20 changes that Demon’s Souls Remastered needs
With the PS5’s announcement scheduled for the end of this year (2019), rumors that a remastered version of the PS3 classic Demon’s Souls would be announced arose. And that stopped being news a long time ago. It seems like every other day someone says that’s gonna happen again.
Which is to be expected. A lot of people want this game to be remastered, myself included.
That being said, it looks like the stars are aligning this time. The PS5 needs launch titles and it seems like the rumor comes from an insider. For my part, I intend to keep my expectations under control. If the rumors are true, outstanding. If they aren’t, I wasn’t expecting them to be.
With that said, a Demon’s Souls Remastered should be announced at some moment before the heat death of the universe. And if Sony and From Software wish this title to be well-received, lots of things need to be fixed in this game. And I would like to believe they’d have the decency to update a game with such archaic concepts.
I’m Brazilian. I never give up.
Therefore, From Software… Sony… hear me out.
Demon’s Souls is fantastic. Truly a spectacular experience with moments I still haven’t seen in any other game out there. Not even in other Souls games.
But it is not perfect. Because it was such an experimental game, the ideas put into it range from “brilliant” to “backwards”. And we all want a good game to sell well, right?
Therefore, I hearby present you both a comprehensible list of changes that Demon’s Souls Remastered desperately needs, coming from a fan with years of experience on the title and on the other games in the Souls saga, frequent interaction with the community around them, and a great interest in game design.
Also, I’m not an all-knowing god of Souls. Just a guy with a computer. Do yourselves a favor and check the comments for people that might disagree with me. They may have answers or suggestions of their own.
And please, grab pen and paper. It’s a lot to talk about.
- Removal or repurposing of the Banish miracle;
Coming from someone that loves the Invasion mechanic in Souls (the option to invade another online player’s game and kill him), it baffles me that this miracle even exists in Demon’s. The game is already catering to a niched audience; From should be ENCOURAGING more online interactions, not giving players a free “rage quit” button.
Well, “free” is a stretch, since this miracle is only accessible once you defeat the final boss of Tower of Latria, one of the most cutthroat areas in the game, and even then, only Faith builds can use it. And even then, the invader needs to be near the player using Banish in order to be hit by it and sent home.
But nevertheless, an experienced player with ill-intents can summon two buddies, massacre invader after invader with their help just for fun, and if by some miracle some guy manages to turn the tide, the host can simply send him away with the push of a button.
If someone wants to play alone, they can simply start the game (or the console) in offline mode; that’s what I do in the other games when I had a long day and don’t have the patience to die unnecessarily. And if they want other players to help them make the game easier, invaders are the game’s answer to counterbalance the drop in difficulty.
This “miracle” actively hurts invasions. What reason do I have to invade if at any point I can be sent home by a coward? Honestly, sometimes From makes it seem like they hate invasions despite practically patenting the concept.
Fixing this is, admittedly, very difficult. It would involve repurposing an existing function in the game without messing with the lore. Maybe they could make it so that Banish only works with offline phantoms or something.
2. Addition of a Dried Finger option;
The Dried Finger is a consumable item in Dark Souls that allows you to increase the number of allied players from 2 to 3, resulting in a team of 4 counting the host. The drawback is that it allows 2 invaders to enter your game instead of the usual 1.
Now, From has reiterated that Demon’s Souls does not take place in the same universe as Dark Souls, so just adding a Dried Finger in the game would go against the lore. The right thing to do would be adding a new item with another name and the same function. Or at least adding this option in a text box on the menu; the latter would be the simplest option.
Seriously, From, inexperienced players need their armies of friends to beat this difficult game, and invaders love tearing them all to shreds one by one. Let us have fun.
Can you imagine how fun would a 4v2 war on Tower of Latria’s narrow bridges be? Everyone fighting to simultaneously deal damage and not throw themselves off a cliff… my God, my eyes sparkle when I think about it.
By the way, one of my favorite locations to fight other players in Souls is the wooden bridge in Archdragon Peak in Dark Souls 3. Seeing players who think they’re awesome throw themselves to their deaths is hilarious.
3. Increase of options to manipulate the Tendencies;
World Tendency and Character Tendency are two eldritch mechanics that Demon’s Souls never bothers to properly explain, but still have a drastic effect on your playthrough if you’re not paying attention.
