In this week's issue of Weekly Famitsu magazine, Sony Computer Entertainment made the first announcement of Demon's Souls, a new "dark fantasy" action RPG under development by Armored Core makers From Software. The game, which will be playable at the Tokyo Game Show next week, is due out for the PlayStation 3 next year in Japan.

While details are still scant on Demon's Soul, SCE Japan producer Takeshi Kajii described the game to Famitsu as a spiritual successor to King's Field, the From-developed first-person RPG that first hit it big on the original PlayStation. "I am a fan of From Software, but naturally that also means there are parts of their games I'm not satisfied with, too," he said. "If this was a new King's Field game, there would be areas we wouldn't be able to touch since they're part of the series; working together like this, we can try to make something really new."

Demon's Souls takes place in the kingdom of Boletaria, currently enshrouded in a deep fog thanks to its king inadvertently unleashing an ancient monster from his slumber. You, a nameless hero who you're free to customize Elder Scrolls-style, must penetrate into Boletaria and save the kingdom -- but like many US RPGs these days, the game is slated to be extremely open-ended. "You get only the barest minimum of a goal, and there's nothing forcing you to do anything in the game," Kajii said. "People say to you 'Save the world,' but you can ignore them and keep going if you like."

The way Kajii and From Software director Hidetaka Miyazaki described it, Demon's Souls is a bit of a hybrid -- an RPG that uses the PS3's hardware to the hilt while still retaining the challenge and exploration of traditional role-players. Your hero can use a wide variety of weapons, each of which has different attacks and animations depending on how skillful you are or whether you're using one hand or two, and the game's physics system places natural limits on what's possible in any given tactical situation. "We gave a lot of thought to how to make the fun and charms of a classic RPG interesting all over again with the latest technology at hand," Miyazaki noted. "We figured that doing the things that previous hardware ignored -- having long weapons bump into walls, lighting the area in realtime with the torch in your hand -- would make the game that much more fun. We're taking the things you did through menus in Wizardry and letting you carry them out in real life." (Miyazaki also hinted that while Demon's Souls won't have multiplayer, he would still like to "find a way to use the Internet to make the single-player mode more interesting.")