From Software Bloodborne. Discuss or die!

[Murk]

The art style is very cool and armagad swag coaattttt but the gameplay seems... well, the same if not even simpler. Unless the gameplay being shown is by scrubs who don't know how to do anything interesting, it mostly looks like "press r1 to win" and sometimes "press r1 twice to win". The boss was cool, the cleric beast, just like a mini manus.

The Fish hopefully; the loss of darkness in ds2 is one of the most disappointing parts of the game to me

 

[Gozma]

It looks like bad encounter/level design, like for example the stairs going up to the aqueduct in DaS1 aren't a cool little combat area because the individual enemy designs and 1v1 combat are just so good

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

The art style is very cool and armagad swag coaattttt but the gameplay seems... well, the same if not even simpler. Unless the gameplay being shown is by scrubs who don't know how to do anything interesting, it mostly looks like "press r1 to win" and sometimes "press r1 twice to win". The boss was cool, the cleric beast, just like a mini manus.

The Fish hopefully; the loss of darkness in ds2 is one of the most disappointing parts of the game to me

the uploader said he is not Souls games veteran... trying to separate and kite every single fucking enemy

anyway i liked that pitch black house in 3rd video. i hope it stays that way til release

 

[The Fish]

The art style is very cool and armagad swag coaattttt but the gameplay seems... well, the same if not even simpler. Unless the gameplay being shown is by scrubs who don't know how to do anything interesting, it mostly looks like "press r1 to win" and sometimes "press r1 twice to win". The boss was cool, the cleric beast, just like a mini manus.

The Fish hopefully; the loss of darkness in ds2 is one of the most disappointing parts of the game to me

the uploader said he is not Souls games veteran... trying to separate and kite every single fucking enemy

anyway i liked that pitch black house in 3rd video. i hope it stays that way til release

If the game allows you to do that then people will, especially if it guarantees survival. That stuff Miyazaki said about not allowing passive play and having to fight more aggressively (compared with dark souls) seems to be somewhat empty at the moment. Though needless to say there's plenty of room to turn that around in what we haven't yet seen.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

So wait... There's no character stats or inventory in this shit?

 

[Murk]

Huhh I hadn't thought of that. I was under the impression that we just are not shown it... but it seems you get self use item hot-keyed, bomb item hot-keyed, and bullet for the gun hot-keyed... the rest is swap weapon mode.

And all the armors are variants of a swag coat.

LOL VAN HALEN MAY CRY SOULS LOL

 

[praetor]

without stats, SM makes sense. with stats, SM is the most retarded thing ever

 

[Machocruz]

^What is SM?

And I hope the enemies are way more aggressive than in that video. Once you've aggro'd them (and it should be set up so multiple get aggro'd at a time), they should chase you to the ends of the earth. That's if From are sticking with the Let's Attack Aggressively approach. This looks like typical Kite Souls right now.

 

[Zep Zepo]

^What is SM?

Soul Memory (Dark Souls 2)

Zep--

 

[The Fish]

Some more footage of the alpha. This player beats the "cleric beast" boss.


Here's just the boss fight itself -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAHov-Gsl10#t=6433

 

[Murk]

So either the alpha doesn't include it or the game seriously has no inventory/stats. Even with the option menu brought up -- there is no 'equipment' or 'player character' menu, at least not that I'm seeing.

That boss is p cool and the screams are definitely unnerving but I donno about that opera happening all over my face.

My god, the blood, it's like killer instinct or something.

 

[ghostdog]

If this game doesn't have inventory and stats it can go fuck itself.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

there is no fucking way this game will not have proper inventory. its fucking multiplayer game. you expect From and Sony to release their flagship game where you can play maybe 4 or 5 different characters? FFS its still Souls games

last time i checked fucking DS2 had around +220 weapon so i fucking doubt that this "system seller" will be released with 6 coats, 4 guns, 2 swords, one axe and one hammer

anyway fuck spiders

 

[AngryEddy]

So, I like that the bosses at the very least appear to be vocal and animated now, but I fucking detest this new "Do enough damage, then get a free crit" system.

