Demon's Souls - What Happened?

[Music] hello and welcome good friends to another chapter in the endlessly swirling cosmic ballet that is what happened the dusty old tome that makes you question the frayed edges of your own sanity as you struggle to piece together the shattered memories of video games both big and small embarrassing and bold finished and unfinished so steal your nerves and hold to the last four stages of your gallantry because we're about to enter a world that was fraught with so many perils and setbacks that it should never have existed at all there was that good okay that's that's good alright so when do I get paid you get it after you leave are you [ __ ] are you I guess I'm leaving then I [ __ ] yes as the dulcet tones of Vaati forewarned you on this episode of what happened we are taking a look at a particular video game that by all rights should never have even come out let alone become such an enormous success that it spawned its own sub-genre this is of course the story of From Software's 2009 classic ninja blade which has since influenced pretty much every facet of game design from difficulty to combat Who am I kidding it's demon souls in the mid 2000s from software was basically a nonentity on the worldwide video game stage yes the armored Corps series was certainly a thing but it was one of the many mech franchises they were stomping around at that time unlike the zero that we have today unfortunately much of from softs other output such as Kingsfield or echo night were unknown when it came to the mainstream unless it had a bright red aged tech logo on the box smartly though they were pretty frugal when it came to developing these niche titles so they just needed to sell the bare minimum to keep the lights on as the Xbox GameCube and ps2 were heating up from software decided to really start swinging for the fences to see what would stick which is usually a strategy that never sticks horror games JRPGs card-based JRPGs more mechs action titles tension and even some political commentary Michael if you can name it they were attempting to make a game out of it in 2005 however the company was rocked by the sudden and aggressive appearance of a man named heeda Takamiya Zakir who shook the company by the shoulders and shouted what are you doing and started directing all of their games taking them from the bottom to the top and a whirling dervish of skyrocketing profits as money came raining down on top of their success boners which is of course a massive lie as the real story is far more mundane Miyazaki quit his job as an account manager at the tender age of 30 and suddenly decided to switch professions after he played team ICO's ICO while he had always been interested in gaming this was the revelatory experience that spurred him to pursue a career in the industry he interviewed was hired and quietly began work on Armored Core last raven as a planner and excelled enough in the position that he was promoted to director on the next game in the mechs series this is where the protagonist and the antagonist of the story first appear cuz they're one in the same as the industry was barreling towards the many closures and ballooning budgets of the 7th generation Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series was rapidly gaining in popularity especially the hype forth and forthcoming game oblivion Sony of Japan wanted a piece of that first-person questing horse armor PI contacted from software and requested a title in the same vein especially since the Xbox 360 would have exclusive console rights for a full year originally the idea was to make a new entry in the Kingsfield series to be able to compete with oblivia oh wait you serious let me laugh even harder ludicrous idea at the time but that was the initial plan and it had been a hot minute since From Software had even touched a dark medieval fantasy title with the last one be in the Japan exclusive shadow tower abyss back in 2003 on the ps2 now just as this new project was starting to kick off or kicked down in this case Miyazaki was in the middle of directing his 2nd armored Corps for answer when he first caught wind of this new fantasy project that had been greenlit elsewhere in the bowels of the from soft dungeons it's been reported that he would regularly stock the hallways of the company was a smell is blood and demanded to be put on the title the realities of game development though came crashing down as he was indeed too busy with armoured Corps and there wasn't really an opportunity to insert himself into this elderscrolls killer since it was going smoothly that is until it wasn't very very quickly the whole thing started to fall apart very very a lot from softs a company that made metal wolf chaos was now tasked with making a massive first-person open-world RPG on brand new hardware and that was bad enough but when you consider that the hardware was the ps3 a console that even Sony struggled to get a handle on for the first few years well then things were bound to go off the rails the team was struggling to make just about anything work has just the prototyping phase languished for a year or two until a very nearly got canceled when the original director was pulled off the project and that's when Miyazaki saw his opportunity to strike Demon Souls was not going well the project had issues and the team had been unable to make a compelling prototype but when I learned that it was a fantasy action role-playing game I was thrilled I realized if I could find a way to take control of the game I could make it into anything I wanted best of all if my ideas failed nobody would care as it was already considered a failure one of his first ideas was to stop listening to Sony the mandate that the project needed to compete with oblivion was foolish even to the biggest of idiots and since the project was viewed as the black sheep of a company he took a risk and redesigned the whole thing only keeping the medieval fantasy aesthetic and this was due to Miyazaki being a huge turbo nerd he was and obviously still is a fan of the swords and/or sorcery and the