The Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls games have amassed a vocal following in recent years with gamers who equate exceptional difficulty with entertainment. My personal gaming tastes are pretty far removed from that mindset, as I primarily prefer story and art direction/aesthetics above all else, with challenge being very near the bottom of my list of what I look for in video games. As such, my personal history with the previous Souls games that Bloodborne is a spiritual successor to is quite limited ? I bought the original Demon’s Souls expecting it to be a more traditional third person action RPG and stopped playing it after about an hour because I couldn’t progress. My pet peeve in video games is being made to replay the same sections over and over, and the bulk of the Souls series seems to rely heavily on this mechanic, so I have stayed away from the more recent Dark Souls games. Bloodborne, however, came with the promise of being more action oriented so when Sony’s review copy came across my desk I was excited to see if the Souls games’ accessibility issues had been addressed in any way. Read on to find out how I liked my first few hours (that’s right, hours!) with Bloodborne.
Before I get into the juicy gameplay details, I have to note that my initial impressions of Bloodborne were not the greatest. The game’s Wikipedia article does a much, much better job of explaining the story than the game itself does. The game’s quite stingy with its dialogue, and as far as I know there aren’t even really many of the usual notes and things that you find lying about in games meant to expand the story in ways that the narrative itself is somehow unable to. Just with what you’re told/shown in the game I had no idea there was some kind of disease that was meant to be turning the people of the city into the creatures that you battle. As far as the game’s concerned the plot is “You’ve probably played games like this before, you’re a Hunter, yadda yadda, something botched transfusion something, yadda yadda, kill everything that moves (if you can).” So the lack of appropriate storytelling was already a big strike against the game in my book and the second big initial strike against it were the graphics/technical aspects of the game.
Within my first 20 minutes of playing Bloodborne I was inundated with pretty significant aliasing (the likes of which would probably actually make me stop playing the game if it was on PC), glitchy and ugly early-Xbox 360-like character customization (as pictured above) where the character’s eyes were glitching through their face polygons at times, and significant animation glitches like when I ran into the first enemy and it killed me by grasping and biting the air next to my character. Looking up “Bloodborne glitches” on Google I’m certainly not alone with such experiences and while I hope that they eventually get patched, there’s little excuse for touting your game as AAA these days when it’s held together by the coding equivalent of Scotch tape and rubber bands. The technical problems go even deeper as the game’s asynchronous network features largely imploded after launch with less than a quarter of the Specter replays of other players’ deaths actually showing anything (the helpful hint notes system is still thankfully working as intended). On both the pre-release private server and the actual live servers I’m experiencing constant disconnects around every half hour that kick you straight back to the title screen. The game graciously lets you resume where you were before you were disconnected, but it begs the question why you need to go all the way back to the main menu to switch to offline mode when you’re not actively playing with anyone else. I could understand the need for a reboot if you were playing along with someone else, but the game could stand to be much more graceful with its network disconnects.
I had a lot of trouble with the game’s second boss – Father Gascoigne. I would have loved to have someone help me with the boss, but the “bell ringing” mechanic that makes you spend one Intuition point (the game’s rarest stat/currency) for the chance of someone coming to your aid is farcical in the game’s early hours. You don’t get the second bell required to join other players until after you’ve beaten the second boss, so most players looking to help each other are too high of a level or too far in the game to go back to help those struggling in its early stages. I rang my “help me” bell on three separate occasions attempting to find assistance with boss #2 and even after waiting half an hour on my third attempt I never had anyone show up. My biggest message to the developers of Bloodborne is: “Difficulty is not an excuse for bad game design.” Bloodborne‘s playability could have greatly benefited from good old-fashioned matchmaking. There is no logical reason to not show players how many others there are in a similar area who have wrung the assistance bell or are looking to join another game. There’s no reason not to have a map of the game world, even though there are not a lot of places to go. There’s no reason for a game that looks like a mid-life PS3 title to be struggling so badly to stay at a mere 30fps on the PS4. There is no reason the game should have to take so long to load between lives. I think a lot of the people calling this game a masterpiece are just the masochistic gamers I mentioned before who are willing to forgive the game its multitude of technical and obvious design faults in the name of having to play parts over and over again.
So, obviously the game’s no fun then, right? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Even though Bloodborne offends almost all of my gaming sensibilities and often runs more like it’s in pre-alpha than a full release title, and even though it looks like a previous generation game and has about as much variation in the first 15+ hours’ environments as Pac-Man, From Software has managed to refine out the immediate barriers to entry in such a way that Bloodborne is still impressively fun to play. It took me seven tries to beat the second boss on my own once I realized it was futile to be looking for assistance that early in the game ? I have never before continued to play a game that took me even half as many attempts to surmount an obstacle. I don’t know if they’ve just perfected the formula to initiate Stockholm Syndrome or if they really have refined the elements so the game is legitimately fun, even to newcomers, but I was genuinely elated when I finally managed to beat that boss and I was intrigued to see what other enemies the game had to throw at me next, even though Bloodborne‘s story is basically background noise to loosely lead you into the next punishing boss battle.
I often felt like giving up while playing Bloodborne, especially when I was forced to replay areas over and over to stock up on Blood Echoes so I could level up, but I was always able to do just enough damage to enemies to feel like it wasn’t completely hopeless and learn just enough of the various enemies’ movements to know how to approach them without immediately dying. So, even if you’ve stayed well clear of the Souls games over the years due to their really absurdly punishing nature, you still might want to give Bloodborne a try. Souls die-hards will likely think that the game takes it too easy on you in its early hours, but there’s enough challenge to be had even for those who would only play Mario Kart if they were hooked up to a car battery and shocked every time they went off the road to increase the “challenge”. For us regular gamers, Bloodborne will demand every ounce of gaming prowess you possess, will likely break on you in several different ways, and will hardly acknowledge how much effort you’ve put into it, but chances are you’ll still walk away wanting more with the beginning of an understanding of why people have been playing the Souls games so fervently for all these years.