Bloodborne Is Victorian Dark Souls - Hands-On Preview

[Raziel]

This is a terrible article. Missing words and grammatical errors aside, (Did an editor even glance at this?) nearly half of it is wasted up on a jokey preamble that attributes the popularity of the term "roguelike" to two games utterly unconnected with that genre. The phrasing also leads me to wonder if the writer actually speaks the language in which the presentation was apparently delivered.

The remainder of the article goes on to describe in detail systems identical to those already present in said two previous games and raise a concern that was already successfully addressed in both of them, while ignoring the differences that people might actually want to know about. For example, he "went with the plague doctor guy with dual swords and a pistol." There were no pistols in Dark Souls. How did the pistol handle? I'm guessing a lot of people are more interested in that than in hearing about specters of dead players described as if it were an entirely novel system.

And why the brief closing remark about not caring for the game? The title says "Bloodborne is Victorian Dark Souls," so does the writer dislike Bloodborne in comparison to Dark Souls, or does he dislike the Souls series as a whole? If the latter, why was he assigned to cover Bloodborne in the first place? It's not as if this is a review of the finished game ? it's a news article that will appeal primarily to people already looking forward to its release. So why wasn't it written by someone who would know what kind of information those people would want to know and provide it?

And why has someone on the first page of comments already provided more information about what was said at the event than the actual article?

The pistols are just like the other guns that each class start with. They are not really like guns, you don't really aim them, no scoping. They are point blank weapons used only to disrupt the enemy attack in order to give you a chance to melee attack. Sort of like a more complicated backstab. They don't really do any damage, and you have to be close enough to stab the disrupted enemies with your melee weapon before they recover. Worse is that you have to time the shot perfectly to work, and you can only carry 20 shots. So you have only 20 tries to even make the attack, and its not even a one hit kill when you do land it. Even the normal larger walking around enemies can take 3 or more of that crit attack. To say nothing of the bosses. Its a horrible trade off for giving up the shield, the alpha also had no magic. So its possible there is no range attack in this game. It makes the game WAY harder than dark souls. Its like playing dark souls without using any armor, shield, or magic, just rolling around with a giant sword. No blocking just dodging. Theres people who do that, but thats not the way I play those games.

There are enemies that have guns that can shot you all the way across screen and do heavy damage,

 

[OtherSideofSky]

snip

The pistols are just like the other guns that each class start with. They are not really like guns, you don't really aim them, no scoping. They are point blank weapons used only to disrupt the enemy attack in order to give you a chance to melee attack. Sort of like a more complicated backstab. They don't really do any damage, and you have to be close enough to stab the disrupted enemies with your melee weapon before they recover. Worse is that you have to time the shot perfectly to work, and you can only carry 20 shots. So you have only 20 tries to even make the attack, and its not even a one hit kill when you do land it. Even the normal larger walking around enemies can take 3 or more of that crit attack. To say nothing of the bosses. Its a horrible trade off for giving up the shield, the alpha also had no magic. So its possible there is no range attack in this game. It makes the game WAY harder than dark souls. Its like playing dark souls without using any armor, shield, or magic, just rolling around with a giant sword. No blocking just dodging. Theres people who do that, but thats not the way I play those games.

There are enemies that have guns that can shot you all the way across screen and do heavy damage,

Huh. Thanks for the information. Not what I was expecting, although I guess it's sort of true to how shitty pistols of the type I've seen in the trailers actually are (which still doesn't make it sound especially fun). I really hope there's significantly more variety of and uses for them in the full game.

 

[default]

snip

The pistols are just like the other guns that each class start with. They are not really like guns, you don't really aim them, no scoping. They are point blank weapons used only to disrupt the enemy attack in order to give you a chance to melee attack. Sort of like a more complicated backstab. They don't really do any damage, and you have to be close enough to stab the disrupted enemies with your melee weapon before they recover. Worse is that you have to time the shot perfectly to work, and you can only carry 20 shots. So you have only 20 tries to even make the attack, and its not even a one hit kill when you do land it. Even the normal larger walking around enemies can take 3 or more of that crit attack. To say nothing of the bosses. Its a horrible trade off for giving up the shield, the alpha also had no magic. So its possible there is no range attack in this game. It makes the game WAY harder than dark souls. Its like playing dark souls without using any armor, shield, or magic, just rolling around with a giant sword. No blocking just dodging. Theres people who do that, but thats not the way I play those games.

There are enemies that have guns that can shot you all the way across screen and do heavy damage,

Huh. Thanks for the information. Not what I was expecting, although I guess it's sort of true to how shitty pistols of the type I've seen in the trailers actually are (which still doesn't make it sound especially fun). I really hope there's significantly more variety of and uses for them in the full game.

It's just a shift of focus in terms of combat flow and movement, and the game is going to be designed around it. I play absolutely nothing but no-shield runs / SL1 runs in Dark Souls now, so this is an exciting direction for me. It's going to make the game much faster, more exciting and more dynamic to play rather than just inching forward and tanking every attack with a shield, even against the largest bosses.

 

[Dragonlayer]

Industrial Gothic Dark Souls eh? That's a setting just cool enough to overwhelm the boiling, game selling rage I experienced with the earlier entry! Throw in some weapons that don't look like rejects from a Hellsing anime rip-off and you have a deal Mr Miyazaki!