So it should come as no surprise how this one is gonna shake out, but humor me. As we all know by now, if the game contains "Souls" in it, and its by From Software, chances are I am completely frothing over it. So sure enough, I squealed like a fan girl when rumblings and screen shots of something called "Beast Souls" started surfacing.
Trailers and game play videos let me know that indeed a new souls game was on the way, albeit under another name. There were some concerns about the game being more accessible to new players, and a growing fear that it might be made easier. Have they dumbed down what I love so much, to make the game more palatable to the every player? We shall see.... Brace yourself, it's a long one.
BLOODBORNE:(PS4)
Our tale takes place in the Gothic inspired Yharnam, a city once known for its potent medical remedies. A place where its inhabitants value the powers that are contained within the blood. Legend of these remedies pass to travelers (like the player) and they come to Yharnam to see its aid.
But upon arrival, you come to find out that the city is completely wracked with a plague of endemic illness, transforming people into bestial like creatures, or just overtaking them with madness. You arrive on the night of "the hunt" and by some unknown means, you are injured and set to receive a blood transfusion. After receiving it and entering the city, you eventually find your way to the Hunters Dream where you learn that the city received its healing abilities from Eldridge beasts called the Great Ones.
However, the Great Ones that provide such healing also are the cause of the plague, and by spreading it they look to foster the growth of a new great one. So you must return to the waking world to take the fight to the Great Ones in the hopes of finding a cure for your own affliction.
Let me get this out of the way at the start. I fuck'n love the monster design in in this game. Yeah the humanoids are still human, but the bosses and beasts in this game are very fucking scary and cool. They fit right in with the entire games dark Gothic aesthetic, and it feels like I'm fighting giant savage beasts. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy, but I was getting a little worn on dudes in armor and massive unfair dragons.
So I gave a pretty decent gloss over of the general gist of the story here, but as you might come to expect with games from From Software, they have a tendency to try to tell their stories by not actually telling them. They much more prefer the style of just leaving you little snippets of exposition, and letting you find bits of information along the way as you play through the game. It worked in Demon's Souls, it worked fantastically in Dark Souls, and to a lesser extent Dark Souls II.
Because of the nature of this method of story telling, its is incredibly easy to just completely blow past NPCs that will tell you the story. Especially in this game because a lot of times you don't ever get to see their character models. A lot of them are safely hidden behind locked doors or barred windows. You eventually find locations where you can send them to safety, but knowing where to look is tricky until you've passed through the respective areas a number of times.
But in that very "Soulsian" way of theirs, it works. As grinding is pretty helpful to keep your supplies up in this game, you are going to patrol a lot of familiar areas over and over again. Between that and dying in the game a lot, like the previous titles you will start to memorize every single nook and cranny of each level as you play through the game, which thus gives you a reason to check on the people's homes you find along the way. Some you can take to safety, some are just lost to madness.
Since we are on the map, I'd venture to say that is kinda of meshes the map layouts of Dark Souls 1 and 2 in certain regards. In the original, nearly the entirety of the map was fairly circular. As you would play along in the game you would start finding paths and unlocking doors that would take you to new areas, or areas you've already been from a another path. In the 2nd installment, the map kind of starts you at a central point and branches you in 4 fairly linear directions, but you have the ability to teleport around them at will.
In Bloodborne you kind of have the option to do both. The game at times feels a little bit linear, but at the same time there are a couple of paths that open up shortcuts as well. I guess to make sense of it, the shortcuts just allow you to travel around this specific section of map more easily. The first area in the city of Yharnam has you following the city in one long winding route, but along the way you will find ladders and unlockable gates to take you back to the spawn point, and back again more easily than the first path you took.
Alright, so lets just address the werewolf in the room shall we? During the production of the game prior to its release there was a lot of hubbub about the dev team trying to make the game more accessible to new players. This naturally caused the fan base to fly into a tizzy about them making the game an easier, watered down, dumber experience to draw in the troglodytes who have gotten used to a game basically holding your hand the entire way through it.