It works like this. World Tendency is like a “karma” that increases when you defeat bosses or black phantoms, and decreases when you die in Human Form (that being the state you are when your health bar is at 100%). High World Tendency is considered “white”, and it makes enemies give you less items, and low World Tendency is considered “black”, and it makes stronger versions of normal enemies show up in your game.
Suffice to say that dying too much in this difficult game makes your life even harder. Which means, if you’re that guy that makes a lot of mistakes because you never played Demon’s Souls before, get ready to be punished for it! See why it’s important to explain this stuff properly?
And Character Tendency only governs your interactions with NPCs and other online players. To simplify, whenever you kill a harmless NPC or an online player, your Character Tendency is reduced and you lose a little bit of maximum HP in Soul Form (that being the state of 50% less health you’re left in after dying in Human Form), reaching the 45% limit eventually.
But something else the game doesn’t tell you is that the Tendencies determine whether or not certain areas in the game are open or not, and the damage of a specific weapon you find in the endgame. Therefore, relying exclusively on online interactions to manage your offline exploration is a mistake. We need some way to increase and decrease the Tendencies with more control.
Maybe this could be solved with more NPC Black Phantoms invading you offline, or something like that. But to be fair, it’s a tough thing to fix.
4. Removal of Item Burden;
I doubt that anyone will disagree with me on this topic. Limiting the amount of items that one can carry was a terrible decision by From and Miyazaki. This hurts exploration in a very subtle, but no less annoying, manner.
Keep in mind that I’m not talking about Equip Burden. That one’s fine. The game needs to balance builds so that people don’t go around backflipping in the heaviest armor in the game.
No, Item Burden is that annoying value that determines how much you can carry in your inventory, from weapons and armor you’re not using to upgrade materials and consumables. Even each arrow, which you may have hundreds of, counts to the final measuring.
And if you’ve played Demon’s Souls at any point in your life (especially after Dark Souls), you know how aggravating it is to have an arsenal of awesome weapons you would like to try one day… and then suddenly the game forbids you from picking up a literal rock on the ground because you’re carrying too much stuff in your inventory.
No other game in the series brought this mechanic back, and for good reason. It limits how much you can experiment with new strategies and forces you to spend way too much time managing resources with a menu that’s a tad bit too slow for my liking.
Like, just delete this mechanic from the game. No one will miss it. Come on. Chop, chop!
5. Increase of accessibility to Pure Bladestone;
One of the biggest memes in the Souls community is Pure Bladestone rarity. If you don’t care about build-crafting and just want to finish the game, that never bothered you, but if From wants to please the dedicated audience, this blasted stone needs to be more accessible.
For the uninformed, the upgrade path to maximize a Dexterity weapon’s damage efficiency requires the upgrade material entitled Bladestone, and the last level of upgrade requires a Pure Bladestone. Which you can only get by farming a specific black skeleton in the Shrine of Storms.
If you’re not a gamer, farming means repeatedly killing some enemies in a game for the resources they might give you, be it guaranteed or luck-based. In this case, Pure Bladestone is a luck-based farm.
But this is not just any luck-based farm. Dear lord…
There are horror stories from people that spent YEARS killing this skeleton to no avail. And yes, other stones that maximize Strength, Magic and Faith efficiency are also just as rare, but at least for them there are some enemies and places that provide ONE guaranteed rock. Not the case with the PBS, which is exclusively acquired by killing this skeleton and sheer luck.
This is the simplest thing to solve. Just make it so one of the bosses in the game gives you one upon defeat. That already happens with a few of them anyway, and I think the Old Hero would be a great candidate to give you a Pure Bladestone.
Seriously, From. I want to make a Sharp Uchigatana +5 when this game gets remastered. Katanas in DeS are amazing!
6. Removal of the level decrease when dying to an invader;
If From wants to keep this mechanic, I can understand and even appreciate it. But I also think that dying in Human Form is already punishment enough. And with the amount of mechanics that increase your damage to astronomical levels, new players would frequently suffer something much worse than losing progress. Losing rhythm.
Even if you think losing just one level is not that big of a deal because each individual level doesn’t make you that much more powerful, my problem is with how you would reverse that drawback.
To recover the lost level, the affected player would need to farm enemies to accumulate the necessary souls to buy that level again (and they probably don’t remember the exact value), go through a loading screen to return to the Nexus, talk to the Maiden in Black in wherever she is, and go through another loading screen to return to the area he was before.
