@golguin: reviews will surely discuss gameplay in varying levels of detail depending on the site and how much the reviewer deems it necessary to convey his overal emotions on the game.

That said bear in mind that reviewers will basically have a week to beat the entire game. Its not too crazy to assume they won't get that much time to explore everything in strenuous detail. It's not elitist of you to expect a review to discuss gameplay mechanics in a series known for their complexity in them. It is unreasonable to expect that reviewers will have in depth knowledge of the inner workings of this game after a week when it took the most diehard players at least a month to crack open the intricacies of past entries.

No offense intended to the OP, but this is a great example of how someone can get flamed because of a poorly chosen thread title. I think the question posed in this thread is totally reasonable, but the thread title of 'will reviewers fail Bloodborne' makes the OP sound like a fanboy or d-bag, thus inviting more harsh responses than he otherwise would have received. Honestly, if Bloodborne had the same barrier to entry as Demon's Souls, I think reviewers should caution people new to the series about the barrier to entry.

A week? I was under the impression that the review process had started earlier this month.

I find it interesting how this franchise has been deified over the past couple years. It'll be reviewed like any other game.

@golguin: Kevin Vanord on GameSpot mentioned that he was going to get his review copy this Monday if I remember correctly. He was at Sony only this week playing one of the optional dungeons for the very first time. The game only went Gold this past week.

@pyrodactyl: I always felt that world and character tendency is something that players were more interested in bitching about then to understand it.

If you're going to reviews for informed discussion and analysis of a game's mechanics you will be sorely disappointed. Reviews are opinion peices used to help inform the uninformed consumer. If you currently know how adaptability and it's scaling of iframes to current AGL level works in DS2, you simply aren't the target market for reviews.

Probably should have picked a more-balanced thread title, like "WILL THOSE HEATHEN GAME REVIEWERS ON THE INTERNET GIVE MY BELOVED VIDEO GAME A 10 OUT OF 10 OR WOULD THEY PREFER TO BURN IN THE LAKE OF FIRE FOR THEIR HERESY?!?!?!?"

Happy to help.

If Bloodborne is as personal an experience as Dark Souls, reviews will be all over the place naturally.

@mordukai: I love Demons Souls but world and character tendency were dumb systems.

At this point, it seems like every publication has at least one person capable of reviewing a souls game to your standards, and they'll probably be the ones to review it.

@golguin said:

A problem for whom?

I've invented a new term to refer to the absurd, insidious fanaticism that surrounds these games, and the warped logic that results from it: Dark Souls exceptionalism.

Reviewers will be able to give a higher level review. It will be helpful maybe for newer people or people who just want an idea of how the games general mechanics and structure hold up. Reviews for this game aren't going to be helpful for hardcore fans of these games; only newer people.

Hey, I totally understand these systems. Doesn't make them good. What kind of system pushs the player torward circumventing major parts of the experience? If you want to get the maximum out of the tendancy system you have to play offline and kill yourself in the nexus every time you revive. Than you have to look up what effect tendency and trigger it in a particular order to get to the loot hidden behind tendency gated areas. It was a bad system and getting rid of it was the right solution.

I only trust Mark Brussler's (of Classic Game Room HD) opinion on games. He knows how to play them, provided you can burn people and cut them in half. Soul games have both.

These games deserve all the praise they get. In fact Souls' fans are the most critical of the series. We've been raised on wholy original gameplay, great enemy and bosse design as well as engaging and mysterious worlds. Those are not qualities we get often or at all in the modern AAA world.

Anyway, most souls' fans will tell you Dark Souls 2 has several issues. It didn't meet the standard set by dark souls 1 and people were not shy about mentioning that. This narrative about a devoted cult of the souls series is ridiculous.

I'm sorry if all this enthusiasm for Bloodborne is getting on your nerves but raining on other people's parade isn't going to change the fact that you won't have anything big to play for the next 2 months. What I'm saying is: join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us...

If a game has too much hype surrounding its difficulty then reviewers won't complain about the difficulty. It would be interesting to live in a world where Demon's Souls came out in the West and no one knew anything about it beforehand, that surely would have generated some entertaining extremely mixed reviews but that didn't happen.

The fanaticism isn't absurd, it's deserved. It scratches that same itch Monster Hunt did for many. The problem with Dark Souls 2 was that it was a direct sequel. Many are either in the Dark or Demon's camp but no one champions DkS2 really. I had more time spent in Demon's and everything points to Bloodborne being an insta-classic feeling like Demons for the first time. Even the name is spelled incorrectly half the time like Demon's Souls was. :D

Ok, see, this is where the cult-like devotion gets weird. I preordered Bloodborne a while ago and I'm looking forward to playing it. Not raining on anyone's parade.

But Bloodborne isn't Jesus.

@pyrodactyl said:

The concept of Dark Souls exceptionalism doesn't mean that the Souls games/Bloodborne are bad games and that people who like them are bad people, in the same way that American exceptionalism doesn't imply that America/ns is/are "bad". It means that the people within its sphere believe that it should be held to a different standard than other games, that it should be looked upon differently, that it somehow innately "deserved" this right. There are plenty of other deep and mechanically dense games that require an extra investment on the part of the reviewer, but before Bloodborne I'd never heard of the idea of a reviewer "failing a game" by not being able to become deeply engaged with all the minutiae of its systems, something that is practically impossible considering both the nature of reviews and the inherent time constraints they cause.