Guess what? Accessible does not mean Easy. Game starts off, you make your character and BANG, you are in a fist fight with a werewolf. 2nd surprise, he kicks your flippin' ass. So you go to hunters dream and get you first weapon and gun. Go back, smash the wolf, move on? Great. Kill a dude with a weapon, awesome. Kill 2? Ok, still no problem but sorta miss my shield. Oh wait now there is 4 of them, let me just back up a bit oh wait now I'm getting shot too. Whoakay slow down a se... Oh, I'm dead again.
BloodBorne is indeed more accessible. But you know what it isn't? Easy, and this is by design. The first level, as is most of these types are games is punishing. It wants to break you, wants you to realize that you aren't Johnny Action Hero, and that diving head first into danger leaves you with your ass properly fucked. It wants you to hang back, assess the danger, get a feel for your controls function before approaching a target.
But does that mean it wants you to be pensive? Fuck no. The game has a interesting life bar mechanic where if you take damages a tick moves down, but the life doesn't actually depreciate for several seconds. If you get aggressive and start dealing damage back, you can recover some of the lost health, if not all of it. Even the flavor text on the only shield in the game tells you not to pussyfoot around. Get aggro, but be safe.
So what exactly did they change to make the game more accessible? Quite a few things actually. One of the first things I noticed is there is no more equipment load in the game. No more piling up gaggles of ridiculously heavy armor to just flop like an overturned turtle in battle. Now you are free to mix and match your gear interchangeably and load up with all the weapons you can carry. The counter balance to that is all the clothes you can get, are pretty much just clothes. There are subtle differences to what they can defend, but for the most part from what I have seen the changes are fairly minimal.
There are also a number of less statistics too. There are still a various number of defense statistics: Physical, blunt, thrust, blood, arcane, poison, frenzy, fire, and bolt. But a lot of these are adjusted by a much smaller number of core statistics. Ask me to slow down if this gets too complicated: You have your health, which raises your health. You have your Strength, which raises your damage. You have your skill, which allows you to use speedier weapons. You have endurance, which allows you to attack with more swings. You have your Arcane, which raises your fire and bolt damage.... Am I going to fast?
The only real wild card for a while was something called "Bloodtinge". But even that ends up being simple. It affects your gun, so you could have called it accuracy since I haven't noticed it doing more damage. Gone are the days of needing Vitality to raise you equipment load. No more need for "adaptability" which to this day I don't really have any idea how it affected my character. Magic stats like Faith, Intelligence, and Attunement are now all rolled into one singular stat, and if you are aren't using a fire or bolt mod on your weapon, its a useless stat anyways.
Going back to stuff you can equip? Accessories like rings and amulets are gone too, so those subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) little things you could add to your character just aren't there anymore. No rings to decrease equipment load, give you the cartwheel dodge, raise health, walk fast in water. All that stuff is gone. So while it now makes it a snap to build a character in the game, it kinda feels like its taken away pretty much all of the variety from the game on what kind of characters you can build.
Example, first time through I just built up my character to just kinda be powerhouse. Strong weapon, high Endurance, Health, and Strength. and for the build it pretty much allowed me to bully my way through most of the situations I was in. I made a 2nd character during this, this time trying to focus more on Skill and Arcane rather than Strength. I started it off and played for a couple of hours with a different weapon, and after a while I just felt that I liked my original better, and it didn't see immediate affects of the build. I get the sense that a lot of the effects to where you put your skill points happen more in the late game than the early going. But the problem with that is it makes it feel samey.
Anyone who has played a Souls title before isn't going to be overly lost here, but there are some changes to get used to. For the most part, locking on, movement, and right handed melee combat feels unchanged and right at home. If anything it feels faster, probably to keep up a more frantic pace of the game. The southpaw, however, has some changes to get used to.
As mentioned before, shields are pretty much gone in this one. So the button you would usually use to raise your shield (typically L1) now becomes your weapons "trick" button. All of the weapons in this game take multiple forms. Some of them, like the axe and cleaver get extended range if you change its form. Others like the cane, turn into a whip and change the dynamic entirely. Then you have the Holy Sword and the Kirkhammer, which gives you a nimble long sword in one form, and a massive greatsword or maul with the other. There is a pretty decent variety of weapons in Bloodborne, but there are significantly less than the previous games, so its easy to just fall into the routine of just one or 2 favorites.
