are making it past Phalanx. [MUSIC PLAYING] [FIREBALL EXPLODING] I think that's probably the kind of insight
that people didn't have back in the day, you know, looking at what
are trophy unlock stats. And obviously we have the
benefit of hindsight, right? We get to look at how did players
play the game in the past. What can we improve? There's
always a difference of what do, how do players perceive the game and how
did the developer intend the game to be perceived, right? You
can't just always go the, to the developer of the game and say,
how did you mean to do this originally? What was your intent?
Because at some point, especially when you have
technical limitations in the way, it's not really at all what the developer
meant to do, it's all about, oh, what did I think it means, right? And Demon's Souls very specifically
is a very ambiguous game. It leaves a lot for you to figure out. World tendencies, character tendencies,
just to name a couple, like those are techniques that are not explained. And it's
kind of a challenge for people to figure out. And there was a Wiki for you to look up
how it works. So we did things to try to kind of make the game more
approachable for people by like putting extra UI in to like teach
you about world tendencies and how it affects things or having, having the
archstones themselves, you know, the shards change to kind of indicate are you,
is the world dark leaning or light leaning, you know, stuff like that, so.
The lore is so great in this game. It deserves to be like made more visible
to the point where people get more intrigued and want to find out more about it. PETER: As I played through Demon's Souls my
very first time, I did much more of a, you know, a melee type build. You know,
3/4 of the way through the game, I started to figure it out what magic was. And I got my first caster and, you know,
but I didn't know how to use my magic. I couldn't figure out how to use
magic, and so I had to go to the Wiki. And as great as that is, in that game
when I played it on the PS3, yeah, I referenced the Wiki a lot. But we started
looking at it and it's like these days, like how much do we actually want the
user to go to the Wiki? And it's like, well, really never. We really don't
want them to go to the Wiki. Take for example, vaulting, you know,
that we knew that it's like, this is a mechanic that's in the game
that unless you accidentally stumble across it, you will never know about it.
We changed the game up slightly. So in the tutorial section, right as you're
jumping off the bridge for the very first time, you know, five minutes, less than five
minutes into the game, you run across one of your first messages on the ground.
You bring that up, that allows you to then hit this little button that goes to
show you a help video page to start introducing you to it, where you see a guy
going, pressing the right button combinations to vault over the wall. If we could teach or expose these
scenes to the player in a way that feels very natural within the game,
we could hopefully reduce frustration or basically eliminate the issues of where players
can get through the whole game. And then they get to the end. They're like,
I didn't even know you could do that. I didn't even, I never figured out how to
cast magic, so I just avoided that. And it's like, no no, that shouldn't be a thing.
As we went through it, we decided, well, we could add a help page, you know,
to the end in inside of our menu system. But the great thing about it is I
feel like it complements the game. It doesn't change lore.
It doesn't change difficulty. It doesn't change the aspects of the
game. It's just exposing information that's available everywhere else. And we
did the same sort of thing with like, with the PlayStation systems, with
their UDS systems and activities, and being able to go to certain
sections and then see help videos. Like if you're having a hard time, right,
you can go to the UDS activity system. Now at the same time, we
never spell it out directly. But if you watch the way that
the combat is approached, you can then apply that to
yourself. And so they're just, they're little things that we
found when we played it initially, of I wish that would have
been a little more clear. I wish I wouldn't have
been frustrated with that. I wish it would have been a
little bit simpler for me. And I feel like those are just like little
keys or little touches that we could put on the game to make it clear. GAVIN: Yeah, I was present for every mocap
shoot with Bluepoint's, animation director, Chris Torres. And it was, I've done a lot
of mocap in my time, all the way going back to late nineties when
I was working on The Getaway in London. So I've done mocap ever since then.
And I love it. I started as an animator. I love directing mocap actors, but this is
actually one of the hardest things we've ever done on the game, because
what we had to do is match the cadence of the original animation. So I mean the walk speeds, and the run cycles,
and the attacks, and everything had to be exactly the same. They didn't have to
look the same, but they had to feel the same. So that's where it comes back, where we spent
day after day after day beating up poor Eric Jacobus, the motion capture actor, to get him
to basically get into the right set. And he didn't have to do just one walk cycle. He had to do over 30 different walk
cycles because we have 30 different types of weapons that had
to be done, right? Or that, and there's runs, and turns, and
everything that you can imagine. It's took us the whole day just to do one move set. And then by the end of it, we were
getting that down to about 17, 18 minutes we could do a move set properly. And we would,
we could look at it, and we would know, off the top of our hat. We decided very early on that we
wanted to not only do the male capture, we wanted to make sure that the female
characters had motion capture as well. So we could do the whole female
character motion capture set as well with Maggie Macdonald, who was also amazing.
