• She/Her

One half of queer VN team @AirGong


Kayin
@Kayin

Another blog repost, feel free to check out the original here

My friend Mirai has been doing her first play through of Demon's Souls and, bless my heart, she's been playing on the PS3. Mirai and I talk a lot about art stuff, so I couldn't help but to throw random screenshots from the Remake at her so we could have a giggle. Surely this wouldn't devolve into hours of screenshot comparing, and grumbling, and... well.

... I thought I was over this, but here I am, accidentally scratching open old wounds.

To be clear up front, I hate the art direction of Demon's Souls Remake. I mean hate hate it. If you like it, that's cool, no shade, we all have our own priorities. We care about different things, and tolerate different things differently and it's fine IT'S FINE YOU'RE FINE~

I think it's deeply important for a remake to have it's own identity. I think it's impossible to make a perfect remake without having your own opinion. Even if you slavishly upscaled everything exactly to match the original designs, changing the fidelity of the content changes the context. You get the repeating grass field in the ps3 Shadow of the Colossus remaster. Stuff just doesn't work the same way when you scale it up.

You gotta make decisions and they made decisions, as they should have! But I swear to god, somehow, as far as my tastes are concerned, and despite all odds...

Every single one of them was bad.

That sounds like an unfair statement. It kinda is an unfair statement. Some less invested people look at me crazy when I say it! Bluepoint has tons of technically great artists! These designs aren't poorly executed or awkwardly designed. Everything is high fidelity, perfectly color graded, well performing, and well optimized... but there's a problem.

Years ago I wrote an article, "Design Literalism vs Lateralism"(which, while no longer on this site, is available here). It's rough, even by the standards of most of my writing, but I think the concept holds up. From Software excels at this "Lateral design", doing things just a little weird, a little different, seemingly picking the literal options that people shy away from, but going lateral where people like to play it straight. For those of us obsessed with From's designs and art, this is one of the biggest appeals, and one of the things about them that is the most difficult to imitate.

The problem is... Whenever confronted with a situation that forced them to make an artistic choice, Bluepoint would choose the most standard option. Make the most expected decision... Almost as if they saw From stray from the formula, and assumed they made a mistake.

What, you had some fat evil men and forgot their BOILS? Amateurs.

What, why would this demon look so goofy and unnatural? Amateurs!

What, is this, a child's scribble? Don't you know a 3/4ths pose is more dynamic?

AMATEURS!

I could keep going, weapon and armor designs, to environmental design choices, weird details that make no sense...

Why does Vanguard have shackles and chains on him? Was he captured? No that's... just what you do? Why does he have holes in his wings? To look more gross, obviously! That's just what you do! It looks cool, right?!

You could do this with so many design decisions in the Demon's Souls Remake, but I want to focus on one.

We're going to talk about why Bluepoint's Flamelurker sucks shit

Click that link and give it a good look. Look at the inspirations, look at everything. Now, to be fair, I hold no individual artist responsible for anything. I don't know what their briefs looked like, what their art directors said, or how much time they were given. Most of the concept art is very well executed. These are talented artists. I know factually that there were people on that team who fought for details they thought were important. I hold no one person to blame.

This isn't even his final design. This design was in the first trailer, where fan outrage made them change the head. All that aside, seeing what was originally intended*(even though they claim it was a "placeholder", despite concept art)* gives insight to how they think because... this could be a fire demon from anything.

Fire demon? You gotta do LAVA, right? and BIG, BIG demon horns. Why would the original design have small, goofy horns??? Gotta be built like an ape, like hellboy! Gotta look BIG and MONSTEROUS! How else are we supposed to know it's POWERFUL? And the Arena? Gotta make it look like some Diablo hell shit! Also the mouth of the temple? It should be a BIG DRAGON HEAD cause it leads the DRAGON GOD and that would be EPIC!!

None of this is bad but it feels like every other game, resembling the well executed but utterly forgettable work you see all over Artstation. Art that gets you hired. When your director asks you for a fire demon, you know what he's thinking. Do you really want to to give him something weird or goofy looking? Even if you had a great idea, do you really want to bother when you know your Director won't go for it? Even if the Director likes it, the Executive Producer will send it back for revisions. Why are you making yourself more work?

So you do what's tried and true. You can look at the references to the left of the concept art and see that is well worn ground. So... what did he look like on the PS3?

[floatbox type="full"]


[/floatbox]

Flamelurker isn't lava. Flamelurker isn't fire. Flamelurker is on fire.

