Bloodborne Editorials
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There have been quite a few opinion pieces on Bloodborne published since the game came out, and I figured it'd be worth it to just round up the one I could find and that looked interesting in a single post, for people that are interested in the game in some way. I will warn readers that the editorials contain an abundant amount of gameplay and story spoilers, so I only recommend reading them after completing the game at least once.
Laura Hudson for Boing Boing writes a personal piece on her experience with the game. While much of it touches on the well-worn topic of the game's difficulty, she adds a personal slant to the mix that makes it actually interesting to read:
Part of why I wanted to play Bloodborne has to do with my particular psychological wiring: I have an almost masochistic compulsion to do very difficult things. At its best, my penchant for risk and challenge -- my refusal to say die -- has compelled me to jump out of planes, hang off vertical rock faces hundreds of feet in the air by my fingertips, and move to foreign countries. At its worst, it has trapped me in bad jobs, bad relationships and bad habits, unable to step back or say uncle until I ran myself into the ground.
As I've gotten older, it's become the defining question of my life, or at least my happiness: What's the difference between bravery and masochism, between perseverance and self-abuse, between putting your nose to the grindstone and grinding your face to an unrecognizable pulp? When will I learn the difference? Friends attempt to analyze me: What if I secretly enjoy being miserable?
"But I don't enjoy it," I insist. "I don't like being unhappy. I just don't always know when to give up."
...
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. It was what I believed they could be, if I only tried harder, believed more, and just kept on grinding. But it wasn't that I failed at them; it was that they had failed me.
Difficulty is also the topic of this piece from IGN's Dan Stapleton, who explains why the way Bloodborne presents its challenge turned him off the game. The line between punishment and tedium is thin, and Stapleton finds Bloodborne to be crossing it too many times:
Where it lost me was primarily in the repetition, due to outrageous amounts of enemy-filled space between save checkpoints, and the equally outrageous 40-second load times every time I was sent back to the beginning. To be clear, there are no checkpoints between the start of the first area, called Central Yharnam, and after you kill the boss. Tough games are great, but when I triumph over a significant enemy or obstacle and make progress, I want that progress recognized and rewarded. The last thing I want is to be told to do it again and again and again, until it loses all meaning. As a new, inexperienced player, that's exactly what Bloodborne does: it takes the achievement of killing a big group of evil villagers or a couple of werewolves and reduces it to tedium by making me kill those exact same enemies so many times it becomes more chore than challenge.
This led to a downward spiral of impatience and frustration. Bored by the prospect of running through the same level again and again just to get to the part that was giving me trouble, I'd try to take shortcuts mostly by diving into combat and biting off more than I could chew. That usually ended about the way you'd expect. That setback and resulting loss of items, BloodBuxâ„¢ (I refused to call them (blood echos) because how does that even make sense?), and another 40 seconds of my life would make me even more angry, and the cycle would repeat. After a few hours, I knew exactly how Bill Murray felt in Groundhog Day.
Yes, I do understand that the style of these games demands careful planning before diving into combat, and I can appreciate that. However, that appreciation has limits that were soon overwhelmed by monotony; after that, it's boring and annoying and I just want to get to something I haven't seen before.
Tim Rogers wrote a very well-received 4-page article on the game for Gamasutra. All in all, I think it does a fairly good job summarizing not only the Bloodborne experience but also the general philosophy of its predecessors:
Your character's attacks all have warm-ups and cool-downs. The enemies' attacks have warm-ups and cool-downs. If you chain together multiple attacks, the next attack in the sequence requires a shorter warm-up. When I say the controls in the Souls games are "responsive," I mean your character responds with perfect immediacy to your pressing the attack button. Only the response is not an attack: it is a warm-up into an attack. Did you think before you told the character to do that? If the answer is "no," you might not have been playing this game very long.
The warm-up into the attack is the same length every time. When you press the button, you're making the decision to invest that exact length of time into launching that attack. Therefore, the controls are, in fact, "Perfectly Responsive" just not in the way that clicking a mouse to fire a rifle in Call of Duty might be.
An enemy confrontation is an invitation to decision: you will evade, attack, or run away. Evading is a multi-pronged decision: maybe you want to evade because the enemy is winding up an attack, and you want a better position. Attacking presents you multiple decisions as well: maybe you will do a quick attack, or maybe you have time for a slow attack.