 

[LivingOne]

^I agree with that. It's one of the reasons I've been enjoying bosses designed by Itsuno and his team less and less since after DMC3. Knocking down Cerberus or Beowulf required hitting them where they took less damage or getting in a position that made easier for them to hit you. Having Agni and Rudra knock each other required some coordination. And they got up pretty fast anyway. Then doing this got much easier with DMC4 and especially with Dragon's Dogma. And the duration of the knockdown got longer too, allowing more free button smashing hits.

And now this game too? Sigh...

 

[Damned Registrations]

Huhhh the japanese gameplay had wayyy darker settings. This one looks closer to DS2 level of "darkness" where there's actually ambient lighting everywhere...

Sooo no durability, faster healing, and "YOU PLAGUE RIDDEN RAT!'

hrmmm seems faster paced

The player probably turned the brightness up. Lots of people seem to do this despite games often telling you otherwise. They don't seem to mind playing washed out horror games with no atmosphere for some reason.

I turn up the gamma precisely because I DON'T want all the detail washed out. At the 'recommended' levels of lighting, half the shit in dark souls/2 might as well not even have a fucking texture.

You tell me which one looks 'washed out'.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The first one looks washed out in black ink.

 

[Kanedias]

http://www.twitch.tv/peeve

Peeve is streaming the Bloodborne alpha, if anyone wants to watch.

---

Random thoughts:

Everything seemed fine, but I have a few concerns. So in Dark Souls 2, whenever you are locked on to an enemy and sprint, you can move freely. This wasn't present in Dark Souls 1 and it's not present in Bloodborne either (at least in this alpha). I am afraid of them doing this, absorbing everything from Dark Souls 1, even the flaws, and ignoring the many mechanic improvements from Dark Souls 2. It's very possible that this happens since Bloodborne has been in development in parallel with Dark Souls 2, and it has a different team.

The atmosphere is top notch. Probably my favorite part of what I have seen about this game so far. I like how full of detail the area is, and how much variety the enemies had, too.

Combat seemed very Dark Souls 1-ish. It's very fast. Most of the enemies died easily to R1 spam because they were weak and had no poise (the villagers) and the bigger enemies were parry bait (all of this is very Dark Souls 1-ish). Parries seemed easy to pull off, but they cost ammo, since you must shoot them to parry. Can't speak much about combat though, since the alpha area is very small and is probably just the Undead Burg equivalent. I'd have to see how you handle more powerful and interesting enemies. Attacks did flow nicely from each other, though, and they can be fully aimed.

The boss was really nice atmosphere wise, but I'd have preferred it to be a straight up fight. It's a gimmicky fight, you have to damage his head with the gun and he gets "parried", and you follow this with a powerful riposte. This is the main way to deal damage to him aside from the oil urns + molotov, since normal attacks did very low damage to him. He can also one shot you.

I'm going to buy a PS4 for this game. Hopefully they can get the best parts from both Dark Souls 1 and 2.

 

[Murk]

Watching Peeve's stream (he actually explain some stuff) and I came away with the same conclusions as Kanedias, basically. Parrying is stupid easy/reactive but with limited quantity (tho I imagine this is only an issue if you keep dying or in the early game and you'll be able to stock up on plenty of bullets).

There are defensive attacks -- the two daggers for instance have a block/hit/backstep attack when dual wielding. The gun seems to be a defensive item as well and not intended for actual ranged combat... unless that is entirely dependent on ammo type and later you get a "sniper round" or something.

Also, I noticed no magic... is this melee souls?

The alpha has preset classes but that's not a thing, so builds/stats may still be in but I imagine that they will be very limited (actual level cap) or that equipment may be unique or sporadic. I want to assume it's gonna be a 1:1 of the souls games' systems but who knows.