Your typical fire demon seeps lava like a monster drools. The lava is a natural part of itself. It, often, is the lava... but with the original flamelurker, all aspects of his design point to distress. Skin melting, not like rock, but like flesh. Clothes? Armor? Skin maybe? All peeled back painfully, flaying out, like birch logs curling in a fire. His soul is so hot it is used by the Blacksmith Ed to forge weapons. He looks blown out on screen compared to the PS5 version. Lava isn't that hot. You don't forge with lava unless you've seen too much bad fantasy. Lava melts, but fire burns. Wood burns. Flesh burns and carbonizes. These are the hottest flames. This is a fire disruptive to the being wielding it, destroying him from the inside.

Add to that all the potential lore... Flamelurker as the Legendary Big M, the man who killed dragons with his bare hands. Is this him, becoming like a dragon, like his likely descendants Ed and Baldwin, getting burned up alive by his obsession as is the usual metaphor in Souls game? Or did he die fighting the Dragon God? Is this burning his soul suffering and living on?

... Or is he just Lava Man Big, Very Hot? Just being strong and scary and posturing like a gorilla instead of being both uncannily monstrous and yet uncomfortably human? Fighting in a demonic hell temple, or in a temple of an old, fallen civilization... a mausoleum containing a great hero, used to symbolically seal away a god that didn't actually exist until the Fog brought it forth from legend?

Everything about the PS5 flamelurker, and his environment, and animations are so well executed... but they don't build to anything. They don't inspire any thought. While maybe not literal, as my old article would say, they are direct. The statistical average of a fire demon, in a statistically average arena, all executed with incredible skill. Is that not the true dream of videogames? To fight the most technically well executed big lava dude?

For me, as someone who doesn't care much about fidelity, designs like this leave me feeling nothing. This design does nothing to excite the imagination, or inspire curiosity. Even without all the possible lore, without all the deep readings... PS5 Flamelurker is an enemy I've seen in a million other games. He's probably a character in at least 3 different MOBAs. Even if the same design doesn't quite exist, it's existence is practically implied, an aspect of the ur-flame demon that exists at the center of the zeitgeist. Familiar and boring.

The original, at his worst, even if ALL the things I said about his design were bullshit and happenstance, he's still... a weird dude with a goofy face and a giant round dome of a head that makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe I am a little nuts, but I value that more. "What the fuck is up with HIM?" is a at least a thought I can dwell upon, where the Remake's design, if in any other game, would flow past me as soon as I looked away. Rote to the point of inspiring incuriosity. At best it is a pretty image to distract me for as long as I choose to look at the screen. Modern media rarely tries to intrigue you with depth, but instead by keeping up the pace. Aggressive animations, colorful, complicated, dynamic arenas, bright particles and lights. Please don't look away, we've worked very had on this.

A child who is used to screaming for attention doesn't understand the power of marinating in silence.

This isn't exactly Bluepoint's fault, because they're not exceptional in this regard. Heck, if they're exceptional at anything it's genuinely at the technical ends of art. But they are the unfortunate technical team that's being given Art Games to remake. They represent the whole industry, they represent movie VFXs, and even the future of AI.

Cogs in the Machine

Mirai and I end up talking about AI art a lot and a point she made, as professional CG artist herself was... the industry already treats talent like AI. The pipeline strips out creativity. Everyone is given a task so small that they can't really have much expression. The spots where you can add your personal touch are almost invisible.

You don't make the whole 3d set, you either make one or two assets for a set. They have to match, so don't be ambitious. When you're assembling a 3d scene, you're working from the props made by other artists. You may rig a model exceptionally well, but you're working with the animators so you can't be too ambitious or experimental. The animators? They're cleaning up mocap data. The more the work is spread, the more consistent the output becomes. Then when it comes back, you get notes, and the process moves again, like tweaking a prompt or re-generating with a different seed. The bigger a production, the less influential one person becomes.

You still needed a concept artist, but that time is passing. A person in this context often becomes not so much a contributing artist but a machine that turns time and money into random pictures. Or... at least that seems to be how it feels to the people in charge. They don't want the most creative, interesting, or unique version of something, they want the boring thing they see in their head done well. They want an exceptional version of the average. You can look at that flamelurker reference sheet. It had no hope of being an interesting design, because the only reference it pulled was from art that already existed and a few pictures of lava. Things get made a certain way, so artists who want to get into the field copy those things, feeding those images to producers, who then expect things that look like that, creating a pretty but numbing feedback loop.

This is what AI does. It can't be creative, because it can't think laterally. It can't even think. It can just analyze a prompt and predict the average. "Trending on Artstation" is a common AI prompt for a reason.