I think it took about year and a half. I mean, weren't in the studio for a year
and a half, but we were obviously going backwards and forwards for
about a year and a half, and capturing, and getting it into
the game, and testing and checking. MARCO: We've had countless new idle
animations for enemies as well, which are all new mocap animations. So like,
mocap was not just limited to the player. You have, like the character idle
cycles, like 20, 30 seconds. And it's just like, it all needs sound. Et cetera,
et cetera. But it just adds to the life, right? Because now you have all these characters,
instead of there's just them in standing in a fixed idle pose, just waiting for the
player to get to close, it would actually give them a chance to like tell a
story again, in the world, right? GAVIN: In the studio we actually got
five actors in at the same time. And so they would do all those idle
animations at the same time, and we would say, oh, you know, you're really bored. And let's say you'd get five animations
at one take of five different actors. [SWORDS CLANGING] [GRUNTING] [OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING] PETER: As we went through the game,
we picked several pillars that we wanted to be really stand out. And in
Flamelurker, like the intro, the fight, that whole experience we knew we
wanted that one to be top notch. And you know, it's a difficult thing 'cause
at the same time, like you take the Flamelurker, you take the model. And you look
at the original PS3 model and there's details there, but there's
a lot of not details there. And so when you look at it on the PS3
I feel like your eye, you know, naturally makes up. You look at
something, you see some shading, you see some light, you see some things, and then your eye
sort of feels in the details and so on. But when you actually get up to the
model, it's just not there, you know? It's like you want to see something
better than what it really is. And so when we start working on
those models, it's like, well, what are they trying to do here? I don't know. Maybe you can look at some of
their past concepts that they did. But then to earlier points, like that
doesn't even mean that concept was in line with what they actually ended up
delivering in the end. You know, we went through and we looked at
the model, we looked at what it needed to do in the level, how it
needed to behave, and came up with what we felt like here's a great
interpretation. It might not be triangle for triangle accurate to what
the original was. 'Cause that's not what we're trying to do. And at the end you
just kind of got to let go and say, I think this is the best thing for the
game. And in the end, you know, it got released in some of our
early trailers. And part of it was, we knew we wanted this to be
this really cool experience. And it shows really, really well.
And so it makes it into trailers. And then as you've most likely
seen, like the fan base reacted, where's the patch on his eye,
you forgot the patch on his eye. Half our staff starts going through
and saying, where's the patch. We got to get the patch. Everybody
needs the patch back on the eye. And we're looking at, it was like, whoa whoa whoa,
we need to think about this for a minute. Why did we do this? And sometimes
you got to stand by what you're doing in order to create something that's great.
If you're always wish-washy and going every what direction, you're never
gonna make anything that anybody cares about. We went back, we looked at it more closely and
we decided, yes, the best thing to do is put the patch back on the eye. So we put the patch back on the eye and
brought it more in line with what the original was, which in the end, I think was a great decision to
put the patch back on the eye. It helped tells the story a little bit better.
It also ties in closer with the blacksmith that's also in Stonefang. And so in
the end, that was the right decision. But at that point was the kicking off moment
of let's go look at every single character in the game, which was a multi-day
task of key people sitting down, looking at every single character down
to their feet to make sure, you know, that everything is, we're not
missing anything lore-wise, we didn't accidentally overlook an aspect
that maybe is more important than we thought, or we didn't overemphasize
something that was in the original, but now we made it too transparent
and it's not, you know, you don't have to infer it enough. DANNY: Flamelurker is just one of dozens of
enemies that the team at Bluepoint were responsible for redesigning. And while
the art is a critical element of this, there is so much more work going
on to make this game feel modern. Things like physics, modern visual effects, redesigning and implementing 3D
audio, even having camera fields. So how did Bluepoint tackle these changes,
the elements that made the game feel new, even if we didn't even
realize they were changed? How about we start with the
first boss you encounter? MARCO: Right, so the art style itself
is obviously a bit more realistic, trying to be more realistic. So, when you
have a Vanguard, who's kind of designed to be a little funny, comical, right? He's got
like these tiny, tiny wings, and then one of his attacks like floats mid-air
and looks like a stomp, right? So it's like, you know like a lot of this
stuff's kind of tongue in cheek. So, but at the same time, if you do it
as is in a realistic looking environment, it's going to feel a little out of place. So you have to make some slight changes.