That was, at least, 10 minutes not doing jacksquat to progress through the game. This whole process is entirely dedicated to return to the point you were before.
If you could rest and level up in Archstones like you can do with Bonfires in Dark Souls 1, I wouldn’t mind this mechanic so much. But that’s not the case. The way it is now, the simplest way to solve this is to make it so dying to invaders is the same as dying to regular enemies or bosses. Only removes your Human Form.
7. Assignment of a dedicated gesture button;
That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s precisely because it’s such a subtle change that its absence is so deeply felt. Conveying your intentions efficiently is not just a matter of multiplayer etiquette. It also affects mind game strategies and makes the game that much more varied.
How do you use gestures in Dark Souls and Bloodborne? With a button to open the list, and another to select the gesture. More recent games also allow you to test the gesture without closing the menu, and that test is also seen by the other players.
And how do you gesture in Demon’s? By holding the “interact” button… for THREE SECONDS to open the menu, and then selecting the gesture.
Is this supposed to be a joke?
Three seconds is WAY too much time to be standing perfectly still in multiplayer. In two seconds, an invader 20 feet away can run at me, backstab me, and that’s probably a death sentence. And that’s just the time to open the menu, since there’s still the time to SELECT the gesture I want!
That’s why the game needs a dedicated gesture button. That you can press to instantly see the menu, and that allows you to select a gesture as quickly as possible. If you want to be especially pretty, add the option to test the gesture with Square without closing the menu like it is in Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne.
And if you want to be especially prettier, make it so we can cancel gesture animations by pressing Circle (rolling). That’d be nice.
8. Removal of gender-exclusivity for armor sets;
This is a huge kick to the stomach the first time you play Demon’s Souls. No wonder subsequent games abolished this backwards mechanic.
Forbidding you from using an entire set of armor just because you chose to make a man or a woman is wrong. Horribly wrong.
I make female characters, and I want them to wear some cool armor and look like awesome knightesses. And what’s the problem with wanting my male character to wear a dress? The world is on the brink of being consumed by demons! Who cares about my sense of style besides me?
Worst part is that some armor sets with amazing designs are relegated to genders. The Ragged Set is the nicest looking set for sorcerers, but it can only be used by women. And the Dark Silver Set has a spectacularly slim torso, but it can only be used by men.
Easy thing to solve. Delete this from the game. Simple as that.
9. Fixing of the Luck stat;
In most games, Luck is a filler stat. The one you level up when you don’t know what to invest in anymore. That’s not the case in Demon’s Souls.
Well, it is, but it shouldn’t be.
Luck in DeS has two different effects. First, it’s the stat that increases the Blueblood Sword’s damage, the sword you get from defeating Maiden Astraea. And second, it increases your chances of getting rare items… or that would be the case if this effect wasn’t bugged.
It’s been discovered throughout the years that Luck, in fact, doesn’t increase your chances of getting rare items. It just increases how often you get ANY items from dead enemies. You end up, actually, getting more COMMON items when farming.
I have no idea how From managed to ruin Luck like that, but they better fix this in Demon’s Souls Remastered.
10. Addition of a respec option;
Respec, for the uninformed, is the option to redistribute the stats you already spent on a character. It is extremely useful for players that wish to try new things once they’re tired of the old things.
From’s history with this functionality is hilarious. Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 didn’t have that, then they put infinite respecs in Dark Souls 2, then Bloodborne didn’t have that, then they added limited respecs to Dark Souls 3, and then they decided not to add that to Dark Souls Remastered.
For the love of God, From, make up your mind!
A small problem that comes with adding that to Demon’s is justifying it. But to my knowledge, there are two NPCs that could have this option added to their dialogue. One being the Monumental, a midget that sits on the top of the Nexus and practically doesn’t have any function, and another being the Maiden in Black, the lady that’s responsible for increasing your level.
Giving this option to the Monumental would grant him a greater purpose for players that know this game like the back of their hands, but giving it to the Maiden in Black would make more sense, since if she has the power to give you levels and power, it stands to reason that she would have the ability to redistribute these levels and power.
And just in case From decides not to add this at all… you didn’t hear this from me, but there are two ways to de-level in Demon’s Souls already.
