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Demon's Souls Remake OT - You Died, update: reviews from OpenCritic posted

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  • Pikachu changed the title to Demon's Souls Remake (12 November 2020) OT - You Died
Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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I'm really baffled by the sound design I have to say. It's like they paid no attention to From's ingenious and carefully curated use of ambient sound, reverb and delay in their games' worlds. I just watched several videos, including the latest State Of Play one, with headphones and being a huge fan of From's sound design, they seem to have completely ignored how much of an impact the uniqueness of their approach made on Demon's Souls' overall much-loved mood. I could go into absurd detail here but yeah, it's a really weird and major change.

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Xbob42

Xbob42

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3 hours ago, Bloodporne said:

I'm really baffled by the sound design I have to say. It's like they paid no attention to From's ingenious and carefully curated use of ambient sound, reverb and delay in their games' worlds. I just watched several videos, including the latest State Of Play one, with headphones and being a huge fan of From's sound design, they seem to have completely ignored how much of an impact the uniqueness of their approach made on Demon's Souls' overall much-loved mood. I could go into absurd detail here but yeah, it's a really weird and major change.

I feel like I can almost hear the subtle details you're talking about just thinking back on my time with the Souls games, but do you have any concrete examples that would help me even more? I didn't notice anything terribly off with the initial gameplay trailer with no UI, but I haven't watched too much footage since then. Got any comparison moments so I can see for myself?

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Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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58 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I feel like I can almost hear the subtle details you're talking about just thinking back on my time with the Souls games, but do you have any concrete examples that would help me even more? I didn't notice anything terribly off with the initial gameplay trailer with no UI, but I haven't watched too much footage since then. Got any comparison moments so I can see for myself?

So I'll use Stonefang Tunnel as an example but this seems to apply across the board in terms of overall ambience. Put on some headphones and listen to the original here for a minute:

 

 

Your footsteps, weapon noises (especially clashing of shield vs. enemy attacks), enemy groans etc. are doused in reverb and echo when in that long corridor and changing subtly once the player moves back into the more open area. Also you can hear all sorts of distant background sounds creating a sense of the mine just kind of existing in the background. This is way more intense in the more open areas featuring the water wheels and so on earlier in the level but I didn't want to use it as an example as I don't think we've seen those areas in the PS5 remake footage as of yet so I can't compare. In general, in my opinion From are masters at bringing their worlds to life with sound specifically. People often cite the oppressive atmosphere in these games, and especially Demon's Souls, as a positive and unique quality and a lot of that can be attributed to the rather 'intense' sound design.

 

Here's the same area in the remake:

 

 

I want to point out that by no means am I saying this is bad sound design whatsoever and I'd wager even most fans of the original won't notice the different much and simply view it, at worst, possibly overall as less atmospheric without being able to pinpoint why. The audio design is decidedly more conservative here with an emphasis, to me at least, on your 'epic fighting'. The player character sounds and enemy noises are very immediate and very compressed kind of reminding me of Doom 2016's over-compressed weapon sounds. What I mean is that everything is very up-front yet has a soft edge to it, this is very typical modern AAA sound design and a current trend to my ears. Your player character is overly 'chatty', at least in the context of Demon's Souls, which is more apparent in other videos and what I mean by that is that every tiny little action gives you Naughty Dog-ish audio feedback of dramatic enunciations. The reason I say Naughty Dog is because they've been using that specific trick to make Nathan Drake more relatable since the first Uncharted, a trend that has been adopted by most AAA, and smaller, games since. In my opinion, it just doesn't fit for Demon's Souls.

 

Besides that, it's immediately apparent how much less of the location's character is transmitted through audio here. The only thing going on really is the much lower mixed kind of typically Souls background ambiance.

 

I could write more but yeah, the more I write the more I see how nitpicky and niche complaint-y this is getting but From's audio design is something that immediately stood out to me and attracted me to this series and I can't overstate that. And again, I'm not saying this is in any way objectively worse design, just that I think it's much more standard AAA and less uniquely atmospheric.

 

Edit: Also I'm keeping in mind that this type of audio design is a sort of subconscious cumulative effect so it may be hard to fully see what I'm saying in these short examples.

 

Edit #2: You can compare these two as well. Somehow the zombified undead sound like random dudes now and there are many small, strange details like that that don't make sense to me for Demon's Souls:

 

 

 

Actually this may be a better example even. Let it play for a bit and compare when he goes indoors there in Boletaria for the first small room with the ambush. Immediately you're greeted with a damp, reverb-laden change in sound and the loud crackling of the torches and so on. Is it realistic? No. It's atmospheric and eerie in its surreal quality though. The remake has a much more realistic approach where the torches/fire can barely be heard and so on but considering none of these games have level music, it makes for a pretty boring sounding audio picture I think.

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Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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10 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Oh yeah, you can definitely tell the difference. The new one almost just sounds like only NPCs and characters produce any noise whatsoever, and they don't seem to be affected by the environment they're in. 

To me, this kind of thing is what I often see people call immersion-breaking. The audio design feels disconnected from the place being portrayed to me compared to the original. There's a lack of sense of place, something From clearly is super meticulous about in every game since Demon's.

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Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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I wanna add that they also changed the way soul form works in terms of audio design. When you were in soul form in the original, your footsteps etc. were replaced with that kind of eerie "hollow" ghostly sound as you moved around. Based on the State of Play video, they got rid of that. He's in soul form starting Boletaria and there's no change to the player character's audio feedback at all. The more I analyze it, the weirder it is to me how much simpler the whole soundscape is in the remake.

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