LEVEL UP recently had the opportunity to interview Gavin Moore, Creative Director for Demon's Souls and a member of SIE Japan Studio, about various elements of the game. Of course, one of the topics that were touched on was the graphic section.
Now the question is, if the PlayStation 5 can be raytraced and it could have been implemented in Demon's Souls , why leave it out? As explained by Moore, it was a decision they made since it was something that was outside their initial ideal of the project. Also, there is a certain cost to implement it and they preferred to prioritize other elements.
“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"
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 ”, were the words of Moore.