Bloodborne

Hey so I was initially jealous of missing out on this cuz I'm on XBone but I've watched a few gameplay vids and this one, showcasing the fight Mike is stuck on, really makes the camera control look frustratingly awful.



I know this doesn't capture atmosphere and all the other great stuff but I look at this and just feel frustrated.

The camera IS God awful, esp for the large bosses.

I like to think that the sometimes awkward camera angles simulate the disorientation you would have fighting these enemies. Still even with the strange camera angles, this game is very impressive and my favorite 'next gen' game thus far.

ok I watched some more gameplay and my initial analysis may be off. I'm told that the guy in that video was terrible and that most people use the lock-on camera (yay for Link) that gets around the camera issues.

But I was feeling SUPER frustrated watching that video as Father G drifts off-camera and then the guy gets roasted not knowing where the dude was.

My buddy went for that nekkid character class. He's totally stuck on Father G.

hey I heard that the leveling-up decision is a tough one. Cuz when you level-up, all the enemies in your area respawn and it can take another couple hours to clear them out again. So when are you supposed to level up? After you find the shortcut door to the next area?

Yep, lock-on is very helpful for controlling how the camera rotates, although sometimes it can be a bit 'in your face' with the bigger enemies. Still much better than trying without the lock on, you're asking to get killed fast otherwise. The naked class is an interesting choice since you get more control over how your character levels, but at the beginning of the game it's a pain, since everything is much tougher. I'd recommend your friend level up a bit more before going to Father G.

When you return to hunters dream, all areas you've cleared repopulate. So it's always better to find the next lamp or shortcut before leveling. Still, even if you have to make a hasty trip to stock up on blood vials or whatever, you can often run past enemies to where you want to go. It gets easier once you learn the layout of the area you're in.

When to level is really up to you, but really I've found that weapon upgrades make a bigger different, but still a balance of the two is important.

he just beat Father G but he says there's some giant thing that one-shots him now

It;s tough playing great games at the same time for buddies that have a Xbone and PS4. I think the next game that could be really good where this might work is The Division but who knows.

Black Barney wrote: hey I heard that the leveling-up decision is a tough one. Cuz when you level-up, all the enemies in your area respawn and it can take another couple hours to clear them out again. So when are you supposed to level up? After you find the shortcut door to the next area?

Yeah, best after a shortcut. But also keep in mind that once you've been in a place a lot and have the measure of the enemies there you can fuck dudes up in very short order like a murder machine. Of course, if they happen to get you in a group and you make a wrong move you die... souls game and all.

So I played today, I had like 40 minutes so I fucked around for a little while and finally grimly took another run at the blood starved beast. This is probably... my 9th time maybe? The best I did any other time was get him down to 1/2 of his health or so. Keep in mind he was shredding me during these other playthroughs. I'm out of fire paper, molotovs, I'm fairly low on antidotes. No tricks up my sleeve itemwise this time. I'm not going to be fiddling with any items or switching between them and using them, etc. I set antidote to my item slot and that's it.

So this time I go down there and I just walk straight up to him, in the long hall, fuck the pillars on the side. I just get dick to dick with it with no tricks. And I FUCK this guy up. I think he hit me twice and I used one antidote. I used like 2-3 blood vials. I maybe hit him with regular attacks at most 2-3 times. The rest was just putting my pistol in his grill and staggering him. Maybe 5 times. Standing in the middle of a large room with no cover to strafe around. Done.

Lessons? I think it's easy to get into this mindset where you're going to run away from the enemy, try to get it hung up, try to use just the right item at the right time, etc. But when you do that you're devoting some of your limited reflexes and brain cycles to extraneous stuff. A large part of this game is simply timing the enemy with dodges and staggers. Full stop---nothing else. I had gotten so wrapped up in other shit that going down there with no other items or thoughts about what to do meant I just destroyed him.