In Bloodborne, as in any Souls game, Your Brain is the Experience Points. Each enemy has an attack warm-up timing, post-attack cool-down timing, attack range, and attack speed. These games require, expect, want, and beg the players to learn to identify the first attack of a combo by the visual presentation of its wind-up. These wind-ups always fall far short of the theatricality of a Super Mario 64 boss or a Zelda boss: These enemies do not run in place for three seconds, kicking up dust clouds, before charging at you. No, it's always something understated: if the chubby troll in front of you just squatted down halfway for a half a second, it's going to charge at you. You should dash out of the way. If it shudders for a second, it's about to raise up that brick in its hand. If it raises up that brick in its hand, it's going to bash you with it. Fire your pistol and the troll will fall to its knees. This is a simple example of an enemy whose telegraphs are easy to read, and so we encounter another spider web of these games' design: if an enemy's invisible "Telegraph Trickiness" number is low, its raw physical power is probably massive. Weaker enemies' telegraphs are tricky and stealthy as heck: you'll need to watch whether a dude is pointing his rake down or holding it parallel to the ground before you decide whether to attack head-on or reposition yourself.
Repositioning yourself is a good choice much of the time. The level design is miserly about giving you perfect position. The enemies move in unpredictable patterns. The enemies are part of the level design. You'll always want a better position. It's maddening. It's great.
VG247 tackles the game's Lovecraftian themes. Without wanting to knock VG247's editorial, I personally thought George Weidman did a better job tackling this subject, but video content isn't for everyone:
The masterful design doesn't stop there. Any other game would've been content with slapping Cthulhu-like imagery on its walls, or having a meaningless story involving higher powers, without trying to somehow work them into its mechanics. A good example of this would be Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It started off fine, but then you got a gun and started shooting everything. You acquired power, you had a role, and you stopped being helpless and disconcerted. It turned into a mundane shooter.
Bloodborne, however, is a Souls game. It's the only modern game that could get away with truly adopting a Lovecraftian theme in both its story and gameplay. It can add any number of obtuse, fuck-you mechanics and we'd never bat an eye.
Take '˜Insight,' for example. It's a major gameplay feature in Bloodborne, and also functions as a narrative device. I'll explain how both work in tandem. Insight is gained by killing bosses, or in some instances by just being in the arena with them for a few seconds. It's also gained by consuming items called Madman's Knowledge, which the game describes as the skulls of a madman touched by the wisdom of the Great Ones. When Insight reaches certain thresholds, you'll start seeing things you didn't before, some of which you've fruitlessly interacted with on numerous previous occasions and, confused, wrote off to (Souls games).
Finally, Kill Screen turns the spotlight to the game's chalice dungeons, where they argue the game's horror, humor and challenge shine the brightest. Personally, I'm not a fan of what I played of the Chalice Dungeons, so I found the perspective fascinating:
Bloodborne is as good at pure gross-out horror as cosmicism. Its reptile scales have a sheen that wouldn't be possible on older systems, and every player recoils the first time they spot the forest snakes writhing toward them in hissing piles. Your skin crawls when you see the first snake-stack and realize that it comes up to your waist; then you find one that's taller than your head. And later of course you meet the spiders with pale men's faces and the singing brains with all the little mouths. The game experiments with all kinds of biological repulsion, from the full-on body horror of its infected and pregnant bosses to a hilariously pointless Doctor Moreau digression of hybrid beasts with dog bodies and raven heads. There's even a strain of charming Halloween schlock in the mix of horror styles: ghostly carriages with no drivers, and gatekeepers who turn out to be (Already Dead) after they open a door for you.
The game's Chalice Dungeons are home to their own types of jump scares and nasty surprises. I don't think their style has a name, but I'd call it Daggerfall horror or dungeon sickness the sensation of wandering blindly into randomly-generated passages that go who knows how deep and hold god knows what. The game's procedural malice creates rooms teeming with spider-summoning Chime Maidens, eerie invisible ladies, and greasy-haired undercranked enemies that come at you with the speed of the girl from The Ring. Engorged bloodsuckers appear in rooms you already cleared just to scare the shit out of you. The absence of human intelligence in Root chalice design winds up making them worse but more unnerving than Bloodborne's above-ground environments. Is there a more primal fear in games than getting lost?
