Bloodborne, a legendary game. In my eyes, the best FromSoft game. The first one I fell in love with. The one that opened my mind to the grizzly machinations of Miyazaki and co., and that still echoes in my blood today whenever I pick up the pad and enter the Lands Between or venture back to Lordran.
But, to be a Bloodborne fan is to be cursed. The game came out in March 2014 – nearly a whole decade ago, now! – and since then it has been largely ignored by its own developer (FromSoft), its publisher (Sony), and even the various remaster-specific studios that have shot to prominence in the interceding years (here’s looking at you, Nixxes). Fans praying for a version of the game running above the frankly dismal 720p/30FPS native to the PS4 version have had to make do with modders and dataminers showing off illicit builds of the game online. We’re probably never even going to get an officially-sanctioned PC port. More’s the pity.
So, imagine my delight when I saw that the PS5 Pro was going to apply some hardware-level wizardry to PS4 games. Imagine the speed with which I hastened to get Bloodborne installed on my PS5 Pro when it arrived last week. Imagine my disappointment when I realised with growing horror exactly what I’d gotten here — somewhere, I felt a monkey’s paw curling its finger, a Needful Things-type fella cooly smirking as the imposing spires of Yharnam rendered on my screen once more.
The only real upgrade you get playing Bloodborne on PS5 Pro is a slight ‘image quality boost’, to use Sony’s own parlance. It sharpens everything up, basically; takes off the jaggedness and removes some of that vaseline-smear that I actually came to associate with the game in some ways. As a result, text and UI elements look better, some details in the world are clearer, and that huge YOU DIED message hits harder than it ever has. It doesn’t exactly make Bloodborne feel like a new game, but more like you’re playing it with a new pair of glasses on – everything’s a bit more in-focus, a little nicer to look at. That’s it.
The framerate is still a bit choppy. Some of the textures and colours are still a bit weird (the gold trim on some of the items and environmental assets in Old Yharnam still look really weird baked into the gloomy twilight of the early game, for example). In the dark and gloom, some of the vibe is still lost to ageing graphics. I can’t help but imagine how amazing Bloodborne would look with proper HDR implementation — how it’d look to see an amygdala peering at you from the top of the cathedral in the dark when you finally reach enough wisdom, the screen dark enough so you can only make out its vague shape, see its alien movements out the corner of your eye…
Alas. If you’re waiting for a 60FPS and 4K version of this game, you need to wait for a remaster or remake that’s likely never going to happen. Whilst Sony is out there remaking/remastering more recent games like TLOU2 or Horizon Zero Dawn (why?), Bloodborne remains out in the cold, rocking back and forth in its creaky wheelchair, visibly ageing with every passing iteration of hardware.
I am not alone in thinking that a Bloodborne acknowledgement, in whatever form it takes, would move consoles. People would have been knocking down doors for a PS5 Pro if it had come with a version of Bloodborne that run at 4K/60FPS, I’m sure of it. Look here, here, and here. The people chattering about parting with £700 for a PS5 Pro are the exact people Sony is aiming for with ‘premium’ tech like this; the system is being sold as something for enthusiasts, for people who can actually tell the difference between 30FPS and 60FPS (because, lo and behold, not everyone can, nerd).
I’m not even talking about a full-blown remake or new product here, really, to take advantage of this in-built audience. I think a patch for Bloodborne, making it juice the PS5 Pro hardware, would have been just as appealing to all the FromSoft goths as a wholly new title. The audience has been clamouring for something like this since even the PS4 Pro in 2016. It’s a license to print money. So, to go back to that headline, why won’t Sony even acknowledge Bloodborne these days? The best we have are fan efforts, which admittedly do look spectacular.
There’s a rumour going around that FromSoft is working on over 20 games right now. The developer and publisher is famous for keeping many of its irons in the proverbial fire at all times, and I don’t think I’m alone in praying that one of these is something to do with Bloodborne — a sequel, a remaster, a remake, something.
The world is turning to ruin all around us, there’s no better time to head back to Yharnam to suffer alongside its denizens. Grant us eyes.