Undecided on Bloodborne: Looking for Thoughtful Input

I got Bloodborne for Christmas. I just got around to unwrapping it this morning (I had a pile of other Christmas loot I wanted to get through first - a good problem to have). My first impression is a little... meh. I'm truly undecided as to whether or not I want to keep going with it.

The reviews seem to be mostly high. Still, both positive and negative reviews never fail to mention how challenging the game is. A lot of reviewers say the perceived challenge is just hype and it's not all that bad.

I don't play video games to stroke my ego. When I want to be rewarded for nonsense (challenging or otherwise), I just put in overtime at work. That being said, games like Animal Crossing: New Leaf are not my M.O. either - I don't play video games to go entirely brain dead.

I hate doing things twice, let alone multiple times.

Is this the game for me?

Also worth mentioning: I'm a sucker for story-driven games. From what I'm gathering, Bloodborne more or less, lacks a solid a story element.

I just don't want to get wrapped up in a game I think I'm going to enjoy only to find myself yelling at the TV 90% of the time...

@nickbird:

Bloodborne is a Dark Souls game at its core. It's basically a beat em up. You start a level. Fight some baddies and collect items to get to where you need to go. Once you die, you go to the game version of hell where you can buy stuff you want and level up your character. It's a simple design but it's a whole lot harder than it sounds.

Once you die, you restart to the most recent checkpoint and lose all of your currency. The worst part of that is that all the money you had disappears and you lose the progress you made getting there. It gets pretty frustrating but it's cool once you get the hang of it. I LOVE the game's setting but I hate its unforgivable difficulty.

Aside from that, the only story you see is the opening cinema and books and stuff all over the world. The game doesn't really get deeper than that. So in essence, it's more of an old school approach. If you love beat em ups and happen to be really good at stick and dodge combat like Witcher, then this is a great game for you. But I warn you, it is definitely NOT for the faint of heart!

@nepu7supastar7:

Thanks for the intel. I'm going to feel it out a little longer on here but I think I'll probably wind up sitting this one out with the rest of the faint-of-heart booger-eaters. I've been seeing variations on the expression "unforgiving difficulty" on many Bloodborne reviews and that's a red flag for me. The energy in this house would be bad and my blood would be boiling... and there would be broken controllers.

Though I do like beat-em-ups, "old school" is also a red flag for me. I grew up with old school games and I want to just leave them in the past. I don't take well to games (Undertale comes to mind - game bored me to tears) that reintroduce those old school design elements.

Witcher 3 is another one sitting on my shelf collecting dust. I've largely been avoiding it because I'm a completionist and I'm told to expect a couple hundred hours minimum to get through it all. Like reading a Stephen King novel, that level of commitment requires a certain amount of mental preparation on my end haha. Anyway, If the combat is also stick and dodge (what I might call clunky af), it might be a good time to finally just throw that in the trade-in pile too.

Thanks again for the input!

@nickbird: Bloodborne has similarities to Dark Souls but could equally be compared to the original Devil May Cry, it focuses of using your guns carefully, attacking is the best defence (successful hits heal your depleting bar), and has elements of Survival Horror.

The game is not hard for the sake of being hard, if that's your worry. Like From Softwares other games it just respects Gamers to figure out a solution. In an age many games hold your hand and give you the ending on a silver platter it's nice to have some developers that still respect your intelligence, while also keeping a balance in mind. That's all Bloodborne is. It's not Super Meatboy hard or anything like that. Assuming we're not counting Chalice Dungeons or Old Hunters, they have quite the difficulty spike.

If you're not interested in Player versus Player combat you are partly in luck, less likely to get invaded in Bloodborne over Dark Souls, especially till mid-game which you may have more an issue.

See Invasions in Bloodborne can only happen if you summon a Player/ NPC or reach a certain late area of the game. Anyway before any Invader can even come the game warns you about an NPC called the Sinister Bell. These NPCs are very easy to find and once slain, no Invaders can come to your world. They work like Dark Summoners.