Right. And it's like, yes, Vanguard, obviously you're never going to
be able to sell somebody that big, that chubby looking,
lifting off with tiny wings. So really you can't even sell it
with the wings being slightly bigger like we made them, but
at least we're trying to like, let's have it be a, make a bit
more sense, make him bigger. And yeah, we did the same thing
on the dragons actually, which originally the wings were much
smaller and we made much larger to help sell visually. So you don't have that subconscious
thing in the back of your head where it's like, something feels off here, you know?
It just makes it feel more realistic. PETER: I think the bosses, a lot of them,
like especially the Vanguard, really benefited from the extra things
that we can do with physics these days, from the chains to, you know, I don't
know what the thing on the side is, his extra nipple or whatever that sort of
dangles. And, you know, it's just, it adds a bit of realism or it makes
him feel like he's connected to the environment. GAVIN: We went through Maneater as well,
and Maiden in Black and the blacksmiths. And I remember that I got an
image board one morning. I went into the office in Tokyo and
there's some image, you know, Gavin, please check out these image boards. And the blacksmiths were like
really bumped up. And I'm like, no, that's not going to happen. They
look great. I mean, they looked amazing, beautiful artwork, but
that's not going to happen. And I hope we did a good job and most people are happy out there
with the way that we did it. Because we don't want to disrespect the
game in any way or disrespect fans in any way, because we're big
fans of the games ourselves. I think one of the best decisions
ever was the Armored Spider, where the explosive gas attack
got turned into the oil attack. And it just rushed up the corridor at you,
and it pushed you all the way back. Now, visually it's stunning, but gameplay
wise, it's a great twist because then, now you have to fight all your way back
down that corridor again, you know, before you can actually do any damage
to that thing. That's a great twist for me. The other things that I really enjoy in
the game are all the things that were added that players are supposed
to find themselves. You know, Peter talked about the dragon
footprint on the bridge. I love that lightning bolt that hits the tree
as you run through the doorway and stuff. They're little touches like that. Things that we talked about specifically
about, you know, when you do a remake, it's not what the player actually played.
It's how they remembered the game. And you're always trying to build the
game to their expectations. And their memories of the game are far better
than the game ever was because it all becomes this amazing world inside
your head. It's like reading a book, basically. Over time, it becomes this realistic thing. So those changes really helped to pay
homage to those memories that people have, even though they never existed in the original. PETER: I think one of the things that I'm most
proud about is just the little touches of details. Going to, you know, the destructibles
and then being able to burn them. Being able to take a dead
body and push it into the fire. And then that body then catches on fire. And then if it gets pushed out of
the fire, it's blackened by the fire. You know, and it's just those
little touches that like, sort of they're like these little feedback loops
that basically keep you ingrained in the world. Simple things like adding head tracking
on the player and on the enemy AI that as the player, if, if he's
standing there idle and you know, there's an enemy walking next to him,
he'll look over at the enemy. Where in a lot of games or
even in the original, you know, you would just stare straight
forward in the direction that you're going, but it's like, there's this guy over here that's going
to attack you or is coming up on you. Maybe you should look over
there and pay attention. But it's just a lot of those little tiny
touches and attention to detail that I think really make a difference. [WOOD BREAKING] One of the things that I thought we did
really good job with was our footstep detection. You know, you'd be able
to detect that you stepped in a puddle in one spot, and then it leaves a wet
footprint. These little things that basically connects you as a gamer to the player
that you're playing. That then connects you to the world that you're in. [FOOTSTEPS] [CHAINS JANGLING] MARCO: Really, at the end of the day,
we essentially reimplemented every single bit of audio in the game.
All the sound effects were completely redone by Sony, right? They recorded new foley,
did new sound effects, new treatments. There's some amazing tech that went into
the game where we have set up individual areas in the game with connecting portals.
