[PS4] Bloodborne

[christian]

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 9#msg80909

Instead of using shields and magic, (though they still exist in apparently lousy form it seems) you use guns instead. This in turn makes it so that players like myself that rely on the aforementioned elements have to play more honestly.

Interesting choice of words. "more honestly".

[christian]

It's not enough to analyze this game's combat system, and traps, and call it a day. There's far more at work here. And that is the intricate systems present within the world itself, in how you interact with the people, items, scenery, and everything else you might come across. Pay enough attention to the world around you, and you can discover the most incredible things. Pursue an unusual course of action, and the game responds in a totally consistent way that will fill you with wonder, like you were solving a mystery. So there is a very real adventuring component to the game, one which by no means has been diminished in the slightest by the action. Would forum threads across the Internet have exploded with content from the Souls games if this weren't the case? No. They'd be as empty as the arcade game threads.

[christian]

In other words, saying that you enjoy Bloodborne for its difficulty would be like if you told me that you enjoy Call of Duty for its story.

[christian]

A subject for another day -- Bloodborne as Atonement for the Modern Gamer

[christian]

Bloodborne: You are the experience points - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2408 ... points.php

Nice title. Will be reading this later.

[christian]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2408 ... points.php

Maybe the most important (and I don't say "most important" lightly) element of Bloodborne (and the Souls games') success is their rock-solid foundation as action games. Maybe the most important (and I'm still not saying "most important" lightly) element of Bloodborne and the Souls games' success as action games is the designers' unbending, unswerving devotion to (sometimes shockingly) long warm-ups and cool-downs on every button action (I say "button action" because movement is also an action; it just doesn't involve a button).

So the game is designed as an action game should be, with moves having startup, active, and recovery states with lengths commensurate with their strength. Like pretty much every Japanese action game ever made.

To say that this is "the most important element about Bloodborne" is to say that the most important thing about it is that it's an action game. It is to praise the genre which forms its skeleton, and to stop short of any real analysis which places it in the proper context within that genre. It's like beginning a Halo review saying, the most important thing about Halo is that it's an FPS. And of course, many reviews are written that way. It's only a matter of time before you're struck with the thought, well, maybe these people have never played a game in this genre before. Maybe they've never even heard of another game in the same genre. What with the way they're going on as if this was something new.

But I know for a fact that Tim Rogers knows about action games. So I don't know why he's playing dumb here. Is he trying to convince us he's a real, serious designer now? He did that better before when he was writing about a wide variety of games and what he liked and didn't like about them. Better that than what he is trying to do now.

[christian]

By the way, I don't like the word "cool-down". Never have. And to see it used to describe the action in Bloodborne feels extremely inappropriate. It really doesn't help dispel the idea that this was written by someone who's never touched an action game before, whose only experience is with MMORPGs and MOBAs.

[christian]

Interesting observation, Bloodborne even has the same stealth system that Metal Gear Rising has.