fighting fantasy series of books as a huge inspiration among a massive list of sweeping changes was the switch to a completely different perspective shifting it from first-person which from soft at least had some expertise in what with King's tower and shadow field and opting for third-person instead so it already it couldn't be further from what Sony and from soft had originally agreed upon like if they had tried which which they did try like that's literally what Miyazaki was doing here personally I didn't believe we could compete by taking the same approach as oblivion so I wanted to shift the focus on gameplay elements like combat and exploration I had to do a lot to convince everyone that a third-person perspective was the best way to go when you consider the environment design the object and enemy placement or the back-and-forth action of the combat I knew we couldn't achieve our best unless the camera perspective was fixed I shared a lot of stuff like that and whatever came to my mind to try and convince them now in certain episodes of what happened and when I say certain I mean all of them this is part of the story where the bosses or the publisher the money people tell the game designer how very stupid they are and to simply just do as they were told but because Demon Souls was in such a unique position this kind of sad neglected runt of the litter these radical changes were almost always met with yeah oh yeah okay whatever do what you want we're going to cancel this later we're just too busy to cancel it right now remember from soft had a few other irons in the fire circa 2008 so Demon Souls didn't really have a spotlight being shined on it was just off to the side doing its you know weird [ __ ] and everyone was just happy to ignore it another good way to not get notice is to just straight-up lie to your bosses whenever they needed to give progress reports or presentations to Sony Miyazaki and his team would just so happen to dimensions certain aspects of demon souls what aspects specifically honestly we didn't really mention the difficulty of the game when we did the presentations to Sony we knew that certain members of the publisher would ask us to change it so during the product concept presentation I didn't talk about it much of course I informed our direct producer at Sony but he actually agreed with me he thought that if we were to up front about all the death about this new game concept the marking people would have run a mile so that's why we had to be a bit sneaky about it that's another thing about this dark little fantasy game that could when it was specking during this phase of its development it must have put all of its experience points in the greatest attribute of all luck if the Sony producer who was working day to day with Miyazaki just so happened to not share this view about creating a high but satisfying level difficulty the whole souls like genre might not even be a thing today also and some may not know this the game's punishing nature was actually way more intense during this period as their original intent was to have a permadeath system whereupon once the player would eat [ __ ] it would erase their save file from the ps3 the team eventually decided that this was going a bit too far this is wrong aside from just the difficulty miyazaki crafted just about everything else that makes the souls games souls games interconnected maps shortcuts dropping your experience upon death vague but enthralling lore devious traps and devilish monsters and even incorporated some themes on the company's older titles then with nothing to lose demon souls had its first reveal and public showing at 2008 Tokyo Game Show with the entire team Miyazaki especially now bursting with confidence in their unique vision but just like struggling and fighting to get to the very top of the castles battlements only to be roasted and paled or crushed by an unexpected danger the team was walking into a nasty surprise everybody hated it Takeshi Kaji the Sony producer reflected on this sobering moment for game it was nothing short of a disaster players were initially excited about the concept of a dark fantasy game but they were so critical of the gameplay many people presumed we were still iterating on the combat at that stage and development despite it being nearly finished the truth is that Demon Souls is not well suited to previews particularly at shows you can't possibly understand its approach in five minutes because of the action RPG style people simply expected it to handle in the same way as a mousou when it didn't they were left disappointed this perception was aggravated by the fact that the controls aren't based on any familiar scheme only a handful of players finished the demo some even put the controller down at the character creation screen which was particularly disheartening this is again normally the time in our story where the game gets retooled or a whole new team is brought in or most commonly is just outright cancelled Miyazaki was sure word would come down from Sony that the game needed to be fixed or changed or whatever but in one of those many moments where fate was smiling upon them it was a lucky coincidence that from saath had other projects that were also coming out at this time so they were afforded some creative freedom if Demon Souls failed to sell well the slack would be made up by ninja blade I guess so the game finished up development unhindered and released in Japan exclusively for the ps3 On February 5th 2009 selling approximately three hundred and forty-five thousand copies in its first week which I would be telling you if I were a notable super liar by the name of patches I'm really sorry I didn't mean what I said in reality demon souls wound up barely selling twenty thousand copies in its first seven days and although both from soft and Sony top brass had no faith in the title like zero this was still dreadful even by their conservative estimates so it's like even by looser standards Miyazaki's pet project was a massive smell loser and his own outlook wasn't particularly good during the