Also, I know I said it up thread but I cannot emphasize it enough... but be 1000% sure your TV is on game mode, esp if you have an LCD/LED TV. Bosses are incredibly difficult without it because you can't time them as well. You won't notice it as much vs. regular dudes but when you get to the boss it can really, really mess you up. I have to flip back and forth between modes so sometimes I accidentally play on movie mode (which looks a lot better, e.g. blacks) and I play like absolute garbage vs. bosses.

My (uneducated) advice re: levelling is that you decide which route you go relatively early: skill or strength. If you go skill, you'll be using weapons like the whip and the spear. I think there are more later. With strength you'll be using shit like the axe and the hammer.

Why specialize? Because of the skill multiplier stat a weapons has. So different weapon's damage is multiplied by different skills. So the whip has a strong multiplier for skill but none for strength, meaning you do a lot more damage the higher the skill is. And that multiplier increases as you level the weapon up, too.

I'm sure the system is much more sophisticated than that but that's my initial recommendation, don't try to equal level skill, bloodtinge, and strength. Just choose one and plan to use weapons (at least early) with that. There may be some reason to balance out later. Are there diminishing returns to increasing skills at some point? Do you guys know?

OK, beat Father G. I found an area I had not gone to before, and there was a person there that gave me an item that made fighting him much easier. Won't spoil it if you guys didn't go that route. But I got my timing down, pulled off several viscerals, "Prey Slaughtered".

I've gone through the Cathedral Ward and working on Old Yarnham now. MG nest, WTF!? Guy just keeps blazing me.

Re: the camera, yeah, it sucks. but it sucks in ANY game where you have 3D movement and large enemies that you can get up close to or that insist on being in your face.. You learn to control the camera, the Z-targeting makes a huge difference but it is a little finicky.

On leveling...I tend to level whenever I can unless there is a weapons upgrade...it's so hard to judge what an impactful change will be and usually you don't really see a big change until you have a stat that is really high in comparison to others. Right now, my skill is 20, the next highest I have is 14 in Endurance. I wanted the benefit of playing a high-skill Professional class, but I wanted the endurance to counterbalance a lower damage-per-hit, thinking quantity over quality. Which is exactly the opposite of what I do in Demon's/Dark Souls. Taking into account the higher level of aggression and the emphasis on offense, that made sense.

On weapons, I still use the Threaded Cane (up to +3 on it, a couple of gems in it). The short form is quick enough to whack around single attackers and break combos. The long form whip provides excellent crowd control within almost a 90 degree zone- which is also useful when you're attacked from the sides unexpectedly. I can attack very quickly, and accuracy isn't as important. But then you can switch back to the cane for a high-damage thrust attack.

The blunderbuss is strictly for countering, so I'm playing low Bloodtinge- at least for now. I think it does like 12-14 damage at this point, but it's just to set up a visceral.

On grinding/respawning- it doesn't take "hours" to level, actually. The respawning monsters are really an essential element because that's how you develop the knowledge and skill to go through areas multiple times to get the maximum benefit. You'll find these loops that are particularly lucrative so you do that a couple of times and then bank the blood by leveling or making purchases. It only takes a long time if you are in an area that is effectively lower than your level because you get less for lower level enemies. If you are where you need to be, you can tell that your blood income rate is right. This is exactly how it was in the Souls games too.

I really like how they did the blood echoes part, where if you are killed by a specific enemy then when you see them again they have glowing eyes- and all of your blood. This is much cooler than just finding your little puddle and reclaiming it. I also really like (and have always liked) how that mechanic encourages you to go back to where you were to try again- and effectively, you are rewarded with double blood because you have everything you made going there and then your blood echoes when you get them back. It makes the game feel really high stakes- another psychological trick the designers are playing on you.

Nothing like carrying around 15000 souls in Dark Souls and fumbling off a blind drop...which fortunately there are very few of in Bloodborne, at least so far.

Michael Barnes wrote: OK, beat Father G. I found an area I had not gone to before, and there was a person there that gave me an item that made fighting him much easier. Won't spoil it if you guys didn't go that route. But I got my timing down, pulled off several viscerals, "Prey Slaughtered".