And each those areas in the game, whether you're in a tunnel or a big, giant open
outdoor space, or a cavern, or a palace room, they each have their own individual
impulse reverbs associated with it. And so then it ran path simulation of
what is the path the audio travels from its original source through which rooms,
through which doors, to your ear. And then it applied the right amounts of
reverbs to each, and it did the right amount of focusing. And yeah, it
takes all of that with the amazing power of the PlayStation,
right? Of like just what you can do. Like there's hundreds of streams going on.
'Cause you can also support those streams using the super fast hard drive. So it
doesn't really become any more like all the audio has to be loaded in memory at one time.
You can just stream it all directly off the disk. And I mean, you get gigabytes
of throughput from that disc, right? GAVIN: Yeah, I think there's two things going
on there with the sound in this game, which are incredible, right? The original
creators made an amazing decision, which was that there's no music in the
game until you get to the boss fights. And the reason for that is, is that it's
supposed to be a world of despair and loss. And music is your friend.
It drives your emotions, right? So it can bolster you and
make you feel more heroic. And you're not supposed to be a hero
here. So as you run through the game, the only sound that you have is
of this horrific world around you. And then when you
walk into those
boss battles, suddenly the music comes in, and it becomes like a friend on
your shoulder to bolster you. Because those boss battles
are difficult. They're hard. [MUSIC PLAYING] And the other one is I sat down and went
through every single part of that game with the sound director and said, right,
this is how I want the player to feel at this point. If I walk up to this door, right, in the tutorial
if you walk up to the door on the bridge that you jump off, you can hear Vanguard
growling off in the distance, right? Things like that. Or as I run up
the stairs in the tutorial, I just want to hear a stone fall off
the wall and I can hear it splash way down below it, but I can't see it. And it's all those little things that
we added. And because it's all 3D audio now it's incredibly immersive. And if you've got a pair of headphones
on just plugged into your controller, it's an incredible soundscape around you. And it was an amazing effort by the
sound guys to create the huge list we were writing. And it really adds to the world. The visual look is incredible on the
PlayStation 5, but the sound also is absolutely amazing. MARCO: And actually to Gavin's point, they've had very much responsibility for
the feel of the game because the audio guys are also the guys that design the
waveforms that control the vibrations of the controller. All that haptics waveforms were created
by the audio team in conjunction with the actual sound effects. So the vibrations would match perfectly
to the sound effects that were tweaked directly for that purpose. So, yeah,
they were very much in control too, of like, what does it feel
like when I do a magic attack, the charging up, the vibration, the
condensed place as you charge up that, that cast magic, right? That was all designed by the audio guys
in conjunction with the actual sound effects. PETER: I would say, obviously we started the game
with the original Demon's Souls camera, and one of the things that, you know,
looking at the original camera. Issues that we had was framing, which
really that's all the camera does, right, is it frames the picture. And so it's,
can you see what you need to see? Do you see what you want to see, or do you find that you're constantly
trying to move the stick to adjust it because it's not quite getting what
you want? And so, you know, we made a conscious decision to bring
the camera slightly lower than the original. And a lot of that was
because as you're running, like, just take that front
bridge of Boletaria, right? As you're running up that
first staircase and such, you want to be able to see the Dredglings
that you're running up upon, and being able to see what's coming at,
you and what's going on, and to take the battle scene in. And so we felt like lowering the
camera a little bit was a good call. And I feel like in the end it allows
you to see what's going on, and it plays better on the PS5
that way. And so from that, like we spent a lot of time actually
working on the camera system to enhancing it to, you know, in boss battles,
looking at our lock on points. You know, what are we framing?
How are we framing it? And then what do our transitions, like
do we have smooth transitions from, you know, say our lock camera to
our free roam camera, to, you know, as you're running around the level, is it correctly moving around
corners and around, you know, all the wood posts that
were within the level? There was a lot of attention put into
the camera just to clean it up. And cameras are tricky.
