Bloodborne has some SERIOUS design issues!

Yeah thats what I meant. Punishment because I messed up my strategy is 100% valid and required in a Souls game. Punishment by making me spend time farming shit elsewhere and hopping through menus and loading screens to have the slightest chance of trying again is not.

Rats drop humanity in DS. Humanity is common as **** in that game and it doesnt have a vendor asking for it as currency.

@jg4xchamp said:

The last one is a matter of goals, and I don't think Bloodborne is nearly as loot oriented as its predecessor, if anything Bloodborne has less weapons/attire in general, and those you find on the map. Everything you pick up is a consumeable, which I think is fine, in an action game that's usually how this would work, and for the most part Bloodborne is more of an action game than a RPG.

Bloodborne isnt loot oriented. Its materials oriented, which is far less interesting considering that exploration in Souls games used to be rewarded with shortcuts AND unique equipment, fun items etc...

Now its just stuff to stack and later use to access even more collectables for more mat gathering stuff. I'm nowhere near the end of my first playthrough, I think, so I'm not sure if suddenly the game changes its reward system, but so far its mostly been a blurry mass of unimpressive bits and pieces of something more impressive you eventually unlock at the hud base.

Its a step back in terms of how the game rewards exploration IMO. An extra step to get better stuff that maybe wasnt needed or could have been worked out in a less boring fashion.

I disagree, because a large selection of those pieces of armor, weapons were entirely useless for a lot of built types. So dropping a bunch of inconsequential shit hasn't actually hurt the exploration. The short cuts and nature of the levels reward exploration plenty, and the fact that there are some noteworthy items off the beaten path usually covers my needs. I've actually had little issue with them dialing back the weapons, if only because it's meant that more of the weapons actually feel useful.

The armor admittedly is more of a step back due to lack of customization and in general the part where the game feels like it's all dex builds after a certain point.

Plus humanity as an item wasn't frequent, you had to farm it in the early going with those rats. insight as an item is pretty freakin frequent, because madman's knowledge is like every freakin where, you get 1 just for seeing a boss, and then 3 for beating them. So again that shit was always a currency, and it's a massive non-issue at best.

There are these enemies later in the game that can steal your Insight. Probably not a huge deal but I don't know if there are enemies that actually drop Madman's Knowledge randomly (apart from those spiders in the Rom fight). So co-op and invading are the only ways to gain insight reliably once you've beaten the game and are sticking around in NG for PvP or whatever.

So can I assume you never played Demon's Souls then? In Bloodborne, we have blood vials. In Demon's Souls, we had late moon grass. Blood vials and grass are both consumables, and all of us had to somewhat farm for it, or farm souls to buy it. Both the bonfire in Demon's Souls and lamps in Bloodborne do nothing other than teleport us back to the hub. I'll be hard pressed to find a distinction between the two.

What puzzles me is why none of the things you mentioned seem to be a problem in Demon's Souls, where it all started, but suddenly is in Bloodborne?The legitimate difference is the loading times, which I'll admit is a bit of a problem in this game.

And you cannot say things like "I rarely farmed in Dark Souls." If that's the case, would saying "I rarely farm for blood vials in Bloodborne." make your point completely moot? No. I have to assume that it is a problem for you even if it wasn't a problem for me, and subsequently, many people did indeed have to farm for souls in Dark Souls even if you didn't. But farming has always been part of Souls gameplay. You can go read all the reviews for the Souls games and all the reviewers generally say the same thing, that you have to spent time farming.

Right, but I'm having a hard time looking at that as a negative, because I finished that game with 99 insight on the final 2 bosses lol.

You get this shit pretty frequent man. Admittedly I got myself summoned plenty, but that's because I enjoy getting some freebie souls while I'm working through an area.

Die in Demons and Bloodborne with zero health consumables and go farm for, lets say 10 grass and 10 blood vials, and warp to the closest area to where you died to try again.

Time it, come back and tell me how long it took to reach that setup for both games.

