If anyone who hasn't played a Souls game is skeptical about Bloodborne, don't be.

Before I played this game I had never touched a Souls game, and part of that was because of the elitist attitude that the community showed.

Now that I've played this game, I don't think they're nearly harsh enough. I completely understand why these games are so loved by people who have made a living in the business for years, even more loved by people of my generation, and not-so-loved by younger people. I completely understand why in spite of the overwhelmingly positive critical response, there will be a very vocal and not so small group who don't get it.

I've never felt like someone who would go on a "back in my day" tirade but that's the feeling I find myself wrestling with with Bloodborne. It's like an experience I would have had 10-15 years ago, before every fucking thing was on rails.

What boggles my mind though is how overstated the difficulty and obtuseness of this game is by the vocal minority slagging it off. That fucking Dan Stapleton article for IGN where he says he couldn't find a shortcut to the first boss. Are you absolutely shitting me? I'm not exactly a fucking astrophysicist here, and when I find a gate that says "CANNOT BE OPENED FROM THIS SIDE" my first instinct is to find out how the fuck I open it. And once the convention of shortcuts is established, it's pretty fucking simple to employ that logic in every area of the game.

A rule of thumb is if you're ever so deep into a path that you're getting anxious about dying, you're probably not far from a shortcut or a lantern. That is part of the brilliance of the game, in fact. The level design flirts with the line of going too far between shortcuts or waypoints but it never actually crosses it. It's just incredible and is rightfully getting praised heavily by critics. The satisfaction of reaching another lantern or finding a shortcut dwarfs most singleplayer experiences I've had over the last five years or so, and it's only one part of the game. It is absolutely phenomenal level design.

I understand no game will work for everyone. I fucking hate every Halo game, but I can also accept that they are generally very good. I can live with people not liking Bloodborne, but it is an objectively well-designed game, with more mechanical consistency and coherence than almost any similar game I've ever played. This "BAD DESIGN" crap is coming from people who are too fucking stupid to interpret clues that don't consist of a minimap with waypoints for every point of interest. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here...I am not a particularly intelligent person but I played games in the 90s and early 2000s, which is apparently enough training to realize that doors that are locked can be opened if you try to make your way to them from another angle. You don't need a fucking engineering degree to figure these things out. It's insanity.

/r/PS4 Thread Parent