Yes, I only put 2 and 2 together after the fight. I had the item in question too. Really cool touch.

I'm post-Blood Beast and I got killed by a particular monster en route to the next place I think I'm supposed to go. That monster does something very different to you when you die. The place that is next is one of the more oppressive places I've ever been in a videogame.

Gary, I ran into the same monster and ended up in the same awful place... nice touch on From I gotta say!

Oh boy, did I cheese the dude on the tower. No shame whatsoever.

The first time I got up there, I hesitated on the ladder. He fired, knocked me off, I died. Second time I got up there ready for the fight, did my evasion/whip thing looking for counter opportunities. He blasted me with that damn blunderbuss, I died. Third time I thought "you know, he's standing close to the ledge..." Tried to rush him, got blasted. Fourth time, I rolled straight through his first volley, hit him twice with the short form cane, he staggered back and fell to his death. Had to go back up there after an awakening to get the loot (knowing how it was in Souls where it would respawn the loot if it was inaccessible), but that was the end of that battle.

That whole part was awesome, totally unexpected and it created an entirely different type of anxiety- staying in cover, bolting through open spaces, looking around to get the orientation of where the tower was...

Kind of stuck as to what to do next so I'm just grinding a bit. I see trees below and I have feeling that's where I'm supposed to head. I got the rifle spear, but it kind of sucks right now. Cane needs twin blood shards to upgrade at this stage. Still have no idea what the shining coins do.

That's what I did (I spoilered it above, I probably didn't need to). Interestingly...



The next thing I did starts very close to where that ladder is, there's a boss at the end of it.

You guys had me so worked up over the BSB...what a pushover! Well, kind of.

I thought that thing hanging in the cathedral where you get mobbed was it, so I was poking around for a while there to see if I missed a trigger or something. But then I realized that earlier, I had seen a foggy pathway with two werewolves but ran away from it. So I got down into that lower area and figured out where the BSB was- after finding that nifty shortcut.

I was pretty prepared, I didn't just walk in on him. I had full stock of vials/bullets, fire papers, molotovs, antidotes...and those thought-they-were--useless pungent blood cocktails. I brought them because...well, he's a blood-starved beast, right?

Lit up the whip, went in. Threw a cocktail. Sure enough, he went after it. Walked up behind him, beat the crap out of him. Pulled off a couple of viscerals, between those and the flaming whip and a couple of molotovs, I beat him on the first try. Technically. Because I died of poison literally a second after I got the reward. OOF!

I see what you mean now that you can avoid the fight with the Powder Keg dude. But hey, pushing the bastard off the tower was worth the effort.

You know, going back to that psychology thing...I actually kind of think a lot of the "difficulty" is smoke and mirrors. And it goes back- again, somehow- to Mega Man.

When you get to a Robot Master in a Mega Man game, if you don't have the right weapon from a previous boss fight, it can be really freaking hard. Or even well-nigh impossible. The wrong weapons do little damage or they may even be immune. The P-buster/Mega Buster does base damage, which may be too slow to outpace the damage they're putting on you. However, if you go in there with the right weapon- let's say you show up to fight Gemini Man with Snake Man's weapon- the boss fights are suddenly a cakewalk. You're doing 4x, 5x damage. It took going to the boss and learning what worked to make it easier. It isn't actually the difficulty of the game. It's that the game obscured the "right" way to do it. But there again, it offers an opportunity to learn from mistakes.

The same can be said about the patterns in both Bloodborne and Mega Man. If you don't know that there's two of those ambushy beast guys around the corner, it seems really difficult to get through an area because they jump out while you're fighting another that busts through a door in front of you. But the next time, you know to round the corner, kill those two, and then go hit the doorbuster. You've learned, and the area isn't "hard" anymore. Same with making jumps, figuring out timing, anticipating enemy appearances in Mega Man.

So in a way, it's almost like the difficulty of these games really is a big psych-out that the audience participates in with all of these hushed, reverential comments about how "hard" the game is. Maybe it isn't actually hard. Maybe it's just that you haven't learned how to make it easy yet.