This sums up quite a lot of todays´reviewers -- "I want the game to be easy and hold my hand while making me feel like I´m a totally hardcore pro gamer who figured it all out by him/herself"
Now is Bloodborne a friggin challenge? yes and imo a big one. Should every game be like this? Hell no! Anyways this stapleton guy seems quite suspect to me.

While I like the idea that harming yourself gives you an advantage, I don't think the consumable approach to health is neccessary. It produces a situation where you have to grind in order to have enough to play through a certain area.

On the other hand, Estus Flasks operated similar to Energy tanks in metroid. When you collect them, they essentially serve as an extension of your healthbar. This encourages exploration first of all to find the additional shards. Second of all, this creates consistency with your run and allows the developers to tailor the dificulty of levels to the amount of health you should have at this point. I do think that lifegems somewhat broke that system, but I still think at its core it was better than this.

The problem is when you get to a point where you think "I don't have enough Blood Vials to play the way I want to play". When this happens, you are essentially forced to grind until you can advance and I in no way see this as improving any part of the system.

Try Demon Souls again with the Mage class. I too ran into a wall really early in my Demon Souls run and quit the game until a friend told me to play as a Mage. It is essentially easy mode, but the game is phenomenal if you can get past that early bump.

Looks like most people haven't read the whole article. I thinks he makes some very good points. The comparisons with other hard games are spot on.

All I'm seeing here from you is excusing bad game design with "but it's supposed to be hard" not realizing that there is a difference between challenge and unnecessarily punishing the player for playing the game.

It's no wonder that BB receives such high praise when the result of doing the opposite is receiving giant amounts verbal abuse from "real gamers". Shaming casuals is probably the last bastion for inbreads, now that they can't shame women or sexual orientations anymore.

For me the only thing I don't like so far with Bloodborne is farming bullets and I have thus far had a hard time parrying with them. Other than that, love the hard as balls combat.

I'm just laughing at remarks saying that whoever finds Souls type of game hard aren't "real gamers" or bad gamers.

After his whine fest on Twitter this article doesn't shock me.

Not sure when the last time I saw an article like this though, especially when done before the same site releases their review on the game.

Well, different people like different games

...there, i said it without a wall of text.

Actually, in Europe, it was just initially marketed as an amazing must play game. I read a few reviews giving it 9/10 and ran out and bought it that same day on my lunch break having never heard of it.

However, I would disagree with your point in general, because the reality of what you're saying is if a company marketed a game as "this is total trash", then any reviews saying it was total trash aren't okay.

I actually play and love games that are perceived as being hard by some. I was not ready however for the utter own fest that Demon Souls handed me haha.

However, I can also appreciate that people have different tastes. As long as you're open and honest about those when going into a review, I don't see the issue. All reviews are opinions. This wasn't a review either though to be fair, it was an opinion piece from someone else.

Have you guys noticed anytime theres a great game with great reviews, great reception and sales there is that ONE site, that one gaming website that says no, this game is SHIT

Pointing out a small handful of flaws = game is shit.