Bloodborne - Demon's Souls Spiritual Successor's Spiritual Successor

Oh wow, I honestly did not expect this to ever get finished, let alone so soon. I am going to play the hell out of it.

Ah, so it’s not actually the whole game, just the first area up to Father Gascoigne, and also some, “extended areas and some bonus post game content,” according to RPS. Still neat and I’ll definitely play it.

This is out now!

It’s not a slavish recreation, there are some changes.

Read through a bunch of this thread thanks to Discourse search. Good times, man. Looking forward to doing some serious jawing about Elden Ring in about three weeks(!).

I tried Bloodborne on PSNow on my PC.

It offered to import my save file from the cloud. Sure! Let’s do it!

Of course, once it did, it won’t let me start the game now, saying my saved game has Bloodborne: Hunters DLC, while the PSNow version of the game doesn’t include the DLC. So I can’t play from that save game file online or offline.

I’ll put this here. Richard Leadbetter looks into the patch that fixes Souls games (especially Bloodborne) on PS4 to have consistent frame-pacing. And he asks the question, if it’s that easy, why haven’t From Software done it? And his answer is pretty compelling.

If you don’t want to watch a whole video to get to the dramatic reveal on why, here, you can read it in the article version of the video and skip straight to the relevant paragraphs. (The last 4 paragraphs).

Very interesting!

The video was way too long, I couldn’t take it anymore.

The reason is input latency.

God, they all are.

But why does locking the frame rate increase input lag?

Now I’ve finished Elden Ring I’m going back through the From catalogue. I played this when it first came out but I was definitely not “good” since I couldn’t even get past the very first area with the mobs around the big burning cross.

Now with 100 hours of ER under my belt, I beat the Cleric Beast first run without dying! FG took 3 attempts. BSB went down first go (with Alfred).

A lot of the hard lessons on how to engage enemies transfer very well from ER. Better to move in and engage than back away, dodge and roll instead of blocking. Work on staggers. There is a nice rhythm you fall into.

Playing these in reverse order is really interesting. If I had played this first then of course ER would feel like an evolution of BB, instead it feels like uncovering an early version of Elden Ring.

The Chalice Labyrinths are a case in point. These became the dungeons in ER - a mini dungeon crawl for the player. I don’t really like the Chalice Labyrinths. You are teleported into a dungeon crawl with a series of identi-kit monster rooms to clear until you get to a boss. It feels very disconnected from the overworld and all the world building From has been at pains to create there. There is no continuity of assets - there are just randomly reused set dressings. You also have to teleport twice (once to the Hunter Dream, and then to the Labyrinth) to even reach it.

You get the sense From sat down and thought about this problem when making the ER dungeons. They made the internal style consistent (if repetitive) and made the dungeons link directly to the overworld. They still weren’t my favourite part of ER, but I can appreciate now how much better they became from their earlier iteration!

One thing ER did not upgrade was the lack of a dedicated photo mode.

It was funny going back to Demons Souls. There were so many things that felt groundbreaking in Dark Souls only to realize they already had it in the previous game. Same developer obviously, it just made it seem like more of an evolution.

If you’re referring to the HUD showing, I’m pretty sure there’s a setting to auto hide it.

You can hide the HUD but photo modes usually freeze time and do other stuff your can’t do in BB.

I did the same thing and had an absolute blast going through the Dark Souls series, but can’t touch this game because of its console exclusivity. Damn you, From!

I wish DS and Bloodborne were on PC. I do have Bloodborne for my daughter’s PS4 though.

It is possible to play Bloodborne via PS Now/Plus on PC (game streaming). I tried it and it worked really well. Is this still possible with their new service model?

PS Plus is having a free weekend, so you can play multiplayer for free this weekend. Or, you could play Soulsborne games with messages from other players this weekend!