I agree with most of these. I do not understand for the life of me why Miyazaki insists on having a central hub like in Demon Souls. It's so fucking annoying. We really need to leave Demon Souls behind. Dark Souls did every single thing better. I hate the central hub, also, your life not recovering at lamps, and enemies not repopulating. WHY CANT YOU TELEPORT TO A LAMP FROM A LAMP?? Why are we loading two loading screens to do that? Back to Hunter's Dream, then back to the area you choose. So tedious. I'm a Fromsoft fanboy, but in my opinion Demon Souls is the weakest game in the franchise. Not DS2. I hate that whole "Mario-style" world 1-1, 1-2, shit.

No one should be shitting on TC- he brings up some very valid stuff. Even more valid because Dark Souls didn't have half of these problems and Bloodborne does. It's not like Miyazaki is making his first souls game- this is his third one. He should fucking know Dark Souls did everything better than Demon Souls and Bloodborne.

I agree with that, but good luck getting diehard Bloodborne fanboys to admit any of it. They pretend it's god's gift to gamers and has no design flaws.

They don't play b/c the game has too many barriers of entry and being hard isn't necessarily one of them. There's a lot of hyperbole spouted about the difficulty of the Souls franchise, and majority of it is entirely unfounded. The word hard is a very vague term that has been abused by the videogame industry since 2007 in order to sell games (Castlevania, Advance Wars, Souls, Ninja Gaiden, God of Wars, DMCs). When one particular game becomes popular, the industry makes sequels and the word hard turns into an accessory or selling point. All of the above games can be beaten in 1-3 days the first play through and are easy to learn. Moreover, any videogame that has a plethora of how to guides can not and should not be considered hard. If anything, the games mentioned in parenthesis are just different.

On launch day within a few hours, numerous walkthroughs showcasing how to defeat almost all the bosses in Bloodborne, someone from Japan beat this allegedly hard game already, and ppl from NA were already looking for secret bosses after completing the game. This is happening in not weeks or days, but hours after launch DAY. That should speak volumes. TC more than likely just spams his vials every second and refuses to play the way the game wants him to play. A strong criticism of Souls franchise which is very anti-west. Anyway, perfect image for those naysayers or elitist who don't want to admit to being suckered by a false sense of accomplishment:

You want a hard game go play NES games/ indies instead of the modern marketing crap we get today.

All I know is the start, demons souls, was magical. There was a uniqueness to it that makes it a good game today.

Bloodborne has strayed far from what it was about. Away from armor, away from defense and away from a decent color pallette.

I've got too much Insight. Sitting at 40, and that's not even counting all the Madmen's Knowledge I have.

Game has much more in common with Demon's Souls, and I don't mind that.

Bloodborne is a shit game and I'm glad to say that it made me sell my PS4. If that is all we have to look forward to then I'm out while the getting's good (high PS4 resale value).

Yeah , only Nintendo titles deserve the praise and hype , high scores and GOTY candidates , everything else is fanboyism... lol. Get a grip Link !

Well every game has design Flaws..... From Software simply just call theirs No Hand Holding and Hard Difficulty........ that plus they have a cult like following.

My replies.

Outside of long loading screens and lack of weapons, there's really no serious "design" flaws

Some genuine valid points brought up by tc here, why are so many people doing anything to undermine his thoughts?

I agree about the farming blood vials, i have had to go on a few farming runs due to a hard boss running me dry multiple times; and while it does only take 15 minutes or so to get back to being full up, that is still taking new away from the flow that i had with trying to kill that boss. This would have been improved dramatically if there were actually vendors in the game world, even if they did only sell vials and bullets that is still something.

It would be nice to have a limited use health consumable in addition to the blood vials, similar to the estus flask but maybe with only 1 or 2 slow uses?

Genuine concerns sure, but not design flaws as he made them out to be.

Vendors in the world would work, but honestly if the loading issues were sorted going back and forth to the Hunter's Dream wouldn't be as big an issue for most.