Either by being killed by an invader, which drains the last point you spent on your stats and the subsequent one if it happens again, and even if that’s removed like I suggested, you can also de-level by getting hit by False King Allant’s Soulsucker attack, which has the same effect.
Shhhhh… tell no one.
11. Addition of icons to represent the infusions;
If you’ve played any game in the Souls saga with any degree of applied dedication, you know what I’m talking about.
Whenever you use one of the bazillion rocks the game gives you to imbue your weapon or shield of choice with new characteristics, that weapon or shield’s picture on your lower left interface gets a neat little icon to represent the selected infusion. Like a little lightning icon that means added lightning damage and scaling with Faith.
This functionality was removed in Bloodborne, and I think that was a mistake. It’s been extremely useful since Dark Souls 1. It helps you figure out how many weapons you fully prepared already and how much more farming you still have ahead of you quicker.
Dark Souls 3 had the decency to bring back all the physical infusions from Demon’s Souls, the entitled Raw, Heavy, Sharp and Refined, and added Hollow as a bonus. And each infusion has a beautiful little HD icon by the corner of the infused weapon’s picture.
Well, “beautiful” is relative. I think the icons for the Sharp and Crystal infusions are pretty lazy… this stretched out hand on the hexagon and that ridiculous indigo flare... the Lightning infusion icon is gorgeous, though… But anyway, aesthetic opinions aside!
Adding icons to the interface is the easiest thing in the world. Hire a designer and get him to draw a bunch of pretty PNGs to stick on to the screen. If you want to be the best company ever, also add the weapon’s upgrade level to the picture. From no icon all the way to +10 or +5.
It’ll cost you pennies.
12. Increase of the Old Monk boss fight’s summoning range to the entire Tower of Latria;
This concept of calling another player to face you as a boss, like it is with Dark Souls 3’s Halflight boss fight, was actually first introduced in Demon’s Souls.
If you use a Black Eye Stone to invade someone on the stairwell that leads to the Old Monk, you will be summoned as the boss, and if you win, you’ll get the Yellow Head Collar to use in the regular game. This head piece doesn’t have any unique effect, and in fact only hampers your visibility due to how big it is. What really matters is fighting another player as a boss.
The annoying part of this is that you need to invade in that staircase that leads to the Old Monk. There’s nothing to do in there while you wait. At least when you invade anywhere else, you can go around killing enemies and farming items while the game keeps searching.
I don’t doubt that From will change the Black Eye Stone from a player-searching few seconds long pulse to a permanent player-searching buff if they remaster Demon’s Souls. But if they can also extend the Old Monk invasion area to the entire Tower of Latria, this boss fight’s activity will be enormously extended.
How to accomplish that, I’m not quite sure yet. Maybe by associating the invasion mechanic to using the boss’ head piece and placing that head piece somewhere hidden on the map for you to find. Getting a bunch of these after winning a bunch of fights would be ridiculous anyway, so that’d be elegant.
13. Preservation of unique effects weapons;
Although From has never done this, I’m scared they’ll think Demon’s Souls is “too cruel” to new players, and gets the brilliant idea of nerfing the game’s more busted weapons. Nerfing, for those that don’t know, is to reduce something’s power or efficiency.
Here’s the thing. Some weapons in the game have effects that only truly affect player-to-player interaction. And some effects are… how should I put it… scary.
The Baby’s Nail is a dagger with extremely quick attacks that inflict the Plague status effect, that being a greater gradual health drain than Poison and Bleed that also halves the amount of health you restore when consuming Grass items. Nasty, huh?
And how about the Large Sword of Moonlight? A Faith greatsword with 100% Shield Bypassing! This means that if you swing it at someone that’s holding their shield up, they take FULL damage like the shield doesn’t exist! The Blind also has this effect, but that’s a Dexterity curved sword that’s much shorter than the Moonlight.
And one of my favorites is the Scraping Spear, a Strength spear made from the soul of the first boss that drains 10 units of durability of each armor piece of the target it hits! Unless the target is blocking with a shield or weapon, because then it’ll drain the durability from that instead of the armor!
But if all of that sounds like broken game mechanics to you, it’s exactly this boldness in wanting to watch the world burn that I admire in From and their games. They don’t strive for character balance like this is Street Fighter.