period when we just completed development the evaluation and sales forecast within from software was not good so I did not even imagine that it would be given another chance to develop a similar game again fortunately though things got even worse if you have the misfortune of your product underperforming in your home country there's always the chance it might find success outside of it the original No More Heroes had its famously horrific Japanese debut that was so bad it made demon souls failure looked like a success but in North America and Europe it wound up selling several hundred thousand copies and went on to see several sequels so there was a hope that maybe it could be appreciated elsewhere that was until Sony worldwide president Shuhei Yoshida played the game and immediately crushed any hope for Sony to release it to the rest of the world his reasoning was as follows I played Demon Souls when it was almost final I spent around 2 hours playing it and after all that time I was still stuck at the beginning of the game I told myself this is crap this is an unbelievably bad game so I stopped and put it aside fortunately however this did not prevent other companies from publishing the game overseas which is precisely what happened since the ps3 was one of the first major region free consoles various youtubers and streamers imported from softs latest and found a punishingly hard but immensely rewarding and mysterious adventure that went compared to the glut of Waypoint and QTE filled games that were flooding the market was a breath of fresh air word of mouth started to spread about a niche Japanese game that dared you to try to play it and balked at the idea of you ever beating it very quickly there was enough groundswell that spurred both Atlas and Namco Bandai to publish the game in both North America and Europe respectively if Sony's loss was their game in a very stark contrast demons would go on to sell over 100,000 copies went to release that October and while some review were still negative everyone agreed it was something new and thus stood out far more and if it's simply been a janky Japanese Elder Scrolls as you can imagine Sony regretted this decision if they had kept this working relationship with fromsoft going and distributed Miyazaki's baby outside Japan the whole souls series could have been exclusive to PlayStation consoles knowing they had something here Namco immediately entered an agreement with fromsoft to publish the Dark Souls series a name that is the best type of distinct legally distinct Sony still held the rights to Demon Souls you see but dark and dark two seemingly released almost like back-to-back as things were moving so fast with more fans success and profits soaring by the day this is what pushed Sony to then seek out their own brand new franchise which would take advantage of from sauce now sterling pedigree and wanted Miyazaki to direct it hence in 2015 the hunt commenced on the ps4 ah welcome home good hunter I can only imagine the sheer amount of bowing handshakes and edible arrangements Sony had waiting for Miyazaki as an apology Shuhei Yoshida himself has since admonished his lack of faith and foresight and the product we underestimated the quality of Demon Souls and to be honest the media in Japan did the same we definitely dropped the ball from a publisher's perspective including the studio management side we were not able to grasp the value of the product we were making each subsequent from soft fantasy title and him including Sakura in there has sold better than the last so here in 2020 it was the perfect time for Sony to capitalize on the now often forgotten start of it all with the Demon Souls remake for the ps3 quintuple bawling and just like that the loop is now closed it was certainly a wild ride filled with last-minute director swapping multiple near cancellations and extremely low sales but in the end music his creativity and his rolling of the dice paid off incalculably for the company of which he is now the president of by the way Demon Souls went from its extremely humble beginnings as an oblivion clone to having scores of its own clones and imitators you could say that the success story of the whole souls like genre is the demon souls of the video game industry hot Jesus if you know of any other long shots of the gaming industry where there are just but a hair away from disaster only to succeed in the end leave a cryptic message in the comments below or open up a shortcut to the flophouse VIP patreon to officially nominate the subject of your choosing for our next episode see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 689,113

Keywords: Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, From Software, Souls-like, Video Game Documentaries, What Happened, Wha Happun, Video Game Disasters, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Vaati Vidya, Bloodborne

Id: rQ3_I10FXIY

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Flare3500]

What the hell how is that possible

I didn't know Miyazaki was a generic businessman account manager then proceeds to career change into Dark Souls Director

That's kind of an insane career switch

[u/mythmonster2]

Damn, Bossman pulling in the connections on this one. Never would've expected a Vaati appearance in anything the boys did.

[u/WizardOfTheLawl]

The following comment is pointless and somewhat off topic:

I could have sworn that this was originally called Demon's Edge in development until Tim Langdell with the infamous "Edge" trademark sued Fromsoft to change it. Nope, I looked it up while typing this and I was remembering the Namco game Soul Edge Tim wanted renamed. His lawsuit failed but Namco renamed it anyway. The series is now called Soulcalibur.

[u/The_Draigg]

When it’s all put this way, Hidetaka Miyazaki pretty much is the Lucky Ted of From Software. How he managed to make Demon’s Souls a success despite everything that was wonky about the production and initial reception was nothing short of a miracle.

[u/warjoke]

Sometimes not following your higher-ups have their perks. The best form of THUGGERY.