There are in fact 2 extra HP consumables in the game, Iosefka's Blood Vile and Blood of Arianna, both are single use items (the latter also increases stamina regen) that can be replenished by talking to the NPCs again (to a certain point in the game) but i get that you meant an automtically renewed HP source so :P. That and you can get runes that increase the amount of Blood VIles you can carry up to 24 (there might be higher but 4 extra is the highest i've seen so far).

I remember in Dark Souls.... three Blacksmiths

Rickert, Andre and Vamos.....

Rickert will Upgrade your weapons to magic using Titatnite and Green Titanite Shards...... but he sells Neither.

Vamos will upgrade your weapon to Fire using Titanite and Green Titanite Shards but only sells Titanite Shards.... and on top if that you have to fight your way through a bunch if Skellies everytime you go see him.

Andre will Upgrade your weapons to Standard, Raw and Divine, using Titanite Shards, Green Titanite and Large Titanite.... but again... only sells Titanite Shards.

The fourth Blackmith.... the Giant.... sells Titanite Shards, Large Titanite and Green Titanite... but has no Weapon Upgrades that require Green Titanite..... He can upgrade +10weapons to Lightning Weapons but can not ascend any +5 weapons to +6 despite selling the Large Titanite requited to do so..... you also have to fight or run past 2 Giant Sentinels, 2 Giant Clerics, Possible Silver Knights and One Batwing Demon in order to reach him.... or go the Long way around.

So to Summarize.... all the Blacksmiths were designed using ass backwards logic just to get you to run up and down for literally no reason other than just to waste your time......

From Software's Logic in all its glory.

glad to see that lems are still butthurt about Bloodborne.

I only agree on the Bonfire Respawn & Farming health front ..... just a mindless way of padding the length of this shorter-than-the-others game....

Don't agree with the rest however.

Bloodborne is a step in the right direction, but to say all of their design choices are "correct" is also a flat out lie....

Bloodborne overall had the least interesting boss encounters... mindless large beasts 90% of the time....

That being said, the overall game is great.... It needs the level of variety now though of its predecessors ... I imagine it will come with DLC/Expansion or Bloodborne 2 ... a very good first step though.

But my biggest gripe is the 30% health nerf to Guests/PvP enemies .... people are campaigning to get them to patch this out ... it heavily effects the PvP scene in a bad way ... absolutely stupid.

@jhcho2: Demon souls was the first game in the series, Dark Souls improved the formula... alot, bloodborne is a step back on how consumables work.

I haven't picked it up yet but that consistent loading nonsense I'm sure would aggravate me.

I don't understand how people can actually defend the new bloodvial/quicksilver system. You absolutely need these items to get anywhere in the game. If you run out, you are forced into grinding to get more. This process is made even more tedious by the terrible load times. It is definitely a game flaw, you can't convince me that this isn't bad game design.

Demon Souls had a limited number of healing items, but that game gave you a significant amount. You never had to farm healing items or other essential items.

Some say that Dark Souls forced you to farm humanity when it was low, but that's crap. Humanity wasn't an essential resource needed to progress through the game.

its not a perfect game for sure, I'd say its more like a 9/10 AAAE Editors Choice award winner myself.

No that sounds more like you stoked t find someone finally complain about a great game cows have gotten. Had this been multiplat, you wouldn't have posted this.

Does it work the same way the souls games do? For example, when I die or visit a bonfire, the world was reset to exactly what it was before. Is this similar to Bloodborne or did they get rid of that? It sounds like combat is more interesting this time around, so the game seems more appealing overall.

When you die the world resets but if you simply touch the Bloodborne version of bonfires nothing happens besides a menu pop up. If you want to reset the world, repair weapons, buy stuff, warp elsewhere, level up, upgrade weapons, etc you have to go through two long ass loading screens that go past the minute mark.