Not sure what else to add without going into the negatives of the game, hmm. . . Well if you do try it? Don't invest in Arcane, it's very useless. Bloodtinge with a few dozen points thrown in is considered OP by many. And really what you'll want to invest in if any difficulty is a worry.

The Hunters Axe will forever be the go-to first melee weapon. Due to the charge power attack. The weapons in Bloodborne are not really that balanced at all despite so few, especially the three starting choices for melee, so going with the Cane, or Cleaver (despite being cool weapons) is an up-hill battle over the Hunters Axe. Later on you may want to look into Ludwig's Holy Blade, and if you make it to the DLC? Chikage.

isn't Bloodborne a free game this month? Well, don't know if you could've gotten any more for it with the wrapper on, anyway.

But, uh, everything Dark Souls gets it reputation purely for the franchise's deviation from friendly checkpoints, which are so common these days. Not that it's a faceroll by any means, but the long walk back to a boss fight or area you may have been exploring and the inevitable hit or two you take on the way there will tend to stretch out the distance between successes so that it can feel worse than it actually is. The upside is that it actually makes exploration feel dangerous, which is how the unknown should feel, tbh. The loss of un-invested XP is usually the hardest pill for people to swallow, but xp tends to snowball as you go, and even that feature of death will eventually become worth little more than a shoulder shrug in time, especially if you make a habit out of investing XP before you take on new areas. And if you want to, you can just grind XP easily to circumvent much of the threat enemies pose.

tl;dr, I can count many games I've died in more often than a DS game and many of those are not known especially for their difficulty. I'm not saying the game is easy, but in many ways it's like that girl that slept with the wrong guy in high school, gets labeled, but you can name about 10 people off hand that are worse.

Like with all Souls games, Bloodborne starts out really difficult, and gets significantly easier after the first few bosses. Once you get a decent weapon and a feel for the controls, you'll be tearing through a lot of fights on your first try.

Still, what you've seen is what you get. The rest of the game is just variations of travelling through maze-like areas until you hit the boss. You've already seen the bulk of the story (the lore is deep, but the plot can be summarised in a single sentence), so if the gameplay doesn't hook you soon, I'm not sure if Bloodborne has much to offer you.

(As for The Witcher 3, that's definitely worth playing if you can ditch your completionist tendencies. The quests and characters are leagues ahead of most modern RPGs).

Thanks again for all the input folks.

Funny story. I bought an electronic copy of Salt & Sanctuary a while back. Never played it. Since, reading the responses to my original post here and deciding to shelve Bloodborne for now, I figured "hey might as well try out this other game."

Wouldn't you know it, it seems to be an almost (shameless) 2D version of Bloodborne itself. Before gameplay even begins, you're given a seemingly ton of customization options for your toon. You die (by design) in the first area. You awake in purgatory (or whatever this game's version of death is called). You need salt to level up. You lose salt each time you die. The attacks are the same (one fast, one slow, both charge). In my very limited play time with each game, I could keep going on with these parallels. Hell, there's even bottles of notes left by other players scattered all over the place.

I'm having hell with game selection lately it seems *facepalm.

It is beautiful though. I wish I could find one of these dark games with mechanics more suited to my preferences.

Anyway, for the rest of you SoulsBorne enthusiasts, you might want to check out Salt & Sanctuary, if you haven't already.

@nickbird:

Anyway, for the rest of you SoulsBorne enthusiasts, you might want to check out Salt & Sanctuary, if you haven't already.

Read about it long ago and saw it as a wasted opportunity. Then bought Owlboy.

One can tell the difference between a game seen in the same genre; and completely ripping off another game.

I don't play games because 'it's like Dark Souls'.

Regardless, back on your dilemma, seems you're having what is known as a backlog crisis, I rarely have that issue because Games to me are not some checklist.

If you think Bloodborne doesn't suit your palette? That's fine, move on, you owe that game nothing anyway. It's just not for you, and it is that simple. Find a genre you like, or even play an old favorite game. No one here is judging your taste. Just play games you feel like playing.

