(bright music)
- Hey, how you doing?
So you might not have know this,
but I just returned from twp months of paternity leave.
I'm now a dad, would you believe it?
And I knew I was gonna have a lot of downtime
because there's this thing that babies really love
to do for like 16 hours a day, it's called sleeping.
The question then was what games were going
to take up my time during that period.
I was planning to catch up with a bunch of games,
but I also wanted one I could burn 100 hours
or more on over the course of a few weeks.
In the end, I decided on Bloodborne
because A, it was a PS4 game so I knew I'd be comfortable
playing it on my couch, and B, because you people
won't stop asking us to do a documentary on FromSoftware.
So, if I was going to spend some time away from editing,
at the very least I could do some research.
I played Bloodborne when I worked at GameSpot,
the whole editorial team at the time kinda did,
that's what we did, we kinda moved from game to game
and without the, I don't know, skill or inclination
to really keep at it, I bounced off pretty quickly.
I played it for a couple of weeks,
and then went on to whatever the next new big game was.
I knew that I hadn't given it it's fair shake.
So, staring down the barrel of 100 or so hours
of sitting on my couch with my newborn asleep
on my chest, I started up Bloodborne again.
I picked a lady, named her after my baby girl,
and the two of us went wandering into the Yharnam night.
And let me tell you now, I had no idea what was coming.
(bright music)
(coins clinking)
Alright, first some cliff notes for the uninitiated.
Bloodborne is made by FromSoftware,
a prolific Japanese developer previously
most known for the Armored Core series.
They've since been enjoying a renaissance of late
after they basically invented a new genre of game
with Demon's Souls and and evolved it into Dark Souls.
Bloodborne is the latest member of that lineage.
It's a game with sprawling, interconnected levels
that loop back on each other which contain enemies
of various difficulty boasting unique
and challenging attack patterns.
You can travel between lamp posts that act
as checkpoints, fast travel markers and a way
of ejecting yourself out of the world
into a hub area known as the Hunter's Dream.
This hub world allows you to level up and buy stuff
using the Blood Echoes you've collected by killing enemies.
If you die in the world, you drop all of your echoes,
so you spend most of your time collecting as many
of these echoes as possible and rushing to a lamppost
to effectively bank them before getting killed.
Sometimes that's running back to a previous lamp,
sometimes it's venturing forward
into the unknown to find the next one.
So much of the challenge of this game comes from the fact
that the lamps are generally pretty far apart
from each other, and critically, at least on your
first playthrough, you have no idea where they are.
Essentially, it's a game about running
around, terrified, searching for lamps.
Why are you scared?
Because the enemies in this world
can kill you in a single hit.
The flip side to this challenge is that enemy placement
is predetermined, so while your first run
through the game can feel like wandering
through a dark cave looking for an exit,
subsequent playthroughs are much less intimidating
as you develop the knowledge of where everything is.
(blood splattering)
This is one of the most important aspects
of the design of Bloodborne,
areas that were previously terrifying become familiar.
So the player develops a pattern of environmental mastery
simply by exploring these worlds.
You learn to love every fine detail in this world.
The corners enemies hide behind, the placement of items,
the various shortcuts between areas.
So, where once you were hopelessly wandering
through unfamiliar streets waiting for the next thing
to jump out at you, after a few hours you're basically Neo,
anticipating every single enemy and how they're likely
to attack, killing things to beat of your drum,
farming familiar areas to collect Blood Echoes
that will fortify you for the journey ahead.
I found this type of world design
especially wonderful as it flies in the face
of so much of what modern action games are doing.
I could talk to you all day about every little
nook and cranny of this world,
but if you were to ask me, say, where or the location
of the DedSec headquarters is in Watch Dogs 2,
a game that I played a lot of and really enjoyed,
I honestly couldn't remember.
Worlds like that are gorgeously made,
I think Watch Dogs 2 is a perfect example of this.
But the problem is scale, the scale of these worlds
have made them impossible to get to know
in any sort of intimate detail.
But I do know the streets of Old Yarnham,
I know them like I know the streets of my hometown.
The corners, the sight lines, the detail.
The other misconception I had about this game
was that it was some sort of hack and slash affair.
I've always had an affinity for the precision of shooters,
and so I've generally not been as interested
in third person action games where the combat
is based around flurries of combinations
and generally feels less precise to me.
Basically, I have no time for games Dynasty Warriors
or Devil May Cry, they're just not for me.
However, Bloodborne's combat couldn't be
further from those games, but of course
I didn't realize that coming in.
So the first time I beaten Bloodborne's first boss,
the Cleric Beast, I noticed I had almost
run out of blood vials, the health stimpacks of this world.
That means I used around 18 of these in the fight.
I now know that's not normal.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk,
that's kind of not how you're supposed to play this game.
I was playing this game the way I thought I was meant to
by attacking when I could and occasionally dodging.
Which, I guess, is actually the way most people
probably think that they're meant to play it.
But, just like how the same street in Bloodborne
feels very different the first time you walk down it
than say the one hundredth time, the combat in this game
is also about that type of familiarity and mastery.
It's very hard to win by button mashing
because there's no animation canceling in Bloodborne.
That means that, unlike most video games, if you hit
the attack button, your hunter is going to attack.
You can't just mash the jump button to cancel it.
And you'd better hit your enemy before they hit you
because one missed timed strike might leave you open,
and one of theirs might just kill you in one hit.
But once you have repeated encounters
with these enemies, you start to understand
the way they move, when they're open,
when to strike, and crucially, when not to.
There's nothing imprecise about Bloodborne's combat.
