How did King’s Field lead to Demon’s Souls?

The documented beginning is a proposal inside Sony. Takeshi Kajii, a producer at SCE Japan Studio, pitched Demon’s Souls as a revival of what he called a lost breed of action game, and King’s Field was the spark. A new King’s Field itself was considered and ruled out early: as Kajii explained, working under the King’s Field name meant there would be areas the team would not be able to touch. The project would be a spiritual successor, free to redesign everything, which is also why the finished game is third person, online, and set in a new world, Boletaria.

Then it nearly died. The original team could not produce a compelling prototype, and inside the company the project was considered a failure. Hidetaka Miyazaki, who had joined FromSoftware in 2004 as a coder on Armored Core, heard about the floundering high-fantasy role-playing game and volunteered for it, reasoning that a project already written off gave him freedom to change it. He later said he changed pretty much everything. Production ran about three years in total; the game was released in Japan on 5 February 2009. Sony, disappointed by the Japanese reception, declined to publish it in the West itself, so Atlus took North America and Bandai Namco took Europe.