From Software Bloodborne. Discuss or die!

[Grimlorn]

Looks fun to me, but I haven't been paying attention to development much. I'm also not buying a ps4 to play it. Switching between that huge hammer and that axe would be awesome to play as. I just think people are expecting more challenge and variety when it comes to enemies and move sets in weapons. There is too much recycling from game to game. I know I was pretty disappointed with a lot of the move sets and weapons in DS2.

 

[Phage]

Men.

My Brad Bone box arrives tomorrow unless UPS goes doubleretard again. If I can get the PS4 twitch streaming to work well, I will be streaming Brad Bone as soon as it finishes downloading at launch (gonna do digital download) estimate would be March 24th 1AM EST. Probably go until I fall asleep at like noon or whatever. I'll update here with my progress on getting the BradBone box to work well with twitch if anyone is interesting in watching me flounder around in the game on its launch.

 

[Talby]

If it sucks I'll eat my hat, but I think the worst case scenario is it'll go the way of DkS II and be good, but not quite as good as DkS.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I've successfully avoided the hype/hate trains for this. I don't have a PS4 but I don't believe the "PS4 exclusive I swear on me mum" claims.

 

[rbenchley]

I've successfully avoided the hype/hate trains for this. I don't have a PS4 but I don't believe the "PS4 exclusive I swear on me mum" claims.

Sadly, this one will remain PS4 exclusive. Sony is bankrolling the game and they own the IP. If it was just From or From and Namco, it would be out on PC and Xbox One too, but we're fucked on this one. Sometime this year, I'll cave and get a PS4 so I can play it.

 

[Grimlorn]

Or you can wait 10 years when they start emulating PS4s on PC.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Or you can wait 10 years when they start emulating PS4s on PC.

10 years... It's been 8 years for PS3 and the only thing they can emulate is the bios screen.
Want to play Demon Souls and Bloodborne... gonna have to buy two fucking consoles. Sony is a fucking terrorist who holds Demon Souls and Bloodborne hostage.

 

[Talby]

Just wait for Demon's Souls HD Edition. Actually, I'm surprised they haven't announced a "Souls trilogy" HD set with DeS, DkS and DkS II all in the one box. PS4 exclusive, of course.

 

[Makabb]

I was playing demon's yesterday and watched this alpha footage of bloodborne and i have to say the movement, attack speed and even enemy movement looks exactly like demon's.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Or you can wait 10 years when they start emulating PS4s on PC.

10 years... It's been 8 years for PS3 and the only thing they can emulate is the bios screen.
Want to play Demon Souls and Bloodborne... gonna have to buy two fucking consoles. Sony is a fucking terrorist who holds Demon Souls and Bloodborne hostage.

PS3 is hard to emulate due to the CPU being super weird. It's Big Endian (as far as I remember), POWER architecture, with couple of vector units as well as a normal general-purpose cpu. It uses strange RAM (XDR), so there might be funny stuff going on with memory controller.

PS4, on the other hand, uses a x86-64 CPU, a kind of radeon for graphics, and normal gddr5 memory. It is basically, a mid-range PC running FreeBSD + some custom drivers.

I'm willing to bet a pint of beer on PS4 emu being available on PC before PS3 emu is in anything resembling a working state.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

https://watch.zentrick.com/qxgofC/

That interactive trailer is pretty cool.


Tfw you do not have ps4 and by the time you get one (in 2 years?) the online will be dead...
It feels like shit

 

[Talby]

I'd give it longer than 2 years. The multiplayer for Dark Souls is still alive and well, and even Demon's Souls still has plenty of players.

It's afor me because I want to be in on the ground floor of PVP before everyone has learned the game and knows where the best twink items are.

 

[Alfons]

Why would it suck? It already looks much better than the DkS2 footage did. Only thing I'm concerned about is enemy and location variety.

 

[Hobo Elf]

https://watch.zentrick.com/qxgofC/

That interactive trailer is pretty cool.


Tfw you do not have ps4 and by the time you get one (in 2 years?) the online will be dead...
It feels like shit

The online will be dead anyway. Don't forget that you gotta pay Sony a monthly tribute in order to use your own internet on the PS4. Online communities that weren't Halo or CoD didn't last very long on the 360.

 

[Metro]

Will be shit. Praise the 'spiritual successor' that will come out on PC. You poor, unfortunate PS4 owners.

 

[Phage]

There's an approximately 0% chance this game will be shit, unless you're in the camp that thinks DS2 was shit, in which case your expectations are pretty insane. At worst it'll be an average game. Considering the extensive review that Edge just put out, combined with everything we've seen up til this point, it's almost a given that this game is going to be at least good - probably great or better.

