Demon’s Souls creative director Gavin Moore has confirmed to LEVEL UP that the upcoming PlayStation 5 remake will not support ray tracing.
In a PlayStation Blog entry dating back to June this year, Sony said that Demon’s Souls will come with “beautiful shadow effects and ray tracing” and players will be able to choose between two graphical modes: “one focused on fidelity, and one focused on frame rate.”
However, Moore has told LEVEL UP that ray tracing wasn’t even part of Bluepoint Games’ original vision. He was quick to clarify that the PS5 is fully capable of supporting the feature, but its implementation would come at the cost of something else.
We don’t actually implement ray tracing in Demon’s Souls . It’s not because we couldn’t or because the PlayStation 5 couldn’t do it, it’s fully capable of doing it. It’s like any other graphical enhancement, there is a cost [to implement ray tracing]. 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.
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 remake will release on November 12th. Both the standard and Deluxe editions are available to preorder now.
