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Forums - Gaming Discussion - [IGN ARTICLE] HOW AND WHY BLOODBORNE LOST ME - (This is not the review)

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/26/how-and-why-bloodborne-lost-me

 

Even as someone who had never played one of From Software’s Souls games for any significant length of time, I recently caught some of the infectious enthusiasm from some of IGN’s Dark Souls superfans, who’d been counting down the days to Bloodborne’s release. I’ve often been told that I’m missing out on some great, challenging-but-rewarding action-RPG games, and that I just need to put in a few hours to get into it. So this time I figured, what the heck: I’ll dive in head first, power through the awkward early hours with determination and an open mind, and join the fun.

So I did, for about 12 hours… and I hated it. After beating the Cleric Beast boss, I have no interest in going back for more. This is the story of why.

Keep in mind that if you already know how to play a Souls-style game, my experience as a new player probably won’t relate to you – and I have no intention of convincing you that you don’t actually like it as much as you think you do. You definitely like it exactly as much as you think you do. Reading this, you might find it infuriating that I was playing Bloodborne “wrong,” and that I didn’t have the patience to stick it out longer. Likewise, if you believe there’s no such thing as a game that starts out too difficult to be enjoyable, then we have a fundamental disagreement on game design. That’s fine; just like Bloodborne might not be “for me,” this article isn’t “for you.” We have lots that are, though: Plenty of people around the office are really digging it, and our Bloodborne review (currently in progress) by Brandin Tyrrel and Lucy O’Brien’s new-player experience both offer much more positive perspectives.

So let’s get this out of the way: yes, I suck at Bloodborne. I’ve seen experienced players do in an hour what took me more than 10 as a beginner. But hey, why wouldn’t I suck? Generally that’s what happens when you approach a new style of game for the first time – you’re bad at it, then you play for a bit and become good over time. Ideally, the learning process is designed to be entertaining, and great games even manage to make losing almost as much fun as winning. For me, learning to play Bloodborne was tediously repetitive and very rarely fun.

My experience with From’s games up to this point had been a brief dalliance with the first Dark Souls, just long enough to figure out that I found the combat clunky and unappealing. Yes, I understand that the idea is to read the enemy animations and time your strikes so that you can score a hit before they do. My issue is that I have always absolutely hated feeling locked into attack animations for a second or more at a time – generally, I want my character to react as fast as I do. I’d heard that Bloodborne’s combat system was faster, though, so I figured there was a fair chance I’d be more into it.

And, to its credit, I do enjoy Bloodborne’s fights far more than Dark Souls’. Attacks are much more responsive, and I felt like I could reliably get out of the way of an incoming pitchfork stab when I needed to. It’s still extremely demanding, of course, and I wouldn’t want it to be easy – I was promised challenge, and I got it. To be very clear, individual fights were not what drove me away.

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, BloodBux™ (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.

Don’t mistake this for wanting my hand held – it’s more about not having my hand slammed in a car door and being told to like it. Let’s compare Bloodborne’s design philosophy to Super Meat Boy, the notoriously difficult old-school 2D platformer that kills you so often it turns it into a great end-of-level gag by replaying all of your failed attempts, showing an orgy of dozens (or more) of meaty deaths at once. I love that game. What’s the difference between Meat Boy’s punishing difficulty and Bloodborne’s? Meat Boy’s challenges are bite-sized, requiring only short bursts of perfect execution. They might be super tough, but when you get past one, you’re past it - you don’t need to play it again unless you want to. They also ramp up in difficulty, introducing new players to its brutality quickly, but with the understanding that the first few levels should feel reasonably surmountable.

Let’s compare it to another vicious game: FTL: Faster Than Light. Where Bloodborne and Super Meat Boy have the virtue of being difficult but “fair,” in that a skilled player can avoid death reliably, FTL is a roguelike, which means randomization – and that means you’ll sometimes run into no-win situations where you will certainly die. I love this game even more than Super Meat Boy. Why? Because the randomization means that every time I play through, I get something new. I’ll get a different weapon or upgrade for my ship, or I’ll have a random encounter that leads to a memorable experience. The same goes for the likes of The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, and to a lesser extent for XCOM: Enemy Within (which I typically play on Classic difficulty in Ironman mode, and recently with the ultra-hard The Long War mod installed).

Progressing through the first area of Bloodborne, on the other hand, means getting past at least 15 minutes’ worth of extremely nasty, lethal creatures that never change from one attempt to the next. If you imagine stringing several Super Meat Boy levels together, where one mistake sends you back to the very beginning, that’s what Bloodborne felt like to me. Forcing me to get past several challenges I’d already figured out how to beat just to get back to the one I haven’t is, as far as I’m concerned, an absolutely terrible design choice that makes Bloodborne openly hostile to new players.

So for variety’s sake, I struck out in a different direction a few times – I do like how Bloodborne’s intricate map design allows you to take a different path to the boss, or some that just go off into mini-dungeons of their own. That’s great, except that this game severely punishes exploration. Because you have to do a corpse run to recover your accumulated BloodBux by avenging yourself against the enemy who killed you before, setting off in a different direction from what you tried last time means forfeiting any rewards you earned on the previous attempt.

Plus, there’s no map to show me where I am relative to where I’ve been. Now, part of my anger at this design choice has to do with the fact that I have an abnormally poor sense of direction, in reality as well as in games. Before I had an iPhone with Google Maps, I was constantly getting lost. I depend on maps to keep myself from running in circles, wondering if I’ve been here before or if this section of the level just resembles the last. Bloodborne has no sympathy for this, and expects me to draw my own maps on graph paper or something. I get the idea, and how it makes it “hardcore” by removing any sort of convenience… but I hate it. It adds nothing but a chore.

