NoClip’s film showcases perfectly how Bluepoint Games (which might be joining Sony Interactive Entertainment shortly) managed to remake the 2009 PlayStation 3-exclusive Demon’s Souls.

Demon’s Souls Remake was a PlayStation 5 launch title last November, and it indeed had a lot of exciting stories behind the scenes. There couldn’t have been a better team than NoClip (who have previously made similar films about Half-Life or even Final Fantasy XIV) to provide us with the full story on how the studio got to do this remake which jumped two console generations.

„The way we like to structure [remakes] is to get the package that the original game developer delivered to, in the case of Demon’s Souls, for the PlayStation 3, and from there we’re able to extract all the data,” says Peter Dalton, the technical director at Bluepoint. If they can’t get the engine or rendering source code, then the studio will replace and upgrade them from the ground up.

After getting the game into a new AAA engine for the PlayStation 5, the team can follow up by improving the game’s models and art by extracting the assets directly from the original disc, and if they have the chance, they also use the source material as much as possible. Marco Thrush, the president of Bluepoint, said that Sony translated all of the original Japanese design documents from Demon’s Souls’ development, which helped the studio to have complete parity with the original PlayStation 3 version of the game.

They redesigned the Boletaria Castle area, where the studio remodelled the castle’s architecture, they also changed smaller details (dragon imprints and Dragonfire effects), but Bluepoint adds that they also changed other things to improve the gameplay experience. For example, after you defeat a boss, you can briefly see their past selves in ghost form.

„When you do a remake, it’s not what the player played. It’s how they remembered the game. And you’re always trying to build the game to their expectations. Their memories of the game are far better than the game ever was because it all becomes this amazing world inside your head. It’s like reading a book, basically,” Peter More of the formerly existing SIE Japan Studio said.

It’s worth checking the documentary out.

Source: PSL