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

I was wondering what you meant by the load times - it’s not bad at all on my patched SSD game. Though I do remember it being awful back in the day.

Yeah, the load times are no longer an issue. Plus, having the bits of lore on the loading screen help enormously.

I’m a little bummed I have to apparently subscribe to PlayStation Plus in order to play this online. Not sure it’s worth it as I don’t do multi-player in general.

Boy, I was doing really well (for me) at this last night, but I am really struggling tonight. Those guys with the bricks are just laying waste to me.

I hope there’s a quicker route to Gas Can than from the Central Yharnam lantern. I haven’t made it to the fog gate without burning at least 3 blood vials.

In the plus column, I swapped out my saw cleaver for the threaded cane, and I love the whip mode on that sucker. Very nice.

The route from the lantern to Gascoigne should be a net positive in vials. (It’s the canonical vial farming run). There’s like 10 enemies, never more than two at a time, and the environment should kill half of them. The only annoying part is waiting for the elevator.

yep, definitely a Souls game ;)

It’s all annoying!

They are super easy to gun parry.

Oh right–you can parry with the gun. I tried a few times but didn’t pull off the timing right…I think I just need to spend a bit of time practicing that.

Yeah, listen to forgeforsaken. I’m terrible at parrying, whether it’s by gun or sword, in any game. But the brick guys have such a wide parry window, that even I could gun parry them!

Pro tip: step on the switch to send the elevator back up when you land and you won’t have to wait next time.

Oh yeah wow… Parrying is super easy and effective against those guys. Very helpful.

I had forgotten what was right after Father G but the memories came back to me quickly! Threaded cane working really well for me so far. Was always an axe user before.

Took a brief detour to do the first Chalice dungeon, and now I’m going to start working on the big staircase, then the forest. Also took a quick trip to another place thanks to the death dealer that I forgot about.

Well that just happened to me.

I subbed to PS+ to play the multiplayer and was pretty disappointed. The actual fights against other players are great. But the multiplayer is not integrated into the main game in the way it is in Dark Souls. There’s only two areas in which you could be invaded, and you probably won’t be.

So I’m through Old Yharnam, took an unexpected and unnerving detour to the Unseen Village, and now I’m making steady progress through the Cathedral Ward.

I think this might now be my favorite in the series… after a bit of a rough start, I’m in a groove with the combat that I didn’t really feel in the others. Switching to the threaded cane was a big help, but I think I also just like the pacing of combat more.

That said… I think I could do without the boss battles, to be honest. I love the combat and the feeling of exploring the environments, but I don’t think I get the same satisfaction from defeating the bosses that a lot of people seem to get. If I beat them quickly, great. If it takes a long time, then it just becomes more irritating than anything. After powering through the first few, I think I’ll be fine with summoning help if I ever start to feel stuck.

Oh I love the boss battles, for me there the ultimate test of whether I’m mastering the game’s combat system.

You should totally do that. I personally have a rule to never summon, but I don’t hold with this view that it’s the ‘correct’ way to play the game. FROM put summons in for a reason, so people who want to summon can.

I think this macho nonsense about no summoning is one of the things that unnecessarily put people off these awesome games.

I’m not a huge fan of the boss battles but I do love the feeling of getting that last hit in and hitting the next lamp.

It’d be better for me to have a quick shortcut before each boss that makes each run less tedious though.