To be clear, I’m not asking for floating mission markers to tell me exactly where I need to go to reach my next objective. I like exploring and uncovering new areas on my own. I just want a basic level of assistance in the task of keeping track of where I’ve been, especially when I come back after a night away. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Yes, I could use a third-party map or guide, but philosophically, I don’t believe a game’s first playthrough should make me feel like I require one.

Another idea of Bloodborne’s which felt completely disrespectful of my time is that your supply of items is persistent from one life to the next. In other words, if you use up your health potions (blood vials) trying in vain to win a fight, guess what? Those are gone, even though the enemies you used them to get past are back in full force. So, when you respawn back at the same checkpoint you started from 15 minutes ago, you have fewer items than you did before. Your task is now harder than it was, and the only solution is to spend even more time grinding by killing minor enemies to earn enough BloodBux to buy more at the store (which is hidden behind another full minute of loading screens!) to supplement the few you earn from drops. All of that before you can go back to take another crack at the fight you just lost. In a game where success depends on memorizing attack patterns that kill you so that you can avoid them next time, I want those patterns fresh in my mind when I try again. By putting at least 15 minutes between each attempt, Bloodborne ensures I’ve forgotten half of it by the time I get back.

This brings us to the boss fight: the Cleric Beast. Now, I’m totally okay with bosses being tough and requiring many attempts to stay alive long enough to learn and exploit the weaknesses in their attack patterns. That, in fact, is a big part of what good boss design is all about. What I’m not okay with is, as I mentioned before, having to play through a 15-minute stretch just to get back to the boss in order to try again. Remember: this isn’t some awesome old-school design idea boldly brought back to gaming by From – even the original 1987 NES Mega Man and its sequels I grew up on have checkpoints before boss fights. It’s just common sense. This, on the other hand, is something deliberately punishing and aggravating, and I’m sorry, but I don’t enjoy either of those sensations.

As for the battle with the beast itself, it’s hard to give a good critique, because after all of that, the Cleric Beast – or, as I like to call him, the Clerical Error – repeatedly glitched out. For the first couple of minutes of the protracted hitpoint-whittling marathon, the giant gorilla-thing with an enlarged excessive-masturbation arm dutifully chased me up and down the narrow corridor, and I did my part by dive-rolling past him and stabbing him in the butt to chip away a tiny piece of his health bar. In what could be called a wise move, he decided he’d had enough of that, and stood with his back to a wall, endlessly swiping at nothing at all and screaming at me.

In certain positions, it was impossible for me to hit him without being hit myself, so I had to take damage just to rotate him slightly in order to create an opening to attack, and that opening would then close again after I did. With no effective ranged attack, I soon I ran out of vials and died. About 30 minutes later when I’d replenished my potions and worked my way back, the same thing happened. And again. And again, until I finally managed to kill it. I’d heard much said about the sense of satisfaction you’re supposed to get from the “PREY SLAUGHTERED” message that pops up at the end, but this was simply not worth the aggravation.

For my trouble, I expected… something. A new weapon, a new power, even a new meaningless hat would’ve been fine. Instead, it just dumped a paltry amount of BloodBux in my account, leaving me so underwhelmed at the prospect of starting the entire process over again in a new area that I decided I’d had quite enough.

If that makes me – a guy who’s spent the past 25 years playing countless hours of hardcore games – a “filthy casual,” then I guess I’m a filthy casual. I expect there are a lot of people out there like me, and it’s my hope that my experience will serve as another perspective to supplement – not contradict or question – the rave reviews Bloodborne is currently enjoying from all quarters. Even the most enthusiastic of them point out that this kind of game isn’t for everyone, and I’m an example of who they’re not for, and why.



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So basically....

tldr: This game is too hard so I hate it.



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I was really hoping someone wouldn't post this.



TL; DR : The game has some game design odd choices, that for the sake of "challenge", can get repetitive.

I found this interesting, since it is not the first time I hear this opinion.



ClassicGamingWizzz said:
Just saw who wrote the article ( dan stapleton )and didnt even read the first line but i saw there " i suck at bloodborn ".

If sites wrote articles for every game a dude that works there does not enjoy a game they would spend 90 % of their time and resourses doing these.


It's just an opinion piece by the editor.



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The tagline should be: Bad gamers don't play Bloodborne.

/end thread

IGN gets most of their revenue from Microsoft, so this isn't surprising.



I will say that "Blood Vials" sound like a pretty huge step back from the Estus Flasks. I don't understand how From Soft thought these were in any way superior, and if anyone understands the logic behind this change, I would love to hear it.



Protendo said:

The tagline should be: Bad gamers don't play Bloodborne.

/end thread

IGN gets most of their revenue from Microsoft, so this isn't surprising.


That's a pretty large assumption.

 

If they truly were payed, the game would have gotten a low score.



Platina said:
So basically....

tldr: This game is too hard so I hate it.


To be fair, his complaints are reasonable. One thing is a hard puzzle or a hard boss to read/learn all the patterns, another thing is being "hard" because you are forced to repeat a lot.

I think this has something to do with the fact that i enoyed Dark souls way more than Demon souls. It felt hard without being boring or repetitive.



vkaraujo said:
TL; DR : The game has some game design odd choices, that for the sake of "challenge", can get repetitive.

Welcome to all Souls games. Sacrificing any semblance of good gaming for the sake of a difficulty "label".