@RSM-HQ: I heard that. Definitely having/had a backlog crisis. After all this Bloodborne talk I just sat down and went through my library. I traded 2/3 of it toward a Switch at GameStop (hopefully I won't be left as wanting as I was with the Wii U) and deleted a ton of junk off of my PS4. I keep these games around way too long, telling myself, "I'll give it another go and see if I get in to it." I feel bad because a majority of them are Christmas or birthday gifts (nobody knows what else to get me). I always feel like I should at least give them the old college try but man... I guess I've just grown fussier in my preferred genres with age.

@nickbird: I wouldn't be so hard on yourself, a lot of great games exist, and having a preference is nothing to feel bad about. Just some of these supposed great games don't fit you_

I try a lot of games as well, not knowing if I would like them all. I'm the sort of person who played Half Life 2 and told myself "not coming back to you".

So what I'm getting at is; nothing wrong with breaking out your comfort zone once a while. Yet seems to me you've been doing a lot of that lately. Go and play a game you'll enjoy dood, feeling bad over obligations isn't a way to enjoy the hobby. Don't think the people gifting these games wants you to feel miserable. Honesty may remove your mental guilt, and get you playing something you'd like.

Gaming is suppose to be fun before all else.

@RSM-HQ: Sage advice, bruh. Revisiting the BioShock series might be what I need to cure these backlog blues.

@nickbird: Nice, Bioshock is good taste in my opinion!

The game is stiff enough challenge, but it gets bit easier once you get familiar with the maps and enemies.

There is no story there, apart from intriquing snippets of conversation with mysterious strangers here and there.

I'd say the game is worth playing, not for the challenge, but for the unique and atmospheric experience it offers. It is quite unlike Souls games, and lot better in many ways than any other hack&slash game. The game is an experience you just have to experience if youre a gamer.

So you never made it to any of the cutscenes? Bloodborne has story cutscenes. And quite a few.

I've only completed about a third of the game, judging by a walkthru. Cannot remember any cut scenes tho. Mind you, its been a while.

Someday I aim to complete the game.

Mind you, my backlog is full of games I aim to complete some day.

@henrythefifth: Probably forgotten because the game gives you more direct context than the Dark Soul games, the cutscenes Dark Souls gave are usually a reflection of a boss and little less till the games closing act. Which is fitting because in Dark Souls everyone has gone hollow and forgotten who they are.

Bloodborne has the longest cutscenes FROM SOFTWARE have put together since Armored Core. And a lot of them are giving the Player a better idea of what these people are and why they made the choices they made. You even get a flashback vision after an early boss with two important characters discussing "The Old Blood".

My natural assumption is you lacked interest. And like TC, that's fine. Bloodborne is fun but not for everyone just like any game.

I've played quite a bit of a friend's copy of Bloodborne and personally I really enjoyed it. Not only is it a fantastic hack n slash with challenging combat, but the atmosphere turns it into a horror game. But that being said, it's definitely not to everyone's tastes, so TC it's possible you're just not into it.

As far as the story goes, like the other souls games, there is definitely a story to be found, but it makes you work for it/ makes you figure it out using sparse lore given to you through the environments, item descriptions, and NPCs. It's not a story in the traditional sense, that's for sure.

I do remember there being conversations with the wheelchaired old hunter and the hero, and with the doll. But I cannot really remember what was said. But it's been almost two years since I fired up the game last time. What I do remember of the game is that the atmosphere was great, and that I really loved the exploration and grinding in it. And upgrading equipment at the crafting table in the hunters dream.

@henrythefifth: Coming from someone who really likes the Soul series, espically DkSIII I personally found the upgrading systems in later From RPGs some of the weakest in the business. They really knocked it down since Demon Soul's. Which had upgrading systems closer to Capcoms Monster Hunter.

Bloodborne is free on PSPlus so go trade it in for store credit and download it from the PS Shop! :)

Then, there's no decision to make.

The story is in the items, the people, the place. It is a very sad story if my story theory is right.

The place is a nightmare, everything want to kill you and the game being dark and gothic making it almost horror.

The difficulty is there just like all the Dark Souls game. You can't face an ennemy head-on thinking you'll survive. You have to take your time when you're about to fight ennemies.