AMA: Q&A with Demon's Souls Creative Director Gavin Moore

[Music] welcome to gdc showcase i'm chris graft editor-in-chief of gama sutra i'm joined today by a very special guest for today's ama session uh gavin moore creative director on the new demon souls for playstation 5. i see people have already started putting in questions and if you haven't go ahead now start submitting your questions via the question tab in the chat box there in the bottom right we'll try to get through as many as we can and with that gavin thanks for joining us and please introduce yourself hi chris thank you so much for having me here today it's uh it's great to be with you all the way from tokyo and japan it's a little early here in the morning 7 15 so excuse me if i'm just going to drink all my coffee here when remaking and remastering a game how do you decide which bugs from the original to keep were fixed or fixed based on modernizing

it uh player expectations or or other reasons that yeah thanks jay for that really difficult question you know that early in the morning to start off with um that's a really really really really difficult process there are a lot of bugs that actually become meta in a game right and um it took a long time um demon souls took three years to make and i can tell everybody out there nearly every day we had those discussions we went through that list and we ticked them for yes it's going to be fixed or no it's not going to be fixed because the community want to keep that sort of bug so we look at a lot of background online to see what people are talking about and what they're into what they're not into and you know it's it's a very very difficult decision i mean there's no real yes and no answer it's not black and white it's something we investigate yeah that

is a great question like for being seven in the morning uh that's really good uh we're gonna go to uh stephen real quick um how did your role as the creative director change um in a good or bad way over the course of the demon souls remake project so when i was asked to come on board with the project right at the beginning by the executive producer asakurasan um i spent many sleepless nights i can assure you right this is a playstation gym it's a playstation classic it's beloved by so many people across the world and to take on that responsibility is um not taken on lightly so i would spend sleepless nights worrying first of all what miyazaki sam would say and then i would send the next month not sleeping worrying about what the fans would say um and then eventually you just have to um you know hitch up your trousers and get to work basically and um believe in what you're doing and

believe in the passion so over the course of the game i think my trepidation was overtaken by my passion for what the game is because it's such a spectacular game and so i wouldn't say that i wasn't passionate at the beginning but the more i delved into it the more i became passionate as a creative director to make sure this was the best experience tool for a whole new generation of gamers thanks for that we're going to go on to another one from amelia's any advice you have for an up-and-coming designer with dreams to become a creative director so it took me 20 years to get to where i am now and i've been in this position for 10 and it doesn't get any easier and the one thing you have to keep is your passion and your drive and if you can't get out and out of your bed in the morning because it's raining too hard or it's too cold to go and work on that game that you love then you shouldn't be working on that

game so keep the passion um the other thing i would say is good advice to anybody out there is that when you start a game right you start off with a core experience that you build upon and over the court course of you know making the game how many ever years that may be things change and the game evolves and it takes on a life of its own so don't be afraid to keep reevaluating what that core is because you might have put a feature into that game which you thought at the beginning was great and was working but a year or so down the line it might actually be hindering what the game could become so always examine what you're doing and be brave enough to cut something out of a game as much as you want to add to it you take one from alexis um how do you think one is able to maintain the soul of a game in a remake that's a great question so um

when we look at doing a remake or a remaster we've gone well beyond remasters now they really are true remakes um we try and identify as alexis said the core the soul of the game and that is what we keep um you know working with blue point was incredible working with marco and peter the chief technical officer and how they work and how they sit their engine over the top of the existing engine and strip away everything apart from what we identify as that core or the soul which for demon sources the ai and the gameplay and then we build everything back on top of that so the collision the camera you know obviously the graphical elements the sound is built over the top so even in demon souls on playstation 5 you're still running the core programming essence of the original on the playstation 3. it's very cool um we'll take one from chris that's getting uh some up votes here when creating a game

as difficult as demon souls how do you balance difficult gameplay with intuitive mechanics and usability in general making game hardcore but engaging and fun um to keep enough users playing is that something you could speak to yeah at 7 30 in the morning yeah [Laughter] it's it's it's not as difficult as people may say um i think a lot of the frustration with the original game of demon souls in it and how people thought it was too hardcore came around because the actual system it was running on wasn't capable of running it properly and the frustration of the load times and you know dying and then waiting two minutes for it to load to run back and die again i mean it just made you pull your hair out as you can see i played the game back in 2009 so um so keeping the original core of the game as we as i just talked about