This is essentially a game with a multiplayer experience in a world in ruins. Of course there will be strategies that work better than others. Of course a player with more time to prepare has an unfair advantage. And of course a player that summons his level 500 buddies has an unfair advantage over the invader. This is an “every man for himself”, and there’s no such thing as fair or unfair.
You can handicap yourself on purpose and have fair duels with your friends (you know, if you ignore the 50% less health when in phantom form), but that comes from your prerogative to set that up and find strategies that don’t require little skill.
I really want this nature of “we’re all bad guys” to be kept in the Remaster. No other game series in the market offers this currently. Only Souls.
And speaking of duels…
14. Addition of arenas and a reward system for winners;
I don’t need to explain why this would be a great addition, right?
Actually, I do, because this topic is a bit more complex than just sticking two or more players somewhere so they can slaughter themselves.
The problem with the arena in Dark Souls Remastered is that From didn’t do anything to encourage fights in it. There are no rewards for those that thrive, and the game’s combat remains super unfair, forcing everyone into the same builds all the time. Hornet Ring with Great Club, Dark Bead spammer or Tranquil Walk of Peace spammer. The result: nobody uses this feature.
The arenas in Dark Souls 2 and 3 are far better. In 2, you get Red Eye Orbs to invade and a red aura after winning a lot, and in 3 there’s a medal ranking to classify the best players. Plus, in both games, one-shot builds are extremely hard to run and are (mostly) more skill-based.
Though, why are there no arenas in Bloodborne is beyond me…
To solve that in Demon’s Souls, From could take a few areas that are in the game already, turn off the players’ ability to use Grass items to heal inside them, and put a few cool rewards for those that succeed. And boom! Out of nowhere, everyone is using the arenas!
In fact, I’m going to blow your mind right now. Check this out.
Put the players in the arenas where you fight the bosses (they are already naturally small and isolated by Fog Walls), turn off Grass items in them, reward winning players with upgrade materials (like, say, I dunno… a Pure Bladestone!), add a medal ranking like the one in Dark Souls 3… and voilá!
Of course, the combat is still disgustingly unfair, with the instant backstab and the continent-destroying builds… but you know what? Let us adapt to the combat ourselves!
That’s why this is an RPG. So that we can make several different builds for different purposes, and challenge ourselves to play the same game again in new ways.
15. Decrease of the limitation on the amount of Grass players can carry;
If on one hand, Grass items need to be turned off in the arenas I suggested, on the other hand, they also need to be nerfed in the regular game. There’s a reason Dark Souls 1 only gives you 20 Estus.
The way the game is currently, you can carry 99 of each of the SIX different types of Health Points-healing Grass, and that doesn’t include the 99 of each of the two Magic Points-healing Spices, which can fuel, you guessed it, healing spells. Each individual item weights a little, but I already said I want Item Burden to be removed, so that doesn’t affect my argument.
Fact is that 99 of each of these is WAY too much! There’s no way even a completely specialized invader can go through this practically infinite barrier of healing items when you consider the other player can consume each one practically instantly and he can call his buddies to distract him while he heals. Oh, and each of the buddies can also heal 99 times too.
“But, Peter, weren’t you the one that said this is an apocalyptic game, and that is should be an every man for himself? And that players will adapt to the unfair combat?”
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.
I had the honor of invading in Demon’s Souls a total of 4 times back when the servers were still active. Once as the Old Monk (talk about a lucky day!), once against two other players in the last stretch of Boletaria Castle, and two others against lone players in the same area.
In one of these against a solo host, I could not be efficient in the fight, because whenever I spent all my stamina to deal damage to him, he would back away and heal completely with a single New Moon Grass or Dark Moon Grass! And he probably had 99 of each on him!
Wanna know how I beat him? By accidentally discovering an inescapable stunning attack sequence with the two-handed Battle Axe, or if you’d rather a gaming term, an “infinite stunlock”. This way, he couldn’t heal (because the constant stun animation would literally not let him escape), and perished.
But do you see the problem with this? I had to use an extremely unfair mechanic to have a shot at defeating this player.
If From maintains the Grass inventory the way it is, everyone that plays this game will run the exact same builds all the time. Can you imagine everyone going Curse Weapon’d Dragon Bone Smashers and one-shot backstabbing everything because you can heal eternally and any other option is basically useless?
I don’t want that to happen. I want battles to last longer than 5 seconds. But also shorter than an hour.