When you're killed in this game,
it's because you haven't figured out how to defeat
that enemy yet, or you just got sloppy.
And on the flip side, once you actually defeat something,
it feels like you climbed Mount Everest.
There's this optional enemy in the game
called the Blood Starved Beast.
It took me maybe 30 attempts to beat it the first time
and I had to call in an AI to help me do it.
But on my second run-through I beat it solo
with a mana build on my first attempt,
because now I knew how it moved,
I knew that little stammer it did
just before it's swiping attack meant
that I should roll to it's right.
I knew to circle it around the pillars,
I knew that if I threw some Pungent Blood Cocktails
I could distract it and attack it from the rear.
And when I finally killed it on that first attempt
thinking it was going to take me hours and hours again,
I screamed so loud, I woke my poor little girl.
(explosion)
But, here's the reason I really really love this game,
it's because Bloodborne doesn't care that I've played
a million games before it, it doesn't even care
what I think things should be called.
Pungent Blood Cocktails,
Cleric Beasts, Blood Vials, Vilebloods.
One of the most enjoyable parts of playing
this game is coming to grips
with the idiosyncratic terminology of this world.
Nothing in the game is named normally,
and most of the items you pick up have baffling uses
that you either have to randomly use to find out
or search wikis to figure out what they do.
Oh look, you've picked up some Frenzied Coldblood.
Oh look, you've now gathered some Shining Coins.
Oh great, this crow dropped a Pebble.
Oh, so you want to increase your bullet damage?
Oh, then of course you're just going to have
to rub some Bone Marrow Ash on them.
Oh, I see you've picked up some Madman's Knowledge.
Consume that to gain insight,
but don't have too much insight
because then the crosses on the mannequin guys
outside the Cathedral will change color,
and you'll frenzy the second you see a Winter Lantern.
(character screaming)
This idiosyncrasy extends out to any assumptions
you might have about the mechanics of the game, too.
For instance, guns aren't really guns in this game.
You don't shoot things to hurt them.
It's effectively a shield and used to stagger enemies
so you can repost them with your main weapon.
But of course you don't know that the first few times
you fruitlessly unload on some torch-bearing Yharnamite.
And all of this stuff, the world exploration,
the particulars of the combat, the bizarre bibliography,
it all contributes to this feeling, and it's a feeling
that every single one of us as game players has had.
But it's one that I haven't had since I was a child.
So to explain this, we're gonna
have to go back for a second.
The Secret of Monkey Island is the first game
that I ever completed back on my Amiga 600.
These are actually the original copies of the game
that I owned, they are super illegal.
Sorry, Tim Schafer.
It took me 3 months to eventually get Guybrush from talking
to the lookout to enjoying some fireworks with Elaine.
But in those 3 months, I learned what it was
to play a point and click game, I learned how they worked.
In fact, I just learned a lot
about how game stories and objectives worked.
Similarly, the first FPS I ever completed was Half-Life.
It took me two months.
I still remember replaying areas over and over again,
trying to learn how the AI of the grunts worked.
I did this because it was new and exciting.
I'd never fought enemies like this before
because I'd never really played an FPS before.
And after my first runthrough on easy,
that one that took two months, I started it again on hard,
and completed it in under a week.
There are plenty of wonderful videos
about how Bloodborne and the Souls series
are some of the best games ever designed.
But I think the reason these games are so memorable,
at least to me, is because they tap into something deeper.
That feeling of not knowing how a game works.
Bloodborne is now one of my favorite games ever.
Part of that is because it's just
a tremendously well-designed game.
But another reason is that, for the first time
in too long, I didn't know the rules.
I had to learn how this game worked,
not via a tutorial or using 20 years
of game-playing knowledge, but simply by being bad at it,
by playing, and by figuring out the rules for myself.
Here's the thing, these games aren't difficult games,
they're not hard games, you just start
playing being bad at them,
and that's something we're not really used to.
That's why so many people fall off these games,
because we're so used to being mollycoddled
by either the design of the game or propped up
by decades of knowledge of how to play games.
But the reason we love games is because of that feeling
of exploration we first experience,
that same love of games you nurtured through time
and pressure and getting better
and beating your favorite game.
Well, Bloodborne allowed me, an old blood,
to experience that for the first time in years.
So, when people on the internet tell you
that Dark Souls and Bloodborne are hardcore, they're wrong.
They're not difficult, there's just games
that you're not any good at yet.
And just like when you were a kid go-karting,
or pointing and clicking, or aiming down sights,
there are games out there, today, right now
that can give you that childlike sense of wonder again.
You just have to go hunting for them.
(bright music)
Thanks so much for watching Bonus Level
and to all the people who have contributed
to our Patreon in the past couple of days.
It's been incredible, we've already broken through
to our first goal and we're well on our way
to getting our second one, embedded documentaries.
Two things to talk about, first of all,
yes I have played Dark Souls since,
I am absolutely loving it and I'm planning
on playing Dark Soul II and III as well
once I've gotten through the first game.
And second of all, FromSoftware, yes,
we'd love to do a documentary on them
but right now they're not interested.
I reached out to them, they were super kind
and super communicative and they love the work we do,
but it's just not part of their I guess studio culture
to do the sort of doors open let's talk
to everyone about the particulars of their design.
I think they like the mystery
and I can't really blame them for it at all.
Maybe there's a way we can do some sort of documentary
about the game, maybe how it's influenced other designers,
stuff like that, we're actually working on a project
that I'm going to be filming next week
that does that for a different game.
So maybe we'll use that as a test bed
and see if we can come back to that for Bloodborne.
You're gonna have to wait
and find out what that game is, though.
Or I could just tell you.
(keys clacking)
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