maintains its essence so you're not changing that in any way so you're going to keep the heart core feeling um but we have to think out games change over time and how games evolve and how gamers change and expectations of what a triple a title you know have changed in 10 12 years so it's important that we made those decisions very carefully about what we would add or what we wouldn't had how accessible the game should be you know obviously making a game on the playstation 5 with new features you know super fast ssd you know the new controller with the haptics feedback this is always going to change the game we had to be very careful how you're going to implement those you know user experiences without changing the original melissa asks what kind of challenges have you faced while working in japan on games as a foreign develop developer

i i am i don't experience any anything any challenges in the sense of being a foreigner here japanese people are very open in the workplace and in society to to everyone i think the challenges um are the way that the working practices here are different from in the west it's very common for a team any team member in the west to speak up and speak their mind it's not so common in a japanese development team but it is something that um you know in japan studio that we worked on very heavily to make sure that everyone has a say in the development of the game and to say it's okay to speak up and to speak your mind and to be creative i mean everybody that works in games is very creative and if we're not listening to them then we're losing our precious results tremaine asks hey tremaine seeing you

around this week um can you walk us through a typical day of being a creative director such as any pressures responsibilities enjoyment etc the 7 am amas live ama is probably one of them yeah what are those uh i usually get up around half past four and um i just scanned my phone for all of the emails and the messages and stuff get to work you know start work around you know half six or seven games or global experience now so i would have calls in america both uh in uh central time in texas and obviously in the west coast in california throughout the day then i would get online obviously this is all work from home for a year because of you know 2020 and covet so i would get online and talk to my team um go through every aspect and then even i'll get online with europe so i could be doing everything from

playing the game writing up notes um to different members of staff you know chatting with the art director in texas about the way i can't see the you know how the game plays down this corridor or this character doesn't look correct or it could be talking to a composer or you know in in california or you know going in into the you know music recordings in london or you know being in the voice recordings in london directing actors or you know everything every aspect of the game has to be covered in in the general day and everybody is just as important as everybody else you know it's a massive team effort that sounds like a lot of work um valerie it's a lot of fun too yeah valerie asks uh with demon souls uh you got to develop a souls game how different is it to direct a souls game from any other game what are the main challenges with

demon souls i think demon souls challenge is that it's has legacy it's history you know it's the first of its kind it's a game that spawned a whole new general gaming you know and there are incredible expectations and you have to be very very careful in what you're doing as a genre of game i think the basic rules of how a game plays in the user experience are generally the same regardless of any game that you're playing you know you can apply the same rules it's just the demon souls with the demon souls title you have to be respectful of its legacy uh samuel asks uh demon souls re uh the demons remake was built only for the playstation 5. was the decision to target the newest hardware made early on so we started off the

development um on the pc like all of our titles do we work heavily on the pc and through and then as we get dev kits we um continue that pipeline the blueprint engine is incredible the way that you can adjust something on the pc and it will adjust it straight on to whichever platform you're working on or whatever you can see on your screen um but yeah originally we started off on the pc um and then as we started to get specs through for the playstation 5 we started to think about all the different features that we could adjust and add um but it has always been a playstation 5 game and a playstation 5 exclusive um gia asks and i apologize if i'm mispronouncing names uh what is your team's process to identify uh the soul of a game that you were talking about earlier when remaking a game it's a process so that that's a

that's a lot of discussion um you know i think with the game like demon souls it was always going to be um it had to be its ai it had to be the way that the characters moved um and the timing of attacks you know none of that could change and so we spent a lot of time maintaining that i mean we re motion captured the whole player animation sets and we added a whole new female animation set that never existed in the original game but all the cadence had to remain the same and that was weeks and weeks of motion capture to make sure that we were getting exactly what we needed so we wouldn't change that soul um so i i think it was quite easy on demon souls to identify uh that essence you know the actual core gameplay it was much harder i think to make sure that we maintained the feeling of the game the despair that the world brings across you know we were adding a lot more

visual assets into the game because we had a lot more power than the playstation 3. you know the playstation 5 is incredibly powerful and we wanted to you know showcase you know that world is the best way we best we could especially with visuals and sound but we had to maintain that feeling of despair that miyazaki put into the original game harris asks um as creative director how do you balance leading your teams to achieve your vision with giving them the agency and support to come up with their own ideas it's a lot easier on demon souls to do that because everybody has groundwork to work on so that everybody knows what you know a base to work on if you're making an original title it's um a process where i would lay down um what i believe and that this would be either could be a story that could be