The other button (L2), typically the parry button I guess in some sense is still actually the parry. This is the button that fires the gun that you selected should you have one equipped. You will quickly notice that this game is not designed to be a shooter, and using the gun as a primary weapon more than likely is just not going to happen. It takes too long between shots, and doesn't do enough damage to really be a significant weapon. But then why bother to use it?
Because this is where the aggressive version of the parry comes into play. Depending on the weapon if you can place a well timed shot before an enemy goes to attack, there will be a gong sound and they will drop to a knee (or prone, if quadrupedal) where you can charge ahead with a light attack and gut them for a big Visceral attack. This works for a lot of enemies and many bosses, so learning this is crucial. I found it a lot easier to get then hang of than trying to parry with my shield and with all honesty it makes you feel pretty bad ass to walk around a gut baddies at a whim.
But there are weapons that change the shooting game, I haven't experimented with them all yet so shame on me. The back stab is also still here but it significantly harder to pull off. It lends into a new mechanic with the heavy attacks. In addition to just your normal slower heavier attack, you can charge it for bigger damage. If you can land a fully charged attack behind an enemy, they will drop for a visceral attack. This does massive damage but its significantly harder to do.. and uh, it can make for some awkward situations.....
Another subtle change to the combat are the healing mechanics and the buttons involved. Our character is very much not undead in this game, so our endlessly refilling estus flasks are gone too. But in its place are now the much more readily available blood vials. You can hold up to 20, and once you are full more you pick up go to storage so that rules. But they are a finite item, so if you are struggling against a particularly frustrating boss (Rom, comes to mind), then you might find yourself in a position where you have to go back to an old level and grind to get more of it. This happens with bullets too.
So as I've said a billion times, no game is perfect and Bloodborne is no exception to the rule. For one, there is a bit of lack of explanation in the game. Sure, it doesn't tell you where to go, that never bothered me. But it also doesn't tell you anything about this curious Insight stat you have. Apparently, having lots of it can make the game harder, and you can use it as currency.
But the most important thing about it is, you need at least 1 to open up the character that allows you to level. That's a pretty important thing to miss. You can get insight from an item, but otherwise it happens when you go to fight a boss. So if you if you are like me, you can go through the whole first level and find that first boss, and if you lose? Bang, back to the start of the freak'n level, all your blood echoes (souls) are gone, and I'm still level 1. I can level now that I have insight, but its very aggravating to have lost all that progress. So do yourself a favor: the very second you find the "madman's knowledge" item, use it, then go back to hunters dream and level.
The gear was kind of a let down. As I mentioned a lot of the gear that I have found seemed to have some very marginal differences about them, so really there was little handicap about just mixing whatever Ab Fab outfit I wanted to put together, rather than gearing up for my situations. Just to stand out Lady Velfir ended up wearing a Noble's dress and tiny top hat so she wasn't just another leather jacket asshole with a mask and pointy hat. Same deal with the weapons. The trick features seemed cool, but it didn't reel like there was as much variety this time around. I used my starting weapon the whole game, and I can't think of many games where that happens ever.
And by making it more "accessible" by reducing the statistics, you really kinda took away what made Demon's and Dark Souls special. When I would finish a game, I'd rebuild my character and use different build types and gear, and it would make a brand new experience for me. In Bloodborne it kinda feels like no matter how I adjust my stats, it still felt like I was playing my character the same way, and that is a real shame about it. Because if it starts to feel the same, it starts to feel boring. And when a game feels boring, you don't play it anymore.
I know a lot of Souls players outright didn't like magic, didn't feel it was the "right" way to play the game, but you know it really did at a lot of variety and change to the game's overall play style. I didn't have to charge in and bang if I didn't want to. I could hang back and sling spells from a distance, changed the whole dynamic of boss fights and PVP. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.
One of the biggest problems was its completely unforgivable load time. For deaths or checkpoint teleports, load times could reach an arduous 35 seconds. This doesn't seem like a lot in type but when you are waiting, it feels like it goes on forever. Thankfully, this as already been address and repaired in a patch, and now the load times are as low as 4 seconds and as long as 11. This is a significant improvement.
