Demon’s Souls is a pretty successful game over here in the west, but before it’s western release it was apparently very different during development, even when it was ‘close to final’. Shuei Yoshida, Chief of Development at Sony, has told Game Informer in an interview that when he first played the ‘close to final’ build, he was sure that the game would be terrible.

He remembers saying “This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.”

Subsequently, Sony did not publish the game in North America. That said, it was eventually published by Atlus and became a sort of cult classic.

Why was Yoshida so wrong? Mainly due to the methods of developing games in Japan; assets for a game in Japan are developed in parallel to the game, so the developers put together a small representation of the game as they hoped it would look when finished. Because of the rush, the game had many technical problems and frame rate issues.

He now admits that Sony made a mistake by not deciding to publish it for the US. “We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint”.

There you go, even the most experienced with testing games both bad and great in the industry can make misjudgements of quality.

What I want to see is what the playtest build looked like.

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