Nice article. I’m sorta glad I don’t own the platform with this game, as this sounds exactly like the kind of thing I’d waste tons of time on. I do love very challenging games, but I much prefer ones that are easier to start and stop, such as Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV and Super Hexagon.
I read a good essay on the topic last year: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/dark_souls_ii_the_rise_of_masocore_gaming.html
@the author: Have you tried The Binding of Isaac?
Great writeup. I’m so looking forward to this being released on PC.
I think FROM SOFTWARE has fucking nailed 3rd person combat. Dark Souls (and the sequel) combined the stats-building and weapon choices/customization of RPGs with the biomechanics of fighting games. You can feel the mass of the great hammers, the nimbleness of the rapiers, the reach of the halberds.
I want all of my RPGs to play like that. I’m looking at you, Skyrim.
We have cross-overs in comics, supergroups in music, I want a video game crossover. I want the combat from FROM SOFTWARE, the world from Bethesda, and the voice acting from Mass Effect.
I honestly never got into any of the Souls games. There’s just something about the sheer amount of repetition that frustrates me. It’s that feeling you got as a child after dying at the very end of a very hard Mario level, but magnified a hundredfold.
The strength of Skyrim lies not its combat mechanics but in the sheer freedom that allows one to ride a horse up a nearly vertical mountain slope.
Is there a version I can play on Facebook?
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Good article, but now I’m getting flashbacks to playing GTA: Vice City on PC. The Demolition Man mission, where you have to use a crappy, near uncontrollable radio controlled helicopter to place bombs in barrels defeated me over and over again. When, after about an hour of irritating failure, I finally managed to struggle and swear my way through the next cut scene, I fold that I hadn’t been breathing and my heart was hammering fit to burst. The adrenaline rush was so huge, I nearly passed out. Happy days…
Bloodborne Crush Saga
That’s exactly how I’ve described why I love it.
I admit, I do use online resources to help better understand gear choices and boss strategy. But, in challenges of immense difficulty where dozens have died before you, I consider those pearls of wisdom part of the lore and consistent with the tale.
According to the last details I read - it’s very unlikely to be released on PC, unfortunately.
I too would absolutely love this to be ported, but as it stands it not just a “timed exclusive” or a matter of From Software giving the rights - much like Demon Souls, Bloodborne is partly produced by Sony themselves - as a PS4 exclusive.
Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 are likely the only “current” From Software games we’ll get to play on the PC for a good long while… 
What Bloodborne offered was what I’d always really wanted from the jobs, the people, the places I had found it so difficult to quit, the bottomless maws of time and energy that took everything, and gave nothing back.
That feeling of finding the one thing that was always missing from life… it’s called addiction.
[quote=“SquidgyB, post:12, topic:55257”]
Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 are likely the only “current” From Software games we’ll get to play on the PC for a good long while…
[/quote]Fortunately Dark Souls is still the best game of the bunch.
Very enjoyable article! Really echoes my own experience with the Souls series as far as “that first Souls” game feeling. I love reading about the souls games, be it work from people who like or dislike the games.
I’m always secretly delighted when I read someones thoughts about the moment they realise the game is actually very fair, it it generally our mistakes and assumptions that lead to us dying in it. I end up getting a “YES!” feeling as another person joins the club and accepts the challenge that the design philosophy of the series presents to us.
I can deal with that kind of frustration in The Binding of Isaac or Hotline Miami, since there’s very little downtime in those games, but it was extremely frustrating to die to a boss in Dark Souls, and then have to schlep all the way back from the last campfire, past hordes of annoying enemies with inconsistent patterns and dodgy collision detection (the key word here is: toestabbing).
I wanted to give Bloodborne a try because I liked the atmosphere and the aesthetics, but if it never makes it onto the PC (as one already poster suggested), I’ll be doomed to disappointment.
I feel like the biggest thing From’s games teach me is detachment. Die with 9k blood echoes because I chose to push on instead of returning to cash them in, then lose them for good because I tried to fight two large enemies at once on the way to reclaim them? Oh well. It happens. It’s just a number, and I could easily run through the same path to regain those echos. Switch it off, go to bed.
I didn’t finish Dark Souls. I may not finish Bloodborne, either. But I’ve had a great time in both wandering around these huge piles of majestic architecture and really learning their geography. After a while the monsters start to feel more like a way to slow your pace and make you pay attention to the world than an actual problem.
Completely, utterly agreed, although for me that’s pretty much any game. Detachment, and the self-awareness of realizing I’m yawning so much because it’s three in the morning and I’m still trying to beat .
id liek to play byt cant pay them oney so if anybody haz a link to the .apk for my phone plz pm me plx thx
This is a great piece. I really love how much Bloodborne’s combat mirrors the game’s setting and world. You’re a hunter in the most animalistic way the game is built around carefully leading astray and picking off stragglers from large groups, but going into a focused berserker state when surrounded. The way you get life back if you damage an enemy that hit you quickly enough is brilliant for making this happen instinctively. I’m glad to see this game getting so much positive reception for more than just its difficulty level.
I’ve been a big fan of From Software since the mid nineties but it was always frustrating how Demon’s/Dark Souls fans would often talk up the game just in terms of it being a “real game” because it’s hard without going into any of the positive ways From has played with the genre over the years in detail.
I can wrote this piece that talks a bit about how some aspects of the fandom have been frustrating with that elitist attitude along with some of the cool things Bloodborne does:
http://www.cinedome.net/2015/04/bloodborne-fan-reaction.html
But it’s been thrilling to see that I was a bit too pessimistic, and that thanks to Offworld and some other sites actual discussion of From Software is happening beyond the enthusiast press line of the game being a GOTY because it has nice graphics and is hard.