game ideas or game of mechanics uh level ideas and level designs and then i would usually split the teams um across each of those levels so you would have animators you know environment artists character artists game designers you know working on each level together as a team and it's up to them at that point to um if they come up with ideas to present those ideas and uh for us as a team to come to a consensus about it but as a creative director you have to make that final decision yourself um and it's not personal in any way you just have to look at the whole of the game you know in in its entirety and make a decision that that is the correct thing for the game thanks uh chris asks uh what is what are some of your favorite memories of remaking this game

so as a game i think some of my favorite memories are just watching the game evolve and grow that's always great on any game that you work on you know to look back where you came from and look at where you you know you are at the end is incredible um most of my favorite memories are just the great times with you know all the different teams around the world and you know there's a great great people that work both in sony and at blue point and a lot of fun times together with those people nicole asks uh how did designing next-gen haptics for the ps5 controller changed the game so that was um one of the hardest things you had to do i mean if you were making an original title you could make original game mechanics that would literally use the haptics in in different and you know novel and exciting ways we wanted to use the haptics

but we didn't exactly know how we were going to do it and it wasn't until we actually got the the controller in our hands and felt how the haptics would work haptics is incredibly different from uh the way that a just a normal dual shock would work just a vibration um it works uh in you know together with both sound and visuals all three have to work together so they have to be designed together so you can't just add it at the end like we used to do with you know jaw shark and vibration it has to be something from the beginning of the game that you're thinking about all the time because you're always going to add sound and visuals working in in harmony together and the only way we could do that in demon souls as far as i was concerned is to make the combat grittier right and by feeling and sensing the you know the hits and the strikes and the blocks and the the worst of vanguard's axes it passed you know as you rolled underneath it was

an incredible sense that i was suddenly you know thrown deeper into the combat so it really did enhance the game um brian says hi gavin uh blue point seems to be one of the studio's most dedicated to high frame rate tech in the business can you speak as to why 60 frames per second is so important to your studio i think 60 frames a second probably is compared to pc gaming is probably pretty slow at the moment right um i i know that my son doesn't like anything that drops below 240 hertz when he's on his pc um but every time that you increase the frame rate um you increase the fidelity you know you increase the feeling the emotion you feel you know that you're pulled into the game more you feel like you're a better gamer because the game's giving you more chances you're seeing more right and um so it is incredibly

important to make sure that any tech that we produce now especially on the playstation 5 has to run at least at 60 frames a second um david asks if you could remake any game you want what would you remake oh my god see i would have remade final fantasy 7 right because i just wanted to remake the scene when seth cephegoth kills you know and i was just like no but then they remade it so i'm like okay they've done that one um what would i remake i'm not sure there are so many great games out there um and so many great gaming experiences that you know you i would love to revisit um childhood gaming experiences for instance i'm not sure a lot of them would hold up but in my head they were just amazing experiences um let's see who else we got here

[Music] let's see sorry what qualities would you say a creative director must need to be successful apart from the passion that you talked about earlier and that's from amelia's there's vision um you have to listen that's incredibly important right you have to listen to the people around you because everybody has an opinion and everybody around you is creative and you have to make sure that you're listening to them and then there's a famous line in um game of thrones where jon snow's told like you know to be a leader you have to follow right i think that's incredibly important you have to learn you know everybody's job basically not down to the minutia of it but you have to know what people are going through

and what you're ordering them to do you know it's not it's not good enough to go and make that character and go make it like this and i want it in a week right you can't do that you have to understand the processes and the workflows and the you know how long it takes and what people are doing and how much of their life they're pouring into your creation and you therefore you have to be respectful and treat them with respect tremaine asks um what were some major hurdles if any uh that the team experienced uh doing the remake outside of the pandemic yeah yeah i started the pandemic um i think our major hurdles were always about uh making sure that we were being true to the original right um you know we've learned a lot um bluepoint and um you know japan studio learned a lot remaking shadow of the colossus and it wasn't until that title was made

that we felt that we could take on demon souls and do it justice and so we knew that we could make a great experience and we could definitely give you incredibly outstanding audio and visual and sensory experience on the playstation 5 but it was always going to be are we doing the original justice and and are we always state remaining and staying true to that original vision misha asks um in comparison to the dark souls series do you feel player progression is something that needs to be kept and she says i found learning about the progression in dark souls a very useful benchmark yes probably uh but you have to differentiate the demon souls and dark souls are two completely different titles you know the dark souls series is is a