To go back to my old article... An AI will give you McCreeCassidy from Overwatch, but it won't give you Bayonetta. It can't give you Bayonetta because it doesn't know how to make a Witch without making a Witch. It won't give you Johnny from Guilty Gear because even though he is in no way an outrageous, or complicated design, you can't say 'make me an air pirate katana dude' because it doesn't know how and is fundamentally incapable of finding the design between the prompt. You'll get a... steam punk samurai with a cog for an eye patch.

You can maybe sit there and come up the design and all the little details in your head, trying to generate it by banging on Stable Diffusion for days... but ultimately if you want something like Bayonetta, you gotta pay someone like Mari Shimazaki. Either way, the creative thinking is coming from a human.

At the same time though, while AI is bad at these things, the systems in place right now are also bad at these things. Maybe not as bad, but often close. Young artists training for decades to be the mechanical turks of executives who have "the vision". Of course they'll be replaced, they're practically designed to be replaced. Commodified assets whose real value is only known by those closest to them.

But these cogs are still human, and despite the restrictions in front of them, they still try to bring their passion to the things they work on. Losing them is not just a matter of lost jobs and wages, but that little bit of extra care, the safety valve for rich men and their unearned creative confidence. Human cogs can push back when they feel something is wrong with the machine. Because as utterly basic as Bluepoint's corporate tastes are, without real people around, there would have been no one to say no to this horrible Dozer Axe design.

Shoutouts to my number one DeS hater friend out there, you know who you are


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Kayin's post:

Something that has bothered me for a while about Bluepoint remakes is that they always take out the artistic choices of the original to push what is commonly called "The AAA Look." Every time I look at the Shadow of the Colossus remake I am a little sad because in their graphical decisions to push full tilt into realism it lost a lot of cool aesthetics the original Team Ico did to overcome the PS2's limitations like they did with lighting and fog. They even ignored the colour palette of the game, again ignoring it favour of realism, "the AAA Look."
I think the console wars are kind of dumb, but I do have to admit that Sony seems way too invested in this aesthetic and this is reflected in them buying Bluepoint. It seems too corporate and clean, for lack of a better term. I know a lot of people on both the dev and the gamer side of things who think this is the fundamentally correct way to make game graphics, which saddens me a little bit.

I'll be honest I kinda want to see them do it out of just.... sheer curiosity. I wanna see a dude in a mask with a top hat throw green vials at people. It'll suddenly be steam punk for some reason??

If given the choice between a lower fidelity game with a unique aesthetic or the most technically impressive photorealistic game... I'll pick the first one every single time without even thinking. Indie games can get away with this because a cool aesthetic is a great way to sidestep the cost of hitting AAA graphics, they get to save money and resources AND stand out from the crowd, even if they aren't going for a deliberately retro look like with Dusk or Pseudoregalia.

Meanwhile, AAA games have to show off all their money, they have to be the hottest new thing on the block. You can't cut back on fancy lighting effects or texture resolution, because then you'll look cheap or last-gen. You can't kick the orchestra out and hire one dude from Bandcamp to make your soundtrack, because that won't feel grandiose enough. You also can't be experimental, because those hundreds of millions in your budget have to get made back, and that means you need to have a much wider appeal.

The part about interesting musician with a Bandcamp page versus an orchestra hits super hard after remembering that Insomniac's remake of Ratchet and Clank fully abandoned the series' music style to match the same orchestral porridge that the tie-in movie used, which then carried forward to Rift Apart. It made me realize why I never see anyone talking about buying the standalone OST releases of many major AAA games. Too many games are desperate to sound like each other now.

That shield is the biggest "I don't get this game" change. It's not the WORST because it's so minor, but it's so "???????"

.... I'll be honest, the guy who did that also did the ""dozer"" axe so I think he's the secret WoW superfan I theorized about. 😬

It's definitely not the worst (of the ones you posted the Flamelurker is almost certainly the worst just by the degree to which they genericized one of the most memorable bosses in the original) but it's certainly indicative.

i am going to sleep, but i played the ps3 version emulated on my pc, and i really liked and all.

after reading the text, i still confused with the biggest pet peeve i have is the change to Yuria the Witch clothes, which i guess just change the "Old Raggedy Set " to not be burned somehow.

which still i don't understrand why don't just give her a new set of clothes that resembles the original one.

ALso the music i disliked how over produced it is, everthing feels softer in comparison, but i am a guy who went down a river on foot and swimining hearing on the phone the Evergrace Ost, so i dunno if is valid my opinion on that.

