Demon's Souls Prototype Footage Reveals Scrapped First-Person Mode

A newly uncovered 2007 developer presentation shows that Demon's Souls once included a first-person play option, alongside a different third-person camera and several ideas that never made the final cut. The material, found by FromSoftware dataminer Lance McDonald, offers a rare look at how the game was being pitched internally before it became one of the defining action RPGs of its era.

McDonald unearthed gameplay footage, images, and presentation slides from an internal 2007 showcase at Sony Computer Entertainment, where developers presented projects in progress. The PowerPoint presentation was built by Japan Studio PD#3 and already used the name Demon's Souls, although it was still marked as a working title at that stage.

The slides described an ambitious pitch for a "worldwide blockbuster" in which players would travel across "fields, a ruined castle, lone wasteland, and other cursed locations" while battling "enemies and twisted mutants and creatures, bosses, gigantic chaos beyond the knowledge of this universe." Even in that early form, much of the game's core identity was already visible.

The most striking difference is the camera. In the released game, players explored Boletaria in third person with manual camera control, a setup that became central to the feel of Demon's Souls and later Souls titles. In the prototype footage McDonald found, combat is shown entirely from a first-person viewpoint, and he said this was a selectable mode during development.

The third-person camera in that prototype also behaved differently. Rather than giving players free camera rotation, it followed the character automatically. The left stick was used for strafing and backsteps, a control approach McDonald said appears deliberately similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

That comparison matters because it highlights how fluid Demon's Souls still was in 2007. The final game arrived with a much more distinctive identity, especially in the way combat, movement, and spatial awareness worked together. A first-person option would have changed that feel dramatically, particularly in a game built around careful positioning, shield use, and reading enemy animations.

The presentation also includes examples of content that was later cut or reworked. Among them are snake-headed enemies that would eventually appear in another form years later in Dark Souls, specifically in Sen's Fortress. The slides also touch on the ghost mechanic, one of the ideas that did survive into the finished game and became a recurring feature across the broader Souls formula.

One of the stranger details from the presentation is a South Park reference. Japan Studio used an image from the episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" as an example of the "stereotype image for MMO RPG gamers" that the team seemed eager to avoid. That detail fits with Demon's Souls' unusual online design, which mixed asynchronous multiplayer elements into an otherwise solitary and oppressive RPG structure.

The find adds another piece to the long history of FromSoftware's development process becoming clearer years after release. McDonald has previously surfaced unused material tied to Elden Ring, and this Demon's Souls prototype now shows just how many important choices were still unsettled before the game took its final form.

It also lands at a moment when Demon's Souls remains central to PlayStation history. The original game helped establish a template that reshaped modern action RPGs, while Bluepoint's remake reintroduced it to a wider audience on PS5. Seeing an early version with first-person combat and a very different control philosophy makes the finished release look even more deliberate in retrospect.