Anyone who genuinely thinks this game is coming to PC is mentally hindered. The day that inFamous, Uncharted, Demon's Souls, Last of Us, and every other sony owned IP comes to PC is the day you can perhaps hope for a PC port. Better to wait for PS4 emulator in 15 years - and that shit won't even have the online features which is a huge chunk of a souls game.

Anyway, my bloodborne box's streaming feature works pretty flawlessly. I can probably stream starting at around 00:30 EST on March 24th (depends on how much gets preloaded ahead of time) for anyone who might be interested in seeing the game in motion and interacting via chat about it.

 

[Metro]

I'm talking about the next game.

 

[Phage]

Oh. Blood Souls? Yeah, that's possible. If they do end up doing a sequel-thing I can see that being multiplat. It's kind of strange that they teamed up with sony at all considering the relatively wild success of DkS1/2. The only reasonable guess I have is that Sony offered them a ton of money and support to try to get an exclusive for the PS4. Kind of ironic since Sony initially wanted to cancel demon's souls during its development and were very unhappy with it until they saw the sales numbers.

 

[StaticSpine]

The only reasonable guess I have is that Sony offered them a ton of money and support to try to get an exclusive for the PS4.

That's clearly the point cause PS4 still has no gaems and needs cool exclusives.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

A lot of the apathy towards Bloodborne, at least from the Souls fanbase is likely due to series fatigue. What does Bloodborne offer over DeS/DkS1/DkS2?

Ever-so-slightly faster gameplay? It's not like it's become Devil May Souls or anything. The game still relies on the same timing and positioning fundamentals as the previous titles; there's no animation-canceling shenanigans or combination-attacks to really speed things up. Hell, the animations as a whole aren't much swifter than the rest of the Souls series. Oh wait...the player character can do a dash reminiscent of Risen's dodge or Nero's (of DMC4) Table Hopper. Much speed. Such velocity. Wow.

Expanded attack options? Well, transforming weapons is a more visually impressive version of the one-handing vs two-handing tradeoff in Souls games, but hardly different in a strict mechanical sense. The movesets of certain weapons could be quite different depending upon how many hands were used when wielding it (e.g. many boss weapons, Santier's Spear).

Doesn't look like there are any new gameworld traversal options either. The player character is still (mostly) grounded and can't freely jump/climb in the provided environs.

We have no idea what the weapons/armors/items hold, as From has been quite cagey on this front. Ditto on the character systems. No reason to expect generic Souls on both counts, or worse.

Which pretty much puts all of the burden of selling the game upon the content. And this is going to be a tall order. Souls games aren't terribly complex in a mechanical sense, there's not a lot of leeway when designing stuff for the player to interact with. This gives rise to the "RESKIN!" Syndrome espoused by a lot of DkS1/DkS2 detractors; with such simplistic base mechanics, there's only so much untapped design space for enemies, environmental hazards, and bosses. Which might have worked if the last game was 2+ years ago, leaving fans jonesing for another hit of the Souls experience...but Dark Souls 2 was released a year ago; it's gonna be hard to keep things fresh.

PS: Parrying with gunshot sounds stupidly broken. I wonder if it really will be as dumb as it seems (Parry->Riposte was already dumb enough in Souls games, but this seems to remove most of the risk).

 

[Alfons]

Expanded attack options? Well, transforming weapons is a more visually impressive version of the one-handing vs two-handing tradeoff in Souls games, but hardly different in a strict mechanical sense.

The main difference is the combos. You can seamlessly continue a combo when transforming your weapon.

A lot of the apathy towards Bloodborne, at least from the Souls fanbase is likely due to series fatigue.

I can't speak for anyone else, but all I ever wanted out of DkS 2 is the same core mechanics and design with different maps, weapons, enemies etc. something that in my opinion DkS2 didn't deliver. Well it did, but everything except the UI was worse.
I try and be aware of my own biases so when I found DkS2 to be shitty I wondered whether it really is or whether it's nostalgia or maybe series fatigue. Luckily there was an easy way to check what it was, I played DkS1 and found it to be vastly superior but much less enjoyable. I was burned out on DkS1 specifically, not the series as a whole. I think that the fact that several people went back to Demon's or DkS shows that fans still had the itch, only problem is that nothing out there could scratch it. Of course, I can only be sure about myself. I'm interested, where are you seeing the apathy?

 

[Machocruz]

Can nostalgia really apply to a game that's only 4 years old? Not enough time has passed for any significant changes or progress in game design.