They're always very tricky. And part of it is what we always say,
you know, on the engineering side is if nobody talks about your
camera, you did a good job. If people talk about your camera, they've always got something
negative to say. In the end, we feel like if nobody talks about it,
then we're doing, we're doing okay. Latria is a great example. And I think just
that early stages in the jail cells. Like, there's always this thing of,
I believe in the original design you're supposed to wander around. It's not
supposed to be clear exactly where to go. But there are, you know, lighting keys or other
things that are done within the environment to sort of give very subtle type hints. Or to the keys on the walls that give off
a little bit of a glint to give you an idea of where to go. I think one of
the changes that we made in that area as well is we noticed as the player runs up
and down the walkways next to the jail cells, some of the architecture would sort
of protrude out. It would cause you as a player, you'd be running through, and
your player capsule would slide to the side to run through it. And so every time you'd run up
and down it, you'd be like, this is a little bit jarring,
doesn't feel quite right. And so we pulled a little bit of that
architecture back just a little bit, but also being very mindful of sometimes those are used for the Mind
Flayers in order to ensure that you have cover from, you know, their
projectile attacks and such. And so it's this delicate balance of
opening up the space a little bit so that the player can navigate and so the
camera doesn't have as many problems moving through the environment.
And in the end with the whole goal of can we make it feel a little more
fluid without changing the original. DANNY: Bluepoint worked with a global team
of Sony partners to create this modern version of Demon's Souls. Studios around
the world that specialized in motion capture, audio recording, texture
creation, music composition, and more. But while much of the work was outsourced, the team at Bluepoint in Austin did
all of the project conception, style decisions, level design, lighting, and more. A large reason their modest team was
able to achieve all this was by using technology and tools to
help do the work for them, mechanisms of design that weren't available
to FromSoftware when they made the original back in 2009, and technical
limitations of the console hardware of the time that may have forced them
to make certain design decisions. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARCO: Altogether local at the studio,
we were at the peak, I don't know, like, I want to say we're somewhere between
70 and 90 people, in that range. It was just going up and down. Yeah.
The staff works smart. I can give some specific examples here. We use a lot of
Houdini stuff to accelerate building. So we have amazing tech artists that
build Houdini tools that can automatically break up walls. Like when
we build a brick pattern, we build it in smart enough to support so
that Houdini tools know where the brick, what the brick layer looks like. And so it can
automatically break at the brick boundaries, cut those out and then create realistic
in-between filler between the bricks on the wall. And it's a very dynamic tool. It's allowing the artists to just like,
okay, here's an unbroken wall. Let me create some curves. Right. It breaks it. And then it simulates the collapsing
bricks and then falling down into the tiles. And then we bake that all down into geo. Valley of Defilement. There's another great example where in
the original you couldn't see very far at all. Once you came into the big open
cave section, it was very heavily fogged, you know, technical limitations,
performance issues, you know, it still didn't run that fast,
right, on the original PS3. So you could tell that the content was
really trying to push what was possible at the time. And now, you know,
performance isn't an issue anymore. We could draw everything, and you could
see everything from your starting point, but obviously that goes against the game
design. You're supposed to feel lost in the swamp and make your way
to where you're supposed to go and get led on, right? Now that visibility, how much do
you show, get the right hints so it never feels like we're cutting corners. Like let's drop that stuff in
the distance, right. But again, it's also a huge area. So there's a perfect example of
where we're working really smart. Our tech artists actually wrote tools
that looked at all the original architecture, which was basically boards, planks, right?
But a lot of it was texture detail. And so we wrote Houdini tools that
actually took that geo, analyzed it to figure out how the patterns
and the flow of the planks worked, and then it placed real 3D objects,
high-res planks that we created automatically as a starting point. So basically tech art did a
first pass on the whole level. And then just art then came in after the
fact and just kept addressing it and updating it, just addressing it. That's kind of an explanation I think
why we're able to do so much with so little, it's just because
we don't work hard, we work smart. And that brings
lots of other benefits, right? Like the whole team can sit together
and watch a playthrough of the game and talk about it. You don't have like 300,
400 hundred people studios where half the team is like do off something else
on a different time zone and doesn't know what's going on in the game, you know? GAVIN: I just think the overall whole storytelling,
you know, through the environment, through the sound is absolutely incredible.
Creating that first level that you enter and you can see how everything's
been washed down, you know, in a massive flood down into the valley.
And you've got trees and netting, and then, you know, the enemies take
that and build them into their houses. And there's barnacles growing over everything.