Overall it seems much faster and honestly I really don't like how easy it is to heal... Possibly the one right thing DS 2 did about healing was that it was more time consuming and healed over time. Giving you infinite healing was dumb but eh casuals etc.

One person in the stream mentioned you can't dash at an angle, only in the conventional 4 directions. I HOPE they don't have that kind of clunky stuff.

I think stats are in: different characters hit for different riposte damage on the boss -- and ripostes are independent of the weapon (you always use your barefist), so far the damage difference has been 5 per tick for 10 total, but the point is that maybe they have different 'STR' stats and so they do different amounts of damage.

 

[Kanedias]

The alpha had a fence that was too low and you could get over it and and access a hidden unfinished area.

Spoiler

There was another section of the city and some sewers. The level design there looked damn good, though it was quite unfinished. The new enemies were some undead villagers that crawled around in the water and could attack with arm swipes and vomit acid, giant rats full of tumours, villagers that seemed more advanced in their beast transformation, and this creepy undead pig:

There was also an armor set, but it's name was in Japanese and since the alpha has no inventory, we couldn't see what it was and how it looked.

The most important part was that there was another boss fight: Gascoigne. This is the same NPC that helped you against the two werewolves in the main part of the alpha. When you die to him, he says the following:

So there you have it. Just a reference? Demon's Souls 2? Who knows

 

[Abu Antar]

The alpha had a fence that was too low and you could get over it and and access a hidden unfinished area.

Spoiler

There was another section of the city and some sewers. The level design there looked damn good, though it was quite unfinished. The new enemies were some undead villagers that crawled around in the water and could attack with arm swipes and vomit acid, giant rats full of tumours, villagers that seemed more advanced in their beast transformation, and this creepy undead pig:

There was also an armor set, but it's name was in Japanese and since the alpha has no inventory, we couldn't see what it was and how it looked.

The most important part was that there was another boss fight: Gascoigne. This is the same NPC that helped you against the two werewolves in the main part of the alpha. When you die to him, he says the following:

So there you have it. Just a reference? Demon's Souls 2? Who knows

 

[praetor]

that "Umbasa..." is likely there just as a placeholder until they finish up the dialogue. it's still in Alpha, and they changed up VAs and stuff around quite a bit since the network test Beta for DaS2 so yeah...

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Seems like most audio effects are taken from DaS1.

 

[Murk]

Nothing says asshat like an endles giant watermark in an already dark game full of similar colors of gray.

Seriously, you pretentious twat, your fucking name is already on youtube. If you're worried someone will steal your footage then put it in the corner where it doesn't distract from the content. Ugghhh

As to the content: those must be those plague-ridden rats I've heard so much about

And From will absolutely need to tweak enemy AI; damn near everything is best dealt with simply by circle strafing them. All the big enemies can't handle it -- the brick guy, the pig, even the little bird things. The only one that seems to have any counter was the guy with the big axe.

Someone on Peeve's stream said that 'Cleric Beast' should actually be 'Cleric's Beast' if translated properly -- guess there's some implication as to who the Cleric might be. Filthy creatures. Pretty jacked up that your bro turns on you tho; he seemed like a legit bro =(

 

[StaticSpine]

Played the demo today. It was the same piece from E3. I got to Cleric Beast, he killed me, the camera is seriously fucked up, during the fight most of the time I saw the bridge fence from the outside when I was running to the opposite end of the bridge. And when I was near the boss legs I saw Beast's torso textures. This and the fact that some kid was pushing my back towards the TV made me lose the fight. It was definitely the version with lowered difficulty level. I believe From will fix the camera.

The game feels like a Souls game. L1 now is the same as taking weapon in two hands. L2 is for pistol shot. Square and triangle are for items. You get used to it fast. I could only play for 15 minutes because there were lots of other dudes willing to play. I liked it. The ripostes with pistol shots are cool.