My dwindling enthusiasm for Bloodborne is gut feeling, or intuition. It was the same with Dark Souls 2, which comes out and is underwhelming to a lot of people. I can't say my intuition is an objective barometer for a game's quality, but my gut feeling usually turns to be reality for a lot of people. Too bad it doesn't work with shit like Uncharted, which I was unimpressed with from the first reveal of the first game.

One of the problems with DkS2 is that I could see the devolution of the visuals from the original reveal to near release. I found it odd that people weren't commenting on it sooner than they did. This isn't about graphic whoring but interesting looking content, which includes the environments you play in. Gameplay is mostly the thing but it isn't everything, let's be real. The beta came out and things were looking uninspiring. Nothing looked as interesting as the reveal, or even the DkS1 demos I saw 5 years ago. Drab, flat, uneventful. Enemies look kind of shit, nothing cool. The air was let out of the balloon.

Bloodborne is revealed, and it looks great. Then they keep showing more and everything looks the same. Same weapons, samey looking environments, mostly the same enemies. Cleric Beast looks meh. The one cool encounter was that werewolf boss, but that could just be because I heart werewolves. The first gameplay trailer is still the best showing of the game as hit shows off a bit more variety, it's cut to make it look like furious action, and the lighting/shadows seem richer. That's about all I can intellectualize about what's "wrong" with the game. It remains a gut feeling that it's going to be only ok.

On a side note: these Sony fanboys. This game is going to be the savior that proves to the world that PS4 is where it's at and puts Xbots and PC Mustard Race in their places. Funny how things turn. I remember being in the first wave of people in NA that imported Demon's Souls because I knew from the first screenshot and paragraph about the game that it would be something I would like. I remember all the shit talking about the game before and after it came out. What is this shit? Looks like a PS2 game. Boring hack and slash game. Low budget. Gamespot are idiots for giving it GoTY over Uncharted 2. But now Bloodborne is the killer app and those Demon's Souls philistines are all over the place acting like monocled experts when it comes to these games. Reminds me of a friend. Ninja Gaiden wasn't nothing until it came on to PS3 with Sigma, despite all my praise of the game. Then he's telling me how NG is the shit. Da fuck?

 

[DragoFireheart]

On a side note: these Sony fanboys. This game is going to be the savior that proves to the world that PS4 is where it's at and puts Xbots and PC Mustard Race in their places. Funny how things turn. I remember being in the first wave of people in NA that imported Demon's Souls because I knew from the first screenshot and paragraph about the game that it would be something I would like. I remember all the shit talking about the game before and after it came out. What is this shit? Looks like a PS2 game. Boring hack and slash game. Low budget. Gamespot are idiots for giving it GoTY over Uncharted 2. But now Bloodborne is the killer app and those Demon's Souls philistines are all over the place acting like monocled experts when it comes to these games. Reminds me of a friend. Ninja Gaiden wasn't nothing until it came on to PS3 with Sigma, despite all my praise of the game. Then he's telling me how NG is the shit. Da fuck?

They invested 99 points into mental gymnastics, giving them 30 iFrames to dodge logic and cognitive dissonance..

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

Shit quality but i really dig that horror vibe also that flamming hammer

 

[Alfons]

Can nostalgia really apply to a game that's only 4 years old? Not enough time has passed for any significant changes or progress in game design.

For me, it's not really a matter of how much time passed, but more a matter of how it passed. When PTDE came out I dumped hundreds maybe thousands of hours into that thing, I played it to a point that I couldn't play it anymore. Then, I dabbled in a lot of other crap. So when the second came out and disappointed I wasn't sure whether or not the first was ever that good. I "knew" the first one was good, but my last memories are of it boring me to tears, that's where my uncertainty about whether it's nostalgia or not came from.

One of the problems with DkS2 is that I could see the devolution of the visuals from the original reveal to near release. I found it odd that people weren't commenting on it sooner than they did. This isn't about graphic whoring but interesting looking content, which includes the environments you play in. Gameplay is mostly the thing but it isn't everything, let's be real. The beta came out and things were looking uninspiring. Nothing looked as interesting as the reveal, or even the DkS1 demos I saw 5 years ago. Drab, flat, uneventful. Enemies look kind of shit, nothing cool. The air was let out of the balloon.

It was either wishful thinking or straight up denial, people didn't want their parade to be shat on. Motherfuckers on twitch were hard selling that thing so hard only to realize how much shittier it was and dump it a month or two later.

Bloodborne is revealed, and it looks great. Then they keep showing more and everything looks the same. Same weapons, samey looking environments, mostly the same enemies.

I completely agree, but I'm still hopeful it's a matter of flawed marketing and not flawed design. What bothers me more is that when I raise these same concerns in the fan circles I get the "It's probably not like that in the release version". I was getting the same types of responses when raising concerns about DkS2.