PlayStation Experience 2014: Bloodborne Hands-on Preview

PlayStation Experience, the first of Sony's new annual fan conventions, is the first place I've got to finally play a bit of Bloodborne. And while it doesn't bear the Souls name, it's still very much a Souls-like experience, though From has tweaked it to control slightly different, thanks to a few different additions and changes.

While I can't proclaim myself a Demon's/Dark Souls expert, having played and beat the prior entries certainly gave me a slight edge in Bloodborne. That's the first thing I took away, and I certainly attributed that as a positive. After all, Bloodborne looks to be the evolution of the Souls series, so fans coming to this game having played past games will feel right at home with a lot of the mechanics.

I skipped all the tutorial messages scattered in the beginning of the level, in lieu of just practicing movement and combat myself, first-hand. It controlled as expected. Your light and heavy attacks are still tacked on the R1 and R2 buttons, while L2 allowed me to shoot the gun I had in my left hand. What's different here is L1. This button allowed me to shape-shift my weapon, which transformed from a short hand blade into a much longer staff with the blade at the end of it. Being able to switch these stances at will gave me some tactical advantages against certain enemies. Quicker enemies that dove in after me with quick slashes were much easier dealt with the shorter blade, since it allowed me to counter their fast speed with a quick attack. Switching to the longer weapon allowed me to deal a bit more damage, and have a bit more range as well, but I in turn sacrificed my quick slashes. Since it's extremely easy to switch between these two weapon stances on the fly with a push of a button, you can easily combo a quick attack with the short blade, and switch mid-combo to deal more damage once the enemy's guard has been broken.

Dodging is handled differently here too, and at first I wasn't sure whether I liked the switch. After all, I'm used to constantly rolling in Souls games to avoid damage. While rolling is still very much in the game, you can only perform this move if you're not locked on to an enemy. When you're locked on, you instead have a quick strafe step, which actually allows you to side-dodge enemy swipes. I actually found this type of dodge to work a lot better against the bigger enemies that I fought. And if things got hairy, I simply disengaged my lock-on button and dodge rolled to safety. Souls veterans will surely find the duality of dodge moves a bit weird at first, but it certainly works.

One thing that I was worried about, simply watching trailers and gameplay videos, is that the game would be slightly easier than its Souls predecessors. After all, your weapon moves quicker, allowing you to get hits in many times even before the enemy knows you're there. However Bloodborne counters this with enemy placement and density. SImply put, you're almost always fighting multiple enemies at a time, meaning you constantly have to be on your toes, dodging at the right time, and then going in for the punishing strikes. It's easy to get overwhelmed at times, and often it's better to attract an enemy with a Pebble, rather than charging in and having five enemies swarm you.

Large swarms of enemies will mess you up

Healing items are few and far between, which of course purists will welcome. One thing that I didn't see in this build, are any sort of save points that restore your health and save your position. That meant that I had to constantly be aware of my health and the amount of healing vials I had, since death meant I went all the way back to the beginning of the area, with all the enemies respawned again.

Another thing I've noticed was that there didn't seem to be any 'souls' to collect for experience. Granted, this was still labeled as the Alpha build with pre-determined characters, so it's possible that this demo didn't have any sort of character growth implemented.

I am really curious as to Bloodborne's size. Today it was revealed that there will be 10 areas in the game, but that doesn't really give any indication of its size. So far the location of the demo makes it seem very linear, so I'm curious to see whether it will have an open and inter-connected world design very much like Dark Souls.

The game itself looked very gorgeous. Even with a bunch of enemies on screen at once, with blood gushing everywhere with each and every slash you perform, the game continued to perform fantastically. Sure it might not be 60 frames per second, but this is certainly the next best thing.

As a Souls fan, I have high hopes for Bloodborne. It feels familiar enough where I was able to jump in, perform a jumping attack without any sort of guidance, but still very new thanks to the changes to the way the dodge mechanic works, or even the implementation of the morphing weapons. Today's announcement, the Chalice Dungeon, also got me very pumped, since it will revolve around delving into an ever changing, procedural dungeon, that you can tackle with a friend or two. Sign me up. While I'm sad that Bloodborne won't be making its debut in February as previously scheduled, I can only hope that the extra month of polish will make the game that much better.