It's wet, and you can see the water and the insects. And it's like, yeah,
this is a Valley of Defilement. I get that. Right? And it's a great thing. I think one of the things
that we haven't touched on, which is really quite cool, is like
I think the character creator. MARCO: On the human side, we started with
facial scans. So both females and males we scanned. Then we broke faces down into
individual parts. We had a full FACs shape set that we scanned in and got the motion
capture for. We built a system on top that then re-targeted all that blend
shape data for all the different FACs shape so we could actually have one set of
these FACs shapes we recorded. And we applied them to all the enemies,
including Dredglings, soldiers, right? So even some that aren't quite as human, like a Dredgling, their facial animation
is actually driven by the exact same system that the player's facial
animation system is driven by. And so phoneme base, you know,
drives the FAC shapes. Animators going in and keying it all out,
creating little animation clips we can play for like sound cues for like
getting hit, attacks, you know, dying sounds. Writing good take ones, and then just
reusing it wherever you can, or like, oh, let's do this for the players. Well if the players can have amazing blend
shapes, the hardware is powerful enough we can have every single enemy have
blend shapes, just like we can have every single enemy have cloth simulation
on their garments, right? Or just the hanging drapes
or anything that they have, or other physics animation for like
chains hanging or ropes hanging, or you name it. Right? Or like little
armor pieces that move around. That can all just be real physics these days. And it just creates that secondary motion
that you wouldn't be able to easily get out of animation because when an
animation blends through that animation, you get that follow through
motion from those dynamic things. I'm actually in the game. I did the facial motion capture
for that official in Boletaria. So in the cutscenes, that's me
smirking, which to the animators' great credit, they managed
to hide all my imperfections. So you can't recognize me. It's perfect. DANNY: Bluepoint Games' remake of
Demon's Souls is a fascinating piece of work, as much an artistic
achievement as a technical one. Perhaps it's even more impressive
that this was a console launch title finished during a pandemic, a point
at which they were already mourning the tragic passing of their friend and
Bluepoint co-founder Andy O'Neil, an Englishman who moved to Austin
in the 1990s to work on some terrific titles as technical lead at Retro Studios. A remarkably talented engineer who
was instrumental in propelling this once two person operation to the lofty
heights they find themselves at today. In Demon's Souls, Bluepoint Games have
achieved something pretty remarkable, recreating a beloved PlayStation
classic in a way that fans of that game and that series can really appreciate
and opening the door for new players to have their first taste of FromSoftware's
Soulsborne action. Making video games is really
difficult, but just like that feeling of finally defeating Maneater, for Bluepoint at
least, the struggle was worth it in the end. - I have one thing to say. Thank you to
all the fans. You guys keep us going. Just, just to add to a lot of
Gavin's earlier response, according to like the challenge
of making a launch game, right. I think a challenge, I think of it in a
positive way, for sure. Right? Being able to be a launch
title on the PS5, you know, being the team that delivers a genre
defining title on the new console and having that power, right? Being able
to like, oh, you have a game that instantly loads. It shows off all the
features of the hardware, right? PETER: I think as a studio, being a launch title,
like the minute that became an option from Bluepoint's perspective, it was,
yes, we want to be the launch title. We want to be right there that
opening day, because you know, it was one of those highly
anticipated titles. It was difficult. There were struggles, especially
with COVID, but I wouldn't change it.
Not often scared in horror movies but the scenes, 3D audio and haunting environmental design of some levels in Demon Souls had my heart and focus racing
I think everyone that come up with the "just remake X game, it's easy" or that "why do they remake games, just make new ones, remaking games is lazy" should really watch this. Remarkable work not only from Bluepoint but the partner studios that helped in the process.
Ohhh I've been waiting for this to come out for awhile now. Awesome!
I played the original on ps3 when it came out and replayed this PS5 remake. I did not play any other Soulsborne titles and decided to catch up with Dark Souls remastered and it really shows it’s age while the remake was a real pleasure to play through. My advice is to get it unless you know the original by heart :)
My favorite PS5 game so far
Absolutely adore this remake.
Absolutely breathtaking game.
I’ll have to watch this. Just beat Phalanx and loving this game.
If anyone is curious, Danny is currently doing a play through of this with Tamoor over on Giantbomb. It’s been pretty funny content so far (they’re 2 episodes in). I’m pretty sure it is part of their paid premium content though so you’ll need to fork over a few bucks to enjoy it.
Edit: Danny O’dwyer who is the creator of NoClip documentaries.
Edit 2: Episode 1 is free. Any subsequent episodes after that require a premium subscription.