Top 5 improvements we want to see in Demon’s Souls remake for PS5

Meg Bethany Koepp

Demon’s Souls is officially getting a remake, as revealed during the June 11 PlayStation 5 event. The gorgeous-looking take on the PS3 game has fans of the Soulsborne series excited to revisit the Boletaria kingdom.

Sony’s PS5 celebration closed out with a bang, announcing a cluster of games fans have been dying to hear about for years – one of them being the Demon’s Souls remake. Originally released on PS3 in 2009, players have long since been waiting to revisit the game, especially after the popularity of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

Helmed by Bluepoint Games – the team behind the Shadow of the Colossus remake and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection – the re-envisioning promises to do the action RPG justice on Sony’s next-generation console. Here are five improvements we’d like to see to the PlayStation 5 version over the original.

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A better healing system

Farming grass healing items was a big part of the original game.

In Demon’s, healing consumables are your best friend unless you learn the Heal Miracle from Disciple of God or Saint Urbain for 5,000 souls after starting the Miracle of Temple Knight and Priest classes.

Dark Souls introduced the Estus Flask, which allows players to heal up on the fly provided they’ve got any uses left, though even then you’re able to replenish your stock by resting at a bonfire. The remake would benefit greatly from a similar mechanic, as farming for grass was a tedious affair for all.

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Faster ladder climbing

Ladder climbing is a chore in the PS3 title.

If you’ve played the action RPG, then you’ll know just how much of a slog it is when using ladders. It feels like it takes forever, and your character moves at a snail’s pace – not ideal.

In the later games, this was improved by allowing the player to slide down them for quick access, as well as making the process speedier in general.

Adding this into the new title would no doubt give veterans a sigh of relief as they no longer have to wait 10 years to reach their destination.

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No more Item Burden

The mechanic limits the amount of items you can carry.

Not to be confused with Equipment Burden, Item Burden is literally just that – it stops players from carrying over a certain weight. Having that with armor and weapons makes sense – and is something that made its way to Dark Souls – but not so much with consumable items.

The amount could be extended by increasing Vitality, but if burdened, you’d have to unload your stuff to Stockpile Thomas or drop things completely before you could pick anything else up.

Taking the mechanic out of the re-envisioning would – quite literally – lift the weight off of fans’ shoulders, making for a better experience when deciding what to carry and what to get rid of without being limited. Even better if they could do it and still find a way to keep Thomas around.

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Stat re-speccing

There’s no easy way to re-spec your stats in the original Demon’s Souls.

The PlayStation 3 title doesn’t have an easy way to redo your stats. Technically, you can do it if you “delevel” your character by invading another world and forcing an environmental death such as falling from a cliff, but there’s no official mechanic that lets you shuffle them around.

Dark Souls 2 & 3 gave you limited re-specs, so implementing a similar mechanic into the PS5 game could be a great way to include it without affecting the difficulty too much.

Failing that, making it only available in New Game+ would give players an extra reason to replay the action RPG, especially since they could go with a different build.

The broken Archstone fixed

Will it finally be fixed?

By far the biggest thing we (and a lot of longtime DS lovers) want to see is the fixing of the broken Archstone. Unlike later Souls games where it’s one open area, Demon’s is level-based. You’d get around by using five stone portals to visit different worlds.

There is a sixth stone, but it’s always been broken, with dataminers revealing that it was originally planned to lead to a new area dubbed “The Land of the Giants” by fans, but that the developer ran out of time or funds. It was hoped that DLC would finally open up the new land, but nothing ever came of it.

Adding this forgotten world to the remake would finally put the mystery of what lies behind the Archstone to bed, as well as giving players new content to explore.