Say you want to repopulate an area. You literally have to walk up to a lantern, warp to home base and warp back to reset the area. If you need to farm for certain items not found on your area you have to walk up to a lantern, warp back to home base, warp to farming location, warp back to home base then warp back to your original area to progress.... Did I mention loading screens are between 30 - 45 seconds long?

Some people are calling this a feature lol

@JangoWuzHere:

Humanity was Required for Ornstein and Smough and Lord Gwyn..... Not in a Technical sense..... but having a summon mitigates alot of the Cheapness in these fights.

@musicalmac: Combat is actually much worse due to a almost complete lack of variety in how you can actually approach combat, due to the ludicrously low amount of weapons. Bloodborne is the worst Souls game yet. What really hurts it for me is the healing system and the mandatory farming it forces. It really does feel, in retrospect, like they were blatantly padding the game with forced farming to artificially lengthen the game length, (the dull chalice dungeons really drive that home too) because the game is actually SHOCKINGLY light on content. Take out the forced farming and the loading times, and I'd be surprised if the game has more than twenty hours of content. If that.

Not helped by an almost total lack of environmental variety. Everything just looks the same, it takes away the exploration aspect, the desire to see what new amazing vista or grand construct awaits you. Lack of variety in weapons and armor also destroyed Fashion Souls, which really was important.

Someone brought up the fact that summoning in the previous two games wad tied to a resource as well, Humanity. But when you did summon, it well… WORKED. In Bloodborne summoning co-op partners can take upwards of a half hour. A full hour if you want two. (and good luck convincing the first summon to stick around that long doing nothing when they've already been farming and staring at load screens for a few hours themselves) In Dark Souls 2 when I was stuck on a tough boss, I used a Humanity, went to the boss area, and took my pick of several summons. Had two partners to help me advance in thirty seconds, not thirty minutes.

PVP also worked a million times better in the two previous games, here, it may as well not even exist. Bloodborne has some very serious fundamental design problems that were glossed over or ignored by the professional critics. It's dividing the Souls community, as some of us feel passionate enough to tell the truth, while others see this as an opportunity to prove they are more "hardcore" than the rest of their already hardcore community.

The harsh truth is that Dark Souls 2, warts and all, was a better game in all the ways that actually count… and Miyazaki had nothing to do with that game. I wouldn't be shocked if DS2: Scholar of the first Sin has more people playing it online than Bloodborne in the near future. A unique advantage to a game whose online feature ACTUALLY WORKS. Not to mention the appeal of building and showing off your own unique build. (good luck doing that in Bloodborne)

Keep in mind I was hype as **** for this game, I voted it AAAA in the hype thread, it simply doesn't deliver the goods at all. It has devastated me that not even a Souls game (in all but name) can't deliver the goods on this system.

This generation of consoles really does just flat out fucking suck. The best games are a bunch of 2-D indie titles that can easily run on last gen consoles. Ugh.

Dark Souls II: SotFS will probably have a larger online community in the long run because that game actually offers valid reasons to explore NG+ and its BURSTING with content.

Was DLC for Bloodborne ever mentioned by From or Sony?

@popeanonymousxv: I have to say I pretty much agree with your conclusion. It's too bad Bloodborne wasn't more widely received by the fans, but it seems to have some strange issues. Too bad. The review at GS made it sound as though circle straffing wasn't enough to avoid enemies anymore because they'll come GETCHA.

That's why I lost interest in the first Dark Souls and didn't buy the second, because it was the same thing over and over, and enemies had the same attack patterns, etc, etc, etc.......

… and it works. Thats a plus. DLC hasn't been mentioned yet, but one can hope. This game desperately needs more content and several more patches to fix loading (they are working on it) and the online play. (waiting thirty plus minutes to join a game or get someone to join yours) Hopefully any DLC areas won't just be more grey, black, and orange victorian dredge.

Yeah I can't even come up with one good reason to bother with NG+, least of all several NG runs like I did in Demons, Dark, and Dark 2.

