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.
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.