child of demon souls and demon souls is the first of its kind and that's not to say there are many design issues and changes that um were made in the dark zone series you know as the as the original development team learned more about what they wanted to create and how they felt that that game should play um i think demon souls though stands up you know even today as a classic and um i'm just glad we got the chance to remake it and bring it to a whole new generation of gamers out there ibrahim asks uh what would you recommend an aspiring game designer from europe uh who wants to work abroad for example in japan learn japanese right um definitely learn japanese i've been here 18 years and i'm still terrible so that will help you immensely

um if you really have the passion you really want to go to a foreign country i think the best way to do is pack your bags and go to the foreign country right find a means to get there you know live your dream get on that plane you know whatever it is get to that foreign country and then you know really start applying to companies and get your way in and it doesn't matter how you get in get in at any level and then you know if you have the passion you'll get to where you want to be but it's not going to come to you you've got to pick up your boots and get there yourself uh tremaine is asking to for you to remake legend of dragoon hello yeah so yeah yeah i would do that one i like that one yeah uh let's see this one just popped up um okay michael asks how have you balanced creative direction slash vision with uh with schedule restraints or you know

i don't expect to get into like what you were working on with budget specifically but those kinds of restraints yeah um well i'm not going to talk about budget but demon source is not a cheap game at all and it shows i mean it's a it's a triple a cycle it stands out there on its own and we were very lucky to get the backing to do that um i think schedule wise you know you always believe as a creative director there's always another six months if you are kind enough to the executives and you say look it's great don't you you know and they're like yeah but you know and we're like well just give me six more months and it'll be even better and you're you know with a launch title you don't get that option that's a drop dead deadline and um it's my first launch title in 24 years of working at sony it was a complete honor to make it but it was incredibly difficult um you know knowing that we had to go into [Music] qa and testing and uh um

you know pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that you know the game was ready for that so we could get the feedback and then have enough time to implement it always with the thing that you know in november the hardware is going to launch and we have to be there with it yeah that's kind of a hard hard stop there yeah uh kylie asks we've got a few more minutes so get your questions then we'll try to get to all of them kylie asks uh especially working remotely how do you keep your team in alignment and make sure everyone has access to the development resources they need okay so a year ago literally a year ago we packed up everything everybody took home their equipment set up everything in the house we tested everything before we left the office to make sure it would work um so i have literally in my living room which my family hate i have a massive

desktop pc two 4k monitors a well obviously my tv that i use most of the time that's why my family hate it and a massive playstation 5 dev kit and an assortment of other equipment how do you keep them in line it's a lot of um relying on them as professionals right you know we don't treat people like children that they're professionals and they will do the work and they'll get on and do it they have a passion for what they're doing and you know you just have to trust in people and you know team structure is very important with that it's also very important to make sure that you're online with them you're talking to them and that you're accessible to them whether that's through you know line slack zoom you know webex whatever you know whatever it may be that they can chat to you if they have a problem or they need advice

um siri asks uh how do you as a creative director fight uh creative blocks they put in you don't there's nothing you can do okay i i i have ideas in my head where i've literally stopped working on them uh for years because i've come up with something in a story for instance that just won't work and then suddenly you can be in the shower you can be driving you can be you know cooking you could be doing something you just go oh okay that's how it's going to work and that's when suddenly you rush back to that idea and you start jotting things down or writing things down there's no way to get over a creative block right you know some people i know will sit there and bang their head against the idea forever and they're some of them are great and they can work through it me for myself personally i i just leave it alone i'll let it go and work a different

tangent on the same you know project or jump into another idea and work on that for a while until inspiration strikes mowing the line also helps uh yeah and any of those normal mundane daily things where your mind drifts away and you become you know you're not involved with it anymore it suddenly wants to jump back in and take control again and that's when those blocks you know end up disappearing all right 10 seconds kelly asks what qualities do you look for in the members of your team passion love for what you're doing they're all skilled they all have a lot of experience and a winning list to learn and are willing to be open and willing to be creative and that's all the time we have that absolutely flew by uh gavin thank you so much for uh getting up in the morning i know you're

super busy and taking the time to do this thank you for to everyone in the audience for giving us great questions to work with really appreciate it awesome thank you so much chris and thank you you know for having me today and thank you to everybody out there and i hope you enjoyed demon souls and i hope we can make new and exciting experiences for you all there and i hope to see you around in the industry [Music] take