Oh and someone mentioned the healing items system here is similar to Demons Souls… issue with that is we had several different plentiful kinds of healing items that were not limited to 20. (or just a bit over twenty with certain runes)

I really doubt they will fix the loadings. Its not that easy to do without some MASSIVE changes to how the game stores and loads up data. And considering the game is out on disc, fucking around with important code on patches is something most devs dont want to do in fear of screwing 5 things while fixing 2,

It will shave off 5 seconds, 10 if we are lucky, from the loading screens at the most.

I love the world so much I think the commitment to the victorean lovecraft asthetic all the way through actually works in its favour and not against it. But thats my personal taste at work here.

My problem with the aesthetic is that every single area of the game looks almost exactly like Central Yarnham. Their is almost zero visual variety.

I get you. What I meant is that I LOVE that aesthetic so much that the subtle variation between simillar looks stands out to me more than maybe it does to you. Central Yarnham vs Old Yarnham for example, I IMMIDIATELY noticed a shift in how the arquitecture looked regardless of the dirtied up streets and dying trees everywhere. I nearly jumped out of my chair when I opened up the door and looked in the direction of the first small cobblestone bridge.

If you're not as invested in this look its easy to see how it might get old quick though.

Quit your complaining, 4 hits from a grunt to finish you off is pretty lenient. You dont need to summon for every boss, in fact, it is a good thing there is a summoning cost.

I'm disgusted by people who need to summon help for every boss. That's all. *polishes monocle*

Such rubbish. You level up because of game time. You get stronger because of game time. Enemies are easier because of game time. So don't spew this nonsense about the game does not reward you for game time. The game suffers from the lack of direction for new gamers. The very least ANY game should do is introduce new players to the mechanics and the design of the game.

The score on metacritic doesn't mean shit especially since this games have problems that would not have been acceptable in other games. The blind following is downright disturbing. I enjoyed this game more than DS but the unfettered praise and the convenient ignoring of game problems is nothing short of remarkable.

Does Blood Borne still have Stunlocking ?

Yeah, gamers don't realize that while it is nice to show love to devs and appreciate their work, if you keep allowing them to release broken games, you're paying for unfinished products and they're just going to keep thinking it's okay. I'm not saying its a big deal, but at the same time, it's not really okay.

I've recently reached Old Yarhnam and though it's moderately difficult, it can become prohibitively so if you run out of blood vials, which has - unfortunately - happened to me. Now, I can't even make it to any of the boss battles in the area. I'm going to have to return to the level that leads to Father Gascoigne to do some farming.

What the hell? You WANT to pay more for a season pass? The planned DLC and SoTFS re-release was a shitty move by Namco. It might have a larger online community for PC in the long run, because Bloodborne isn't on PC. But even then i'm skeptical of a lot of people upgrading if they already own DS2 and the DLC until it sees a $5-$10 steam sale. So you have the community split across two versions of the same game

I agree, but I'm personally struggling to get to that 10 insight right now to get the bell that let's me get summoned to get more insight. Would've been nice for them to give you both abilities at the same time.

That's weird. I had like 15 insight before i even knew about the fountain thing and the bell. Have you ate all your madmens knowledge? You should be able to gain a solid amount more insight by just exploring the next area and finding more knowledge. Both give you insight

I'll check it out. I think I have like 3 of them. I'm only one short right now. I'm just farming a little to get my levels up. As an aside, I guess its just play style, but I almost never use my gun. I know it offers a wicked counterattack, but I have a little problem getting the timing right.

One thing I'm not digging is the lack of build variety. I know this is sort of a reboot of the souls game but it seems like equipment doesn't matter and its all about zipping around and spamming blood vials

@Shinobishyguy: Equipment does matter, in particular the weapons you use/upgrade. Some are way too OP (the Axe + upgrades + fire/bolt papers "reks" mostly everything), some are "just right" some are lol-worthy.

As for the rest of the setup goes (clothing, guns and other variations) I haven't had much need to change (so far).