Demon’s Souls is everything we wish we could create: intelligent, subversive, respectful, challenging, varied, and consistently surprising. When I say “we,” you know who I’m referring to: the aspiring game developers and the arm-chair game designers. I see you there, with your scribbled notes of ideas and concepts. “One day,” you think to yourself, “I’ll pull myself together and make this happen.”
Sometimes I play games and I get a little envious—I wish I had what they had. That drive to actually turn a dream into reality, that skill set to make it come to fruition with any modicum of sense. Even if it’s kind of an accident, like how I view Demon’s Souls. It doesn’t really seem like they were sure of what they were doing or where they were headed, but somehow it all came together. They just did whatever they felt like would be cool, would be different, would be interesting. It doesn’t really work all that great a lot of the time, but it does, indeed, work. I’m aware things like this don’t happen overnight; tons of skilled, experienced, and talented people worked their asses off to make this happen, but you can’t tell me that any process of creation isn’t basically just wandering through a dark forest and hoping you come out the other side in one piece.
Let’s think on it for a minute: Is there anything else like Demon’s Souls over a decade after its release? Sure, its spiritual successors carved out some pieces, but it's not the same, is it? They’re too scared to continue on the path it never even finished carving—iteration eventually leads to homogenization. You’ll get your peak, but those wings will burn off. Can we even blame them, though? The market’s calling and bills need to be paid: how would you approach it? Compromises between the conventional and the experimental are made, and it works—the formula works—but maybe a little too well. Maybe we’ve gone too far with it. Something’s gotta give; that’s the hope, at least.
One day, I’d like to at least try. It won’t be good, it probably won’t even be all that unique or interesting, but at least I did it. Is that a low bar? I’m not sure, but something’s gotta give eventually—things can’t keep going the way they are. The foundation will crumble and be built anew. On that new dawn, I’ll finally build that house I always wanted to build—it’ll be beautiful.
Sometimes I play games and I get a little envious—I wish I had what they had. That drive to actually turn a dream into reality, that skill set to make it come to fruition with any modicum of sense. Even if it’s kind of an accident, like how I view Demon’s Souls. It doesn’t really seem like they were sure of what they were doing or where they were headed, but somehow it all came together. They just did whatever they felt like would be cool, would be different, would be interesting. It doesn’t really work all that great a lot of the time, but it does, indeed, work. I’m aware things like this don’t happen overnight; tons of skilled, experienced, and talented people worked their asses off to make this happen, but you can’t tell me that any process of creation isn’t basically just wandering through a dark forest and hoping you come out the other side in one piece.
Let’s think on it for a minute: Is there anything else like Demon’s Souls over a decade after its release? Sure, its spiritual successors carved out some pieces, but it's not the same, is it? They’re too scared to continue on the path it never even finished carving—iteration eventually leads to homogenization. You’ll get your peak, but those wings will burn off. Can we even blame them, though? The market’s calling and bills need to be paid: how would you approach it? Compromises between the conventional and the experimental are made, and it works—the formula works—but maybe a little too well. Maybe we’ve gone too far with it. Something’s gotta give; that’s the hope, at least.
One day, I’d like to at least try. It won’t be good, it probably won’t even be all that unique or interesting, but at least I did it. Is that a low bar? I’m not sure, but something’s gotta give eventually—things can’t keep going the way they are. The foundation will crumble and be built anew. On that new dawn, I’ll finally build that house I always wanted to build—it’ll be beautiful.