I appreciate the efforts to make the Online mode a little more workable. You get a series of bells to offer help, ask for help, or invade a player. It makes the game a little easier since it uses a queue system instead of everyone pouncing on a soul sign, but it doesn't really give an idea who's available to help, and from what I hear, completely changes how invading worked which has made a lot of trolls very unhappy, (poor them, fuck invaders).
Accessible is fine, you always want to expand your audience, but I didn't think things In Dark Souls 1 were overly complex, you could have tightened it up just a little and that would have been more than sufficient. By cutting down so much of it, I think that Bloodborne is going to hurt in the replayablity area just because there appear to be only so many ways you can play the game.
And if I am being truly honest with myself, Bloodborne can be accused of being the same kind of cut and paste job I complain about in something like Madden, Assassin's Creed, or Call of Duty. Sure, the story changes, the location changes, some of the mechanics are different. But right down at its core? Its pretty much the same as Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II. I think the reason you don't hear people complaining about that is because there is usually a pretty significant gap between releases. Just enough time to pass for you to have moved on or grown tired with the previous game.
Complaints aside, this was a game that the Playstation 4 had sorely needed. Triple A titles like Watch Dogs and The Order: 1886 have been some pretty awful swings and misses, and despite the PS4 doing pretty well, it really didn't have a lot of stand out games. Now it does. From Software knows what they are doing, and even though they keep putting games out in the same engine, it is an incredibly solid one every time.
I hate calling shots for things like "Game of the Year" in the middle of the first quarter, and I certainly feel sheepish that 2 of their games have been my game of the year of 2 of 4 years, but you have to call a spade a spade. Bloodborne, despite its new accessibility, is every bit as good as I had hoped it was.
If From Software wanted to pump out another game like this every 2 or 3 years I would be completely OK with that. It's one of the best engines I have ever played in game and it delivers on pretty much everything want as a gamer. Great control, awesome design, big intimidating monsters, a steep but fair difficulty, and a big meaty chunk of time to sink into it. I don't know what else I can say.
Bloodborne fucking rules.
And fuck you Rom, and fuck your baby spiders too.
But upon arrival, you come to find out that the city is completely wracked with a plague of endemic illness, transforming people into bestial like creatures, or just overtaking them with madness. You arrive on the night of "the hunt" and by some unknown means, you are injured and set to receive a blood transfusion. After receiving it and entering the city, you eventually find your way to the Hunters Dream where you learn that the city received its healing abilities from Eldridge beasts called the Great Ones.
However, the Great Ones that provide such healing also are the cause of the plague, and by spreading it they look to foster the growth of a new great one. So you must return to the waking world to take the fight to the Great Ones in the hopes of finding a cure for your own affliction.
Let me get this out of the way at the start. I fuck'n love the monster design in in this game. Yeah the humanoids are still human, but the bosses and beasts in this game are very fucking scary and cool. They fit right in with the entire games dark Gothic aesthetic, and it feels like I'm fighting giant savage beasts. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy, but I was getting a little worn on dudes in armor and massive unfair dragons.
So I gave a pretty decent gloss over of the general gist of the story here, but as you might come to expect with games from From Software, they have a tendency to try to tell their stories by not actually telling them. They much more prefer the style of just leaving you little snippets of exposition, and letting you find bits of information along the way as you play through the game. It worked in Demon's Souls, it worked fantastically in Dark Souls, and to a lesser extent Dark Souls II.
Because of the nature of this method of story telling, its is incredibly easy to just completely blow past NPCs that will tell you the story. Especially in this game because a lot of times you don't ever get to see their character models. A lot of them are safely hidden behind locked doors or barred windows. You eventually find locations where you can send them to safety, but knowing where to look is tricky until you've passed through the respective areas a number of times.
 |
| Arianna may be a prostitute, but if you follow her events she might be more important than you realize. |
But in that very "Soulsian" way of theirs, it works. As grinding is pretty helpful to keep your supplies up in this game, you are going to patrol a lot of familiar areas over and over again. Between that and dying in the game a lot, like the previous titles you will start to memorize every single nook and cranny of each level as you play through the game, which thus gives you a reason to check on the people's homes you find along the way. Some you can take to safety, some are just lost to madness.
