Demon’s Souls Will Not Support Ray Tracing, Despite Previous Claims

Oct 31, 2020 at 07:02am EDT
Demon's Souls remake Demon's Souls Easy mode

The Demon's Souls PlayStation 5 remake is not going to feature ray tracing support, contrary to what was previously announced.

Speaking with Level Up, Creative Director Gavin Moore confirmed that the upcoming remake of the first entry in the Souls series is not going to support ray tracing, saying that there was a cost in implementing it and doing so would have meant for something else to be left out.

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It's like any other graphic improvement, there is a cost [to implement raytracing]. If we had implemented ray tracing in the game, that would mean that we would have had to leave something out. There is a limited time in game development.

Gavin Moore also added that, at the start of development, the team didn't know if Demon's Souls would support ray tracing, as they wanted to focus on the setting and characters.

When we started development we didn't know there would be ray tracing in the game, so it wasn't in our original vision. What we wanted to focus on was the settings and the look of the characters. Everything is lighting in real-time with shadows in real-time

Demon's Souls not supporting ray tracing is definitely disappointing, but it shouldn't be a huge problem, considering how good the game looked in the latest gameplay footage. Ray tracing would have also been available only in Cinematic Mode, which will probably end up being the less used mode of the two included in the game: Souls game are at their best when played at 60 FPS.

Demon's Souls launches on PlayStation 5 on November 12th in North America and on November 19th in the rest of the world.

About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.

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