Among all of the games coming out this holiday season, Bluepoint Games’ Demon’s Souls remake looks to be a stand-out. A new gameplay trailer revealed how cool many of the bosses look while the development team has promised thousands of permutations for the character creator. In an interview with GameSpot, SIE Worldwide Studios creative director Gavin Moore also talked about having “thousands upon thousands” new sound effects.
When asked about the VO and audio, Moore stated that, “If you think about the way it works, like when you play the game it doesn’t have any music. And it’s done intentionally because music is an emotional crutch. It can make you happy. It can make you sad. It can change your feelings. And what was done in the original was say, ‘No music. It’s just the environment.’ And you feel naked almost. You feel more vulnerable because there is no emotional friend playing in your ear. And then when you go into a boss battle, the music comes in and it feels like the music’s making you go further and do better and succeed in the challenge. So it’s an incredibly wonderful way to use audio.
“So we’ve done the same thing. We’ve actually remade thousands upon thousands of new sound effects to add into our levels, and then using 3D audio on the PlayStation 5, that really comes to life. I mean, you can feel arrows go past your head. You can feel Imperial spies creep up behind you in the palace of Boletaria or creatures crawl out of the slime in the Valley of Defilement. It’s an amazing soundscape now and it really adds to the fear, the trepidation, and the challenge of the whole experience.”
Those extra layers of sounds in conjunction with 3D audio should also help players feel more aware of the dangers around them. Will it provide an unfair advantage of sorts or help increase the immersion? Perhaps both? We’ll need to get our hands on the game to be sure.
Demon’s Souls is out on November 12th for PS5 in the United States and November 19th for Europe and the rest of the world. It’s been confirmed to run at dynamic 4K with a steady 60 frames per second or native 4K at 30 FPS. However, there won’t be any support for ray-tracing.