16. Increase of Colorless Demon Soul farming options;
This is the second most valuable material in the game, only surpassed by the Pure Bladestone I mentioned before.
And what does this do anyway? Colorless Demon Soul is the material you need to upgrade boss and special weapons, the ones that aren’t infusible. For these weapons, either your build is made for them, or their damage sucks.
You need a total of 5 of these to upgrade a single special weapon all the way to +5, the maximum possible. And you can get a total of 10 per playthrough.
That’s it. Only 10…
But wait! 5 of these 10 are acquired by killing Primeval Demons, which only appear in Pure Black Tendency, which cannot be reversed without killing bosses (that don’t respawn after death). Not to mention this isn’t a guaranteed drop; you can kill the Primeval Demon and straight up get nothing!
But wait again! One of these 10 can only be looted in an area you can only access in Pure White Tendency, which not only requires the direct opposite effort of accessing Pure Black Tendency, it can also only be achieved by killing bosses without ever dying!
But wait again! 2 of these 10 can only be acquired by following Mephistopheles’ NPC assassination list, which will make you murder extremely valuable merchants, not to mention Mephistopheles herself only appears in Pure Black Tendency!
The result: you can only get TWO Colorless Demon Souls per game, the ones you get by trading very specific items at the bird nest in the Shrine of Storms. That’s assuming you wanna keep NPCs alive and avoid going to NG+ to reset the Tendencies.
That… is… RIDICULOUS.
We need a consistent way to farm these items. Be it by the arena I suggested, or making Primeval Demons respawn after you reset an area, and making them Tendency-free enemies.
17. Addition of more character slots;
Very straightforward. 4 character slots is just not enough for such a complex RPG.
“But, Peter, there are only 4 types of builds in the game! Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Faith”. Wrong.
There are these 4 builds that focus on a single stat each, and then there are the Quality builds, that invest in both Strength and Dexterity; there’s even a dedicated infusion for that.
And then there are the Dragon infusion builds, that only require you to meet the weapon’s requirements.
And then there are the hybrid builds, which invest in Strength and Magic, or Strength and Faith, or Dexterity and Magic, or Dexterity and Faith.
And then there are the more creative builds, like the ones that combine Magic and Faith to use different spells in combination; there’s even a catalyst for that specifically, the Talisman of Beasts.
Or the ones that invest everything in Strength or Dexterity and just the necessary points to use a single support spell, like the extremely useful Second Chance.
And how about the builds that focus on a single weapon, and invest everything else in health and stamina? If the situation was precarious before, with 4 slots for a game that allows at least 13 different combinations, now that we’re counting each individual weapon as worthy of a separate build, we’re past 70 different builds! And I’m not counting bows and crossbows!
Even worse! I’m also not counting all the levels under the SL125 meta, that are basically dedicated for invasion builds. Like SL10, SL20, SL30, or the non-exact numbers between them!
So, yeah… 4 slots is not enough.
Now, to be fair, no game in the saga offers 70 character slots. The most Dark Souls 1 and every subsequent game offers is 10. But even then! 10 slots is a lot more than 4!
Like… From… just add more rectangles in this menu. Go beyond your usual 10 if it doesn’t hurt you! Like 15 slots, or 20. I’d love that.
18. Removal of the offline wall atop the Nexus;
Back to the baffling design decisions.
I’m referring to the upper area in the Nexus in which you can check the most powerful players in the game… or something like that. I’m actually not sure what’s the criteria for player ranking in this arenaless game. What matters is that you can only access this area online. If you are offline, it’s blocked by a wall.
And I know that if Demon’s Souls gets remastered, that won’t be a problem anymore, but… come on? Let me go there offline too!
It’s got some interesting architecture and a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes! If I’m not online, just don’t load the best players’ data and put a text box on the screen saying this function is unavailable offline.
Who on earth came up with this anyway?
19. Increase of the geriatric speed with which you climb ladders;
It’s actually a joke to see the Demon’s Souls character slowly grabbing each step of a ladder with a patience that the player that bought this game just doesn’t have.
Sure, there’s never too big of a ladder that makes you slowly suffer as hours and hours of your life are wasted… in the main path. But that certainly is the case when you have Pure White Tendency and you wanna go down to the lowest point of the optional area at the beginning of Boletaria Castle.