Since we are on the map, I'd venture to say that is kinda of meshes the map layouts of Dark Souls 1 and 2 in certain regards. In the original, nearly the entirety of the map was fairly circular. As you would play along in the game you would start finding paths and unlocking doors that would take you to new areas, or areas you've already been from a another path. In the 2nd installment, the map kind of starts you at a central point and branches you in 4 fairly linear directions, but you have the ability to teleport around them at will.
In Bloodborne you kind of have the option to do both. The game at times feels a little bit linear, but at the same time there are a couple of paths that open up shortcuts as well. I guess to make sense of it, the shortcuts just allow you to travel around this specific section of map more easily. The first area in the city of Yharnam has you following the city in one long winding route, but along the way you will find ladders and unlockable gates to take you back to the spawn point, and back again more easily than the first path you took.
 |
| There is always an enemy lying in wait. |
Alright, so lets just address the werewolf in the room shall we? During the production of the game prior to its release there was a lot of hubbub about the dev team trying to make the game more accessible to new players. This naturally caused the fan base to fly into a tizzy about them making the game an easier, watered down, dumber experience to draw in the troglodytes who have gotten used to a game basically holding your hand the entire way through it.
Guess what? Accessible does not mean Easy. Game starts off, you make your character and BANG, you are in a fist fight with a werewolf. 2nd surprise, he kicks your flippin' ass. So you go to hunters dream and get you first weapon and gun. Go back, smash the wolf, move on? Great. Kill a dude with a weapon, awesome. Kill 2? Ok, still no problem but sorta miss my shield. Oh wait now there is 4 of them, let me just back up a bit oh wait now I'm getting shot too. Whoakay slow down a se... Oh, I'm dead again.
BloodBorne is indeed more accessible. But you know what it isn't? Easy, and this is by design. The first level, as is most of these types are games is punishing. It wants to break you, wants you to realize that you aren't Johnny Action Hero, and that diving head first into danger leaves you with your ass properly fucked. It wants you to hang back, assess the danger, get a feel for your controls function before approaching a target.
 |
| Parrying in this game is a lot more player friendly. |
But does that mean it wants you to be pensive? Fuck no. The game has a interesting life bar mechanic where if you take damages a tick moves down, but the life doesn't actually depreciate for several seconds. If you get aggressive and start dealing damage back, you can recover some of the lost health, if not all of it. Even the flavor text on the only shield in the game tells you not to pussyfoot around. Get aggro, but be safe.
So what exactly did they change to make the game more accessible? Quite a few things actually. One of the first things I noticed is there is no more equipment load in the game. No more piling up gaggles of ridiculously heavy armor to just flop like an overturned turtle in battle. Now you are free to mix and match your gear interchangeably and load up with all the weapons you can carry. The counter balance to that is all the clothes you can get, are pretty much just clothes. There are subtle differences to what they can defend, but for the most part from what I have seen the changes are fairly minimal.
There are also a number of less statistics too. There are still a various number of defense statistics: Physical, blunt, thrust, blood, arcane, poison, frenzy, fire, and bolt. But a lot of these are adjusted by a much smaller number of core statistics. Ask me to slow down if this gets too complicated: You have your health, which raises your health. You have your Strength, which raises your damage. You have your skill, which allows you to use speedier weapons. You have endurance, which allows you to attack with more swings. You have your Arcane, which raises your fire and bolt damage.... Am I going to fast?
The only real wild card for a while was something called "Bloodtinge". But even that ends up being simple. It affects your gun, so you could have called it accuracy since I haven't noticed it doing more damage. Gone are the days of needing Vitality to raise you equipment load. No more need for "adaptability" which to this day I don't really have any idea how it affected my character. Magic stats like Faith, Intelligence, and Attunement are now all rolled into one singular stat, and if you are aren't using a fire or bolt mod on your weapon, its a useless stat anyways.
