Demon's Souls (2020)

Demon's Souls
Developer: Bluepoint Games Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Platform: PlayStation 5 Released internationally: November 19, 2020 Released in US: November 12, 2020 Released in CA: November 12, 2020 Released in MX: November 12, 2020 Released in AU: November 12, 2020 Released in NZ: November 12, 2020 This game has unused animations. This game has unused playable characters. This game has unused code. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused models. This game has unused items. This game has unused text.

Demon's Souls, the spiritual predecessor to the Dark Souls series, remade for the modern generation.

Bluepoint stated in NoClip's interview with them that they built the remake off of the original game, and indeed a surprising amount of that filesystem still exists within the game underneath layers of Bluepoint's own folders.

Original Game Data

It's not immediately clear how much of it, if any, is used in the final game (the lack of changes in many places conflicts with the idea that much of it is used now), but much of the old data is there and adjusted by hand to be in little endian, Bluepoint's engine, and trimmed to fit slightly better in places.

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  Old Demon's Souls filesystem within the remake

In addition, the lua code in said filesystem has had translation work done on it, as can be seen below in this excerpt of m07_00_00_00.lua:

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  Old Demon's Souls code translated

Text Data

A surprising amount of the actual game's scripting is left out in the open, presumably for easy access. One of the more interesting things to note is the many references to a PS4 release. There are settings made to target the original PS4 as well as the PS4 Pro, along with settings for the performance and fidelity modes on PS5.

There's even strings which directly reference a Windows version, though the lack of other files surrounding that suggest it was more for testing and not a priority to upkeep, one note even mentioning failures in Cloth Simulation due to the rendering process differences.

Though it's not immediately clear if the Debug Menu is usable with the rest of the data we have, there is quite a lot there and even references to an editor.

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  Text files relating to the debug menu

Texture Data

A number of unused textures remain in the files, but perhaps the most interesting among these are what appear to be mockup images for the UI which include items from the original Dark Souls series (specifically 3), with some of the images mocking the more ragged menu look of Dark Souls compared to the cleaner Demon's Souls aesthetic. The item icons look to be from Dark Souls 3, but it's unknown what this was ultimately in service to. 'Body' is also 'Gender' in this, with the first screenshot here displaying a value of 'Male' as opposed to the 'Type A' presented in the final product.

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  Ui Mockup with Dark Souls 3 items

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  Ui Mockup with Dark Souls 3 items and ragged Dark Souls 1 menus

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  Ui Mockup with Dark Souls 3 items and ragged Dark Souls 1 menus