"your design is so generic they could have been in a moba" is the most scathing critique i’ve ever read.

it's a harsh but fair comparison for sure. all ai can do is smush """training data""" together into the most generic version of that thing. but a human artist can bring a perspective. art should be the result of thousands of decisions, big and small, conscious and subconscious, that reflect the individual and how into feet they are.

this should make us optimistic. unfortunately, the gamers love slop.

Excellent job articulating a feeling I've had about Bluepoint's work for years. I've never liked how they handled the Demon Souls remake and it's enough of a detriment that I never felt the need to get around to it.

As a concept artist who's worked on a lot of games with art directions that are arguably part of the problem, You've nailed the general sentiment for why a lot of high budget AAA games look like this. I've worked with some truly creative and thoughtful artists and you'd never know it because we worked on the mobile versions of Call of Duty and PUBG. Where if I'm being frank, the nature of the creative pipeline means it's simply not worth fighting for better ideas. If this dipshit producer wants the most basic ideation of a potentially interesting concept, we're not going to win this fight.

Hell, I'm not going to pretend like a lot of concept artists working in the industry aren't also just incurious people with distressingly narrow frames of reference. The AAA games market has kind of self selected for these types of artists to thrive in the current state of the industry.

Not at all! I enjoyed having a chance to speak on it a little, the typical conversations about games rarely intersect with my field. Even when other sites were reporting on the controversy around bluepoint's artistic decisions, it never really quite touched upon why or how those decisions happen.

"like birch logs curling in a fire" is a beautiful phrase, and also a great example of a thing that would frustrate an """AI prompt artist""" when the program can't return the visual. a computer could only burn trees and show you the evidence.

It's also one of those things that was shockingly hard to google. It's one of those things you only know to look for reference for if you have lived experiences, looking at nature.

my mind goes to Keita Amemiya's designs for Final Fantasy XIV and Shin Megami Tensei IV

Yiazmat and Ultima the High Seraph are established foes from the Ivalice games (FFXII and FFT, respectively) but Amemiya's reimaginings of them for FFXIV's "Return to Ivalice" raid series are distinctly non-standard; the overall body plans and broad thematic details are drawn from their inspirations, but the actual executions are dramatically different. i can think of no dragons from any work of media which resemble Amemiya's split-bodied, hammer-hooved incarnation of Yiazmat, and his Ultima less resembles a blue-skinned Christmas tree angel mounted atop a gilded cannon and more an ornate, floral-looking figure mounted atop a scowling, multi-visaged demon head

his designs for the Seraphs from Shin Megami Tensei, by contrast, completely throw out the original designs - and in some cases, any semblance of a humanoid body plan - in favor of delightfully nightmarish, description-defying creatures with faces in the wrong places, the very embodiment of "BE NOT AFRAID"

both these sets of designs more closely resemble each other than anything else in the respective series they were created for, and you absolutely couldn't get any of them out of an AI

I play around with AI a lot. Keeping up with it, despite my hatred and like... It's SO SO hard to get anything meanful. The more you care about the end result, the more AI disappointed, again and again.

HOLY SHIT THAT DOZER AXE SUCKS. it literally is supposed to lack a blade! Thats the point! Thats what made it memorable! Fuck!

What i ADORE about fromsoft is their designs that actively break expectations. To embrace GOOFINESS. an axe that is literally without a blade, but is still considered so powerful in-game, is so much more INTERESTING.

It's so funny that the actual Remake Dozer Axe is like the most faithfully re-created item in the game like someone on the team saw that proposed art and fucking dove on a hand grenade to save the original design..

They saw what that SAME ARTIST dod to the guillotine axe and were like "absolutely not. Not AGAIN."

I truly cannot fathom missing the core appeal of both those weapons so severely

Really good post and I think you're pretty much right on all points. I have a lot of history with demon's souls. My first souls game, maybe my first ps3 game entirely. Anyway, despite how correct you are, I still really like how the remake looks. I just can't help it, haha.

Not really the point of your post, but it's sheer wizardry that they were able to make the remake feel exactly like the original.

As someone who by all means kinda like what bluepoint did with their remake, as it is has its own vision and made choices for itself instead of copy-pasting everything like with the gameplay which creates a weird Frankenstein effect, this write-up is excellent and I think I even agree with it !

"I still like the thing you're hating on but like what you wrote" is honestly the highest praise, ty~

Also god I can't wait to see that Frankenstein effect in MGS3 Delta or w/e they're calling it

i am ready for it to be awful because remakes but in the true spirit of a metal gear appreciator, i am hoping it is at least bad in a weird or interesting way. sad that fox engine is going to languish. i wonder if kojopro could get the rights to it back at some point

Lots of really good points here and yet my brain keeps getting stuck on how bad Bluepoint's take on the Adjudicator's Shield is.