Going back to stuff you can equip? Accessories like rings and amulets are gone too, so those subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) little things you could add to your character just aren't there anymore. No rings to decrease equipment load, give you the cartwheel dodge, raise health, walk fast in water. All that stuff is gone. So while it now makes it a snap to build a character in the game, it kinda feels like its taken away pretty much all of the variety from the game on what kind of characters you can build.
Example, first time through I just built up my character to just kinda be powerhouse. Strong weapon, high Endurance, Health, and Strength. and for the build it pretty much allowed me to bully my way through most of the situations I was in. I made a 2nd character during this, this time trying to focus more on Skill and Arcane rather than Strength. I started it off and played for a couple of hours with a different weapon, and after a while I just felt that I liked my original better, and it didn't see immediate affects of the build. I get the sense that a lot of the effects to where you put your skill points happen more in the late game than the early going. But the problem with that is it makes it feel samey.
 |
| I about shit my pants when I saw that thing for the first time. It wasn't always there. |
Anyone who has played a Souls title before isn't going to be overly lost here, but there are some changes to get used to. For the most part, locking on, movement, and right handed melee combat feels unchanged and right at home. If anything it feels faster, probably to keep up a more frantic pace of the game. The southpaw, however, has some changes to get used to.
As mentioned before, shields are pretty much gone in this one. So the button you would usually use to raise your shield (typically L1) now becomes your weapons "trick" button. All of the weapons in this game take multiple forms. Some of them, like the axe and cleaver get extended range if you change its form. Others like the cane, turn into a whip and change the dynamic entirely. Then you have the Holy Sword and the Kirkhammer, which gives you a nimble long sword in one form, and a massive greatsword or maul with the other. There is a pretty decent variety of weapons in Bloodborne, but there are significantly less than the previous games, so its easy to just fall into the routine of just one or 2 favorites.
The other button (L2), typically the parry button I guess in some sense is still actually the parry. This is the button that fires the gun that you selected should you have one equipped. You will quickly notice that this game is not designed to be a shooter, and using the gun as a primary weapon more than likely is just not going to happen. It takes too long between shots, and doesn't do enough damage to really be a significant weapon. But then why bother to use it?
Because this is where the aggressive version of the parry comes into play. Depending on the weapon if you can place a well timed shot before an enemy goes to attack, there will be a gong sound and they will drop to a knee (or prone, if quadrupedal) where you can charge ahead with a light attack and gut them for a big Visceral attack. This works for a lot of enemies and many bosses, so learning this is crucial. I found it a lot easier to get then hang of than trying to parry with my shield and with all honesty it makes you feel pretty bad ass to walk around a gut baddies at a whim.
But there are weapons that change the shooting game, I haven't experimented with them all yet so shame on me. The back stab is also still here but it significantly harder to pull off. It lends into a new mechanic with the heavy attacks. In addition to just your normal slower heavier attack, you can charge it for bigger damage. If you can land a fully charged attack behind an enemy, they will drop for a visceral attack. This does massive damage but its significantly harder to do.. and uh, it can make for some awkward situations.....
 |
| Uh... Ok.. I know what that's supposed to be and what is happening here. But that totally looks like what it looks like.... Eww. |
Another subtle change to the combat are the healing mechanics and the buttons involved. Our character is very much not undead in this game, so our endlessly refilling estus flasks are gone too. But in its place are now the much more readily available blood vials. You can hold up to 20, and once you are full more you pick up go to storage so that rules. But they are a finite item, so if you are struggling against a particularly frustrating boss (Rom, comes to mind), then you might find yourself in a position where you have to go back to an old level and grind to get more of it. This happens with bullets too.
So as I've said a billion times, no game is perfect and Bloodborne is no exception to the rule. For one, there is a bit of lack of explanation in the game. Sure, it doesn't tell you where to go, that never bothered me. But it also doesn't tell you anything about this curious Insight stat you have. Apparently, having lots of it can make the game harder, and you can use it as currency.
