FromSoftware took a big swing in 2009 with Demon’s Souls, an action RPG that threw players into a world with little instruction, forcing them to master a grueling combat system far removed from the traditional hack ‘n’ slash that so many were used to.
It was such a bold move that Sony remained unconvinced that it would work and outright refused to publish the game in the West, leaving Atlus and Bandai Namco to pick up the slack. But it was nothing new for the studio, as its debut game in 1994 was just as lax about genre conventions, and there were concerns even then that throwing out the rulebook might be too alienating. But, as with Demon’s Souls, that didn’t stop them.
“We were worried, but at the same time, we genuinely didn’t know how people would react,” longtime FromSoft developer Shinichiro Nishida said of King’s Field, a first-person dungeon crawler that would later inspire the Souls series (via GamesRadar+). “We weren’t expecting people to just freeze up after being dropped into the game… I mean, you can swing your sword, you’ll figure it out.”
King’s Field Didn’t Have A Tutorial Because FromSoftware Ran Out Of Time
In fact, King’s Field was arguably more opaque than FromSoftware’s later games, as it lacked even a rudimentary tutorial. Sure, Demon’s Souls added a twisted flare to its tutorial with a boss designed to kill you at the very end, teaching you that death is expected in its macabre world, but it still brought you up to speed with the basics. However, in 1994, after an eight-month dev cycle, FromSoftware ran out of time and conceded that it would have to throw players into the deep end and hope for the best, a design philosophy that would come to define the studio.
Much like Sony intended for Demon’s Souls, the first King’s Field was never ported to the West.
“For the first King’s Field, there were parts of it that, by necessity, we had to leave somewhat unfinished, but even those parts ended up being cleverly executed in the end,” Nishida explained. “RPGs shouldn’t inherently have rules like ‘you must do this.’ We approached it based on common sense – what feels natural. Not thinking ‘this is how other games do it’ or ‘this part should be like this in a game,’ but rather, ‘this is how someone would respond if you talked to them,’ or ‘you probably wouldn’t talk to a complete stranger.'”
King’s Field has become a cult classic over the years, inspiring not only FromSoftware’s later work in Demon’s Souls and the criminally underrated Shadow Tower, but indie gems like Lunacid — and it’s where so many staples of the studio would be born, right down to the Moonlight Greatsword, but more importantly, it set the tone. While other devs captured the scene with the likes of Final Fantasy 7, EarthBound, Baldur’s Gate, and The Elder Scrolls: Arena, here was a team that refused to be “constrained by existing games,” and while it might’ve been risky to step so far away from convention, King’s Field paved the way for the likes of Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and all the others inspired by them.
- Released
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December 16, 1994
- ESRB
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Teen // Animated Violence
- Engine
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game engine