In this little area, there is a ladder that has to be seen to be believed. There are endgame boss fights that I can finish quicker than the time it takes to climb this ladder down, get the loot in the platform, and climb back up!
Here’s a video about it. Watch it to understand. It’s unbelievable.
Do I need to spell how to fix this? Please increase the speed of the ladder climbing animation! Thanks!
And finally, the most important item on this list…
20. Addition of the Northern Limit as the fourth Archstone;
The cut content of Demon’s Souls is something worthy of urban legends. It’s so much stuff that’s just ready and sitting there, but that didn’t get enough time to be properly added to the game, that it can make you sad to see how much work the designers did in vain.
From what I can gather from my research, the currently broken fourth Archstone would’ve led the player to a vast snowy area, very similar to the infamous Frigid Outskirts of Dark Souls 2, or the beginning of the Ashes of Ariandel DLC in Dark Souls 3. With all the reduced visibility and terrifying snow creatures that come along with it.
But once the player found an entry point, they would be taken to an area with a feel that would never be replicated in any game in the series. The closest I can think of would be something like Shulva, the sunken city from the Dark Souls 2 DLCs, but even that doesn’t do these cavernous rooms and stone-sculpted walls justice.
It strikes me as a mixture of the subterranean city of Shulva and the wide rooms of the snow levels of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2.
Eventually, this would lead the player to a castle similar to Boletaria Castle and the first level of Tower of Latria, with several narrow hallways more in line with the game that had been developing so far.
See it for yourself. All you see in the video below doesn’t officially exist.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s left of the Northern Limit, the fourth Archstone.
And all of this doesn’t account for the numerous enemies that got axed along with it. White wolves that hunt in packs, serpent-headed men, yetis with disproportionate mouths, invisible enemies that cast shadows and give me the creeps, and even werewolf warriors with short-range weapons and smooth movements and their giant versions with clubs bigger than the player itself.
Thanks to hackers, over the years all of these models and maps were uncovered and revealed in videos. And that only served to increase the anxiety of the fans which, like myself, desperately wish From will fix and add this content as an explorable level in Demon’s Souls Remastered.
Asking that From puts themselves to the trouble of fixing this map has two sides. It could both be an absurd effort of adding content to a 10-year old game, and not be that hard, seeing as many models are already finished and in the game already.
From the financial standpoint, there are two sides as well. It could be seen as an unnecessary investment (I fear that if they just add 4K, it’s gonna sell itself), or they could do the same as Crash Bandicoot’s remake, the N. Sane Trilogy, selling originally cut content levels as DLC to make more money.
And at this point, for a fan that played Demon’s Souls on a used PS3 and went drooling upon seeing the cut content, I don’t care anymore.
Sell the Northern Limit as DLC. Sell it for more than the base game! I don’t wanna know!
Ok, don’t actually go that far… that’s a terrible move.
But, From, if you’re reading this, forget this entire list, each bullet point… but don’t forget this one. If you just do this (and a little graphics overhaul), this will be one of the best Remasters in video game history.
Well, that didn’t take long, did it?
Keep it in mind. All I have here are my opinions or opinions of other people which I agreed with. You readers are free to disagree with me and express such disagreement in the comment section in a civil manner.
To be honest, at this point, I don’t mind setting up a Kickstarter to support this remaster ourselves. That’s how much I want this game.
And that’s the power of the games in this saga. They just draw you in like no other. These are experiences that can’t be replicated without a genius like Miyazaki at the helm.
In a recent Twitter poll by youtuber VaatiVidya, he revealed that an enormous percentage of the Souls community never played Demon’s Souls, and I imagine that’s because it’s a PS3 exclusive and was so niched on release. And that’s such a shame given how hard some of this game’s moments hit you.
Personally, I’m a sucker for sad stories. And if you’ve played DeS, you know exactly which boss is my favorite by that metric. Though I refuse to spoil it, lemme just say that… “prepare to cry” is an understatement. I’m talking Sif, the Great Grey Wolf levels.
If this game never gets remastered, that moment will be missed by generations to come. And I refuse to just stand still watching that happen.
I wrote this article for three readers. From Software, myself, and you that has any interest in Souls. And also to externalize this idea that was cooking in my mind for a long time.
Demon’s Souls needs a remaster. And fixes. They are right above.
Hope you enjoyed reading this. I really do.
With love, from a Demon’s Souls fan.
Umbasa.