But the most important thing about it is, you need at least 1 to open up the character that allows you to level. That's a pretty important thing to miss. You can get insight from an item, but otherwise it happens when you go to fight a boss. So if you if you are like me, you can go through the whole first level and find that first boss, and if you lose? Bang, back to the start of the freak'n level, all your blood echoes (souls) are gone, and I'm still level 1. I can level now that I have insight, but its very aggravating to have lost all that progress. So do yourself a favor: the very second you find the "madman's knowledge" item, use it, then go back to hunters dream and level.
 |
| You need at least 1 Insight to get the doll to awaken. So make sure to do that quickly. |
The gear was kind of a let down. As I mentioned a lot of the gear that I have found seemed to have some very marginal differences about them, so really there was little handicap about just mixing whatever Ab Fab outfit I wanted to put together, rather than gearing up for my situations. Just to stand out Lady Velfir ended up wearing a Noble's dress and tiny top hat so she wasn't just another leather jacket asshole with a mask and pointy hat. Same deal with the weapons. The trick features seemed cool, but it didn't reel like there was as much variety this time around. I used my starting weapon the whole game, and I can't think of many games where that happens ever.
And by making it more "accessible" by reducing the statistics, you really kinda took away what made Demon's and Dark Souls special. When I would finish a game, I'd rebuild my character and use different build types and gear, and it would make a brand new experience for me. In Bloodborne it kinda feels like no matter how I adjust my stats, it still felt like I was playing my character the same way, and that is a real shame about it. Because if it starts to feel the same, it starts to feel boring. And when a game feels boring, you don't play it anymore.
I know a lot of Souls players outright didn't like magic, didn't feel it was the "right" way to play the game, but you know it really did at a lot of variety and change to the game's overall play style. I didn't have to charge in and bang if I didn't want to. I could hang back and sling spells from a distance, changed the whole dynamic of boss fights and PVP. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.
 |
| There is no shame in summoning help for tough fights. |
One of the biggest problems was its completely unforgivable load time. For deaths or checkpoint teleports, load times could reach an arduous 35 seconds. This doesn't seem like a lot in type but when you are waiting, it feels like it goes on forever. Thankfully, this as already been address and repaired in a patch, and now the load times are as low as 4 seconds and as long as 11. This is a significant improvement.
I appreciate the efforts to make the Online mode a little more workable. You get a series of bells to offer help, ask for help, or invade a player. It makes the game a little easier since it uses a queue system instead of everyone pouncing on a soul sign, but it doesn't really give an idea who's available to help, and from what I hear, completely changes how invading worked which has made a lot of trolls very unhappy, (poor them, fuck invaders).
Accessible is fine, you always want to expand your audience, but I didn't think things In Dark Souls 1 were overly complex, you could have tightened it up just a little and that would have been more than sufficient. By cutting down so much of it, I think that Bloodborne is going to hurt in the replayablity area just because there appear to be only so many ways you can play the game.
And if I am being truly honest with myself, Bloodborne can be accused of being the same kind of cut and paste job I complain about in something like Madden, Assassin's Creed, or Call of Duty. Sure, the story changes, the location changes, some of the mechanics are different. But right down at its core? Its pretty much the same as Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II. I think the reason you don't hear people complaining about that is because there is usually a pretty significant gap between releases. Just enough time to pass for you to have moved on or grown tired with the previous game.
Complaints aside, this was a game that the Playstation 4 had sorely needed. Triple A titles like Watch Dogs and The Order: 1886 have been some pretty awful swings and misses, and despite the PS4 doing pretty well, it really didn't have a lot of stand out games. Now it does. From Software knows what they are doing, and even though they keep putting games out in the same engine, it is an incredibly solid one every time.
I hate calling shots for things like "Game of the Year" in the middle of the first quarter, and I certainly feel sheepish that 2 of their games have been my game of the year of 2 of 4 years, but you have to call a spade a spade. Bloodborne, despite its new accessibility, is every bit as good as I had hoped it was.
If From Software wanted to pump out another game like this every 2 or 3 years I would be completely OK with that. It's one of the best engines I have ever played in game and it delivers on pretty much everything want as a gamer. Great control, awesome design, big intimidating monsters, a steep but fair difficulty, and a big meaty chunk of time to sink into it. I don't know what else I can say.
Bloodborne fucking rules.
And fuck you Rom, and fuck your baby spiders too.
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