Footage from a 2007 developer presentation shows that Demon’s Souls once included an option to play in first person, Eurogamer reports. The material was surfaced by dataminer Lance McDonald, who found early gameplay, images and presentation slides from an internal Sony Computer Entertainment showcase where teams presented in-progress projects.
The deck, assembled in PowerPoint by producer Japan Studio PD#3, already used the name Demon’s Souls, described at the time as a working title. It set out an ambition to make a worldwide blockbuster in which players visit fields, a ruined castle, a lone wasteland and other cursed locations, facing enemies, twisted mutants and creatures, bosses and what the slides called gigantic chaos beyond the knowledge of this universe.
The camera that did not ship
Most of what the presentation shows made it into the released game. The camera did not. Where the final version puts the player behind the character with free rotation, the prototype footage shows combat played entirely in first person, which McDonald says was a selectable mode at that stage.
The prototype’s third-person camera was also different from the shipped one. It followed the player automatically rather than allowing free rotation, with the left stick handling strafing and backsteps, a scheme McDonald suggests was deliberately close to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.
The presentation also documents cut content, including snake-headed enemies that later appeared in Dark Souls’ Sen’s Fortress, and covers the ghost mechanic that survived into the final game and became a series fixture. One slide uses a screenshot from South Park’s "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode as an example of the stereotype image of MMO RPG players the team wanted to avoid.
McDonald has surfaced FromSoftware material before, including an unused Elden Ring cutscene. The find lands the same year Sony shut down Bluepoint, the studio behind the well-received Demon’s Souls remake, a closure the platform holder announced while describing the team as an incredibly talented one with technical expertise.
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