PS4 system features inspired by Demon's Souls, Dark Souls

PlayStation 4's social features were partially inspired by the asynchronous multiplayer elements of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, Shuhei Yoshida has revealed.

Speaking on the PlayStation Blogcast, as transcribed by Polygon, the SCE Worldwide Studios boss said Demon's Souls and Dark Souls tie for second place in his top ten games of the generation.

"Lots of things Demon's Souls and Dark Souls did, like leaving the message to other people asynchronously - so if you were connected, but not connected at the same time - all these things inspired us when we were designing the system features for PS4," he said.

"The sharing features. I enjoy so much watching people playing Dark Souls on YouTube. This game is perfect to learn from other players how to attack the same situations with very different strategy."

Yoshida is presumably referring to the PS4's integrated Twitch, game DVR and image sharing capabilities. It's an interesting comment as the social features of Demon's Souls and its follow-ups were originally inspired by the collaboration found on Japanese message boards when players would bind together to puzzle through western RPGs - which were frequently not localised, or localised very poorly, leading to bizarre situations like the satirical Wizardry series spawning a whole Japanese off-shoot of serious fantasy games.

Sony published Demon's Souls in Japan but didn't bring it to the west; that honour went to Atlus, and later Namco Bandai. from Software's spiritual successors, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, are Namco Bandai productions.

The PS4 is out now in North America and coming to Europe and selected other territories on November 29.