Bloodborne is one of the best games ever made. But to this day it remains a PS4 exclusive and is inherently flawed on a technical level. It has locked in performance with inconsistent frame pacing alongside a 1080p resolution that was never patched to support PS4 Pro. It came out several years before the upgraded console, so that’s no big surprise, but the fact that this masterpiece has seemingly been forgotten breaks my little gamer’s heart.
Fans and modders have spent years helping Bloodborne hit the illustrious 60 frames per second benchmark, lowering its internal resolution and making similar compromises to combat limitations FromSoftware probably never intended to be a problem. The game still looks great and is definitely worth playing in its current form, but that doesn’t change the fact that players have been asking for a revival for so many years.
I swear that when a State of Play comes along, we’ll see rumors of Bloodborne coming to PS5 or PC, with insiders pledging it to actually happen this time and not be dodgy information from a source who is clearly lying. We got burned over and over, which made me give up hope there’s even a remaster on the map at all. Sony owns the rights to Bloodborne, so any kind of remaster would be its decision to give the green light in addition to finding a studio willing to take the original game and work on it.
Given that it loves to remaster or remake games with little to no real justification, you’d think Bloodborne would be for it. Increase the resolution, increase the frame rate, add some new trophies and boom – you have a PS5 version of Bloodborne. It seems FromSoftware has no interest in the project, and I’m personally relieved that it’s much more focused on broadening its horizons with masterful games like Elden Ring and Sekiro rather than going back to the source of a game that it already in the world. Hidetaka Miyazaki is a director who is constantly coming up with new ideas, so it would almost be a shame to focus his talent on a remaster of a game that is still readily available. But hey, I still want it.
I don’t even want a remake or a remaster that tries to significantly improve what we already have. The previous generation was filled with “definitive editions” that changed the bugger beyond taking advantage of modern hardware and including downloadable content that many of us had already purchased. Free upgrades weren’t even a thing back then, with publishers expecting us to take a double dip in a period when exclusive offers were so thin we were willing to replay games to feel something. DmC, Tomb Raider, Darksiders 2 and so many others joined in on this brutal scheme and we bought it.
Bloodborne can do just that, but will actually have a reason for being when it comes to PS5 and PC in the form it always aspired to but never could achieve. I’m talking 4K, 60 frames per second, new trophies and maybe some improved visuals to top it all off. Don’t pull a Naughty Dog and charge full price for a game we’ve all played before – that would suck.
Given how critically acclaimed Bloodborne is, I’m surprised that greedy publishers haven’t jumped on a remaster just yet, instead deciding to make it available as part of the PlayStation Plus collection in its original form. That’s hugely generous, and not something I’ve come to expect from an industry that is so quick to abuse our love of things. I also just wrote a whole article asking for exactly this to happen, so maybe I’m the real problem.
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