Newly unearthed footage from a 2007 developer presentation has revealed that Demon’s Souls once had an option to play in first-person.
Notable FromSoft dataminer Lance McDonald discovered early gameplay footage, images, and presentation slides from a 2007 showcase where Sony Computer Entertainment‘s developers presented in-progress projects internally.
You can watch the video below:
The presentation, built by the game’s producer Japan Studio PD#3 in PowerPoint, already used the game’s eventual title, Demon’s Souls – albeit then called a “working title” – and set out its premise to make a “worldwide blockbuster” where players visit “fields, a ruined castle, lone wasteland, and other cursed locations” and take on “enemies and twisted mutants and creatures, bosses, gigantic chaos beyond the knowledge of this universe”.
While much of what’s shown made it into the final game, a few elements are notably different, including the camera.
While the final version let players rotate the camera in third person, the prototype footage, however, shows a player fighting enemies entirely in first-person, which McDonald says was a selectable mode at the time.
The prototype’s third-person camera was also different, following the player automatically rather than allowing free rotation, with the left stick used for strafing and backsteps, something McDonald suggests is “deliberate[ly]” similar to that of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion’s control scheme.
The presentation also reveals cut content, including snake-headed enemies that would later resurface in Dark Souls’ Sen’s Fortress and also touches on the ghost mechanic that survived into the final game and has since become a series staple.
Elsewhere, the slides also threw up an unexpected South Park reference. A screenshot from South Park’s ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’ episode was used by Japan Studio as an example of the “stereotype image for MMO RPG gamers” the team seemingly wanted to avoid with Demon’s Souls’ blend of offline and online RPG elements.
It’s the latest find from McDonald, who previously uncovered an unused Elden Ring cutscene that added new context to the game’s lore.
Earlier this year, Sony shut down the studio behind the widely praised Demon’s Souls remake, Bluepoint, despite describing the studio as “an incredibly talented team” full of “technical expertise” which has “delivered exceptional experiences for the PlayStation community”.