Why did they change the art style for it? Why did they change it to that? Why is the bird so overemphasized? Why does the shield show it with the broken Meat Cleaver stuck in its side?

It's interesting because it's not like From themselves haven't played in the fire demon lava guy sandbox, but their interpretations are almost universally more in line with what you point out for our boy flamelurker here - their fire guys ARE NOT THRIVING. Like take Ceaseless Discharge, that guy is in misery, clear misery from his very existence. It's an affliction, not a normal state of being. Likewise his sister with her lava-vomiting spider body is super not thriving. His mother the Bed of Chaos is decidedly Not Thriving too, having become a weird fire/tree/bug thing as she has.

Also i know you touched on it but IMO the fat officials are the most egregious downgrade in the whole remake. They were robbed not just of their iconic, unsettling smile, but all of the PERSONALITY it gave them. The decision to completely flatten them to "what if a mean fat guy had an axe" is so upsetting.

Yeah and even if you're like "Hey the centipede demon looks pretty good" or w/e like maybe there is a PERFECTLY HAPPY LAVA DEMON SOMEWHERE IN ONE OF THESE GAMES (idk probably in ds2 or something were I wouldn't remember) like that's after SO many more introspective designs and it's nto taking a design with some thought put into it and then stripping it away to return to the statistical average.

The thing that gets me with that shield is, like. The original's clearly aiming for a specific era of medieval art, and the remake is like "wow this perspective is amateurish, CLEARLY we need to make this more dynamic" while totally ignoring that the perspective itself is communicating something about the society and people who'd make that shield??

The moment I saw Bluepoint's fat official I knew it was over for me. With such sparse storytelling in Fromsoft's games, there is so much conveyed through the designs. There was a sense of mystery to the original. That face, such a strange pallor and texture, is it even skin, or a mask? That static grin, like something not quite human having a go at mimicking a human expression. There's something unsettling about it, like an eldritch being trying to blend in, but not trying very hard.

Bluepoint's version is just, a fat man with a skin condition, somehow more human with his normal skin and expression, but less believable being that he's a high ranking official with clothes not tailored to fit him. They somehow managed to make him both less interesting and more incongruous to the setting lol

It's fucking dire. Fat Official could have been the Flame Lurker of this writeup. The bad fit shirt is just so lazy and gross and boring. The Fat Officials might win for worst change both because of how much the design sucks, and how much you have to look at it.

another example that really sticks in my brain is the Penetrator, because the new design is so close to the original and yet still completely different... I remember watching footage of demon's souls for the first time, shortly after playing dark souls, and finding the original design so striking. gilt silver armor, with that elegantly-shaped, bright icy blue sword, and killing the official right before the boss fight... it's heroic, right? if he weren't trying to impale you he'd be the protagonist of any story he was in.

then you look at the remake version. the silhouette is nearly the same, all the same distinctive points are there, but everything is just... Eviled Up. the armor is gilt black instead of silver, and the details are twisting and organic instead of clean and elegant. the surface of the sword looks gnarled, and it's given a chunky red blood effect instead of a clean blue light. even the bases are switched from indigo to a bright red with black details. every last bit just screams "that's not what a demon knight looks like, silly! we'll fix it for you."

and they were so proud of it, too! they made a collectible statue! they put a whole dumb arg secret thing into the game, ending with his armor set! "look, guys, you can finally wear the penetrator's armor! that thing everyone wanted from the original! see, we're big fans too." but it isn't the original's armor, and it isn't appealing in at all the same way. it's just bizarre to me

There is something great about the fact that all three of the Boletaria bosses are heroes like Biorr. Only Phalanx is truly bizarre, but Tower Knight and Penetrator keep the type of dignity they'd have before becoming demons. Like we see with Astraea, you don't become a demon and become LOL EVIL!!!! Like oh they got BIG and its CONCERNING and the VIBES ARE BAD but they still see themselves as proud knights!!

Damn this is so, so, SO relevant. To everything. The remake, the current moment, AI, all of it. Demon's Souls is my favorite Souls game because it's so flawed and creative and interesting. Dark Souls was a better Video Game™, but nothing beats DeS for just having the vibe, the weirdness, the atmosphere. Everything's got that weird PS3 jank that just adds to it. You can't replicate that on modern hardware. Everything is so sparse in just the right way to seem ethereal, dreamlike. I could write an essay on what makes it special, but when I saw the remake, I realized they Didn't Get It. It was going to be Demon's Souls by way of Elden Ring. All the edges sanded off.