My personal experience of these games is that I played Dark Souls for 10 hours, and very much learnt to appreciate the feel of combat and some of the level design, but I didn't have the patience or bloody-minded determination to keep playing it. It wasn't my cup of tea.

Blasphemy! The night time is the right time. The night time is the right time!

@csl316: That's the DLC, Bloodborne: Better than Jesus

@atlas: This thread has been created by one dude. I am also a souls fan and I think the premise of the thread is kinda dumb. Hell, the first page is a bunch of people disgreeing with the premise. People should really stop making sweeping generalisations on the internet.

@pyrodactyl said:

Do you honestly think I'd go to the effort of inventing a term for something if this thread was the first example I'd seen of it?

It's a Zelda game.

Have you ever played a zelda or a souls game? Cause with comments like that you make it seem like you haven't. This is as valide of an analysis as saying call of duty is an unreal tournement game. Duh, you shoot guns from a first person perspective mostly in multiplayer in both of those.

@pyrodactyl: Yeah but you wouldn't call CODs gameplay wholly original either would you?

The term Dark Souls Exceptionalism is pretty good.

This sounds remarkably similar to that one poop quote.

You don't need to know all the most intimate and subtle details of a game to tell whether it is good or not, just like you don't need to eat a persons shit to say you care about them. Most people don't give two shits about the in depth mechanics of a game, they just want to know if it is fun or not. The people who are scary obsessed with these games have already paid for the game in full and will be playing it day one regardless. Reviews should neither cater to these people nor should these people care about the reviews.

I wouldn't call CODs gameplay wholly original because there's an ocean of modern military shooters with a heavy focus on multiplayer out there. How many games are huge RPGs with a heavy focus on challenge, freestyle leveling progression and character builds, seemless coop and competitive multiplayer, slow and deliberate action gameplay that rewards thought over reflexes and a mysterious world with a well made story you have to piece together on your own? The only other game that kind of fits the Souls mold is Lords of the Fallen and that's a lower quality shameless rip off.

There is no double standard here. The souls series established a whole new genre of games and is as wholly original as any game can be in this day and age. Stop playing dumb, the difference between Zelda (or any third person hack and slash game) and Dark Souls is of genre and core gameplay, the difference between CoD and other modern military shooters is of details.

@atlas: @planetfunksquad: It's really too bad when you get excited about the new instalment in a great unique series you get shouted down as a fanatic who should fall in line with the jaded herd of assholes that make up the internet.

I don't think most reviewers will fail Bloodborne. I think the Souls style is too well known now for people to be ignorant to all of its quirks going into Bloodborne. Given how light this year may end up being with big releases, I wouldn't be surprised if this game ended up swaying a lot of new people. Bloodborne has a lot of things going for it that past Souls games didn't have in terms of accessibility: new name, better visuals, quicker combat, larger community than ever before, etc.

Man, you really must hate the Souls games and the community. I've seen you post a lot of stuff like this. I get it though, the fanbase is pretty annyoing. But I think you're criticizing the wrong aspect of the Souls community here. I've seen countless "fans" of the souls games shit all over DS2. These games don't get a free pass per se, they just happen to be the favorite games of a lot blowhards who are quick to tear everything else down.

@pyrodactyl: I like Dark Souls and I'm excited for Bloodbourne. They are a very well made amalgam of a bunch of past games. Their design is impeccable and they were/are sorely needed in the games industry. I just feel like Souls fans can be overly hyperbolic in talking about the games. They are not wholly original.

The original Zelda dropped you in a world with no equipment, explanation or help. You could tackle the dungeons in any order you wanted, the secrets were incredibly well hidden and it was difficult as hell. Bosses were (and still are in the rest of the series) based on learning patterns and exploiting them, like a combat puzzle. Sound familiar? Souls games are modern day Zelda games. That's not an insult. From is doing with the formula what Nintendo can't or isn't willing to do.

My point in all this is that if you suggest that a souls game is not the most original, world changing, second coming of gaming Jesus, you just don't get it maaaaan. If this game none of us have played doesn't get good reviews we're already coming up with excuses pre-emptively. The reviews will have failed the game. Is that not a little weird to you?

If you care enough about how reviewers will see the game, you probably care enough to buy the game to see for yourself.

@darthorange said:

@golguin said:

It's probably too much for any given reviewer to really get into the game (they probably don't have the time), but how valuable is a review when it can't give people the information they really want? I feel that the Souls series is a known thing and any general review is essentially going to read like, "Yeah, it's a successor to the Souls series." Are they even going to be able to explore the online mechanics and the Chalice Dungeon?

This sounds remarkably similar to that one poop quote.

You don't need to know all the most intimate and subtle details of a game to tell whether it is good or not, just like you don't need to eat a persons shit to say you care about them. Most people don't give two shits about the in depth mechanics of a game, they just want to know if it is fun or not. The people who are scary obsessed with these games have already paid for the game in full and will be playing it day one regardless. Reviews should neither cater to these people nor should these people care about the reviews.

I think the disagreement here lies on information and its relevancy to the play experience as people seem to feel that my desire to know more about the mechanics of an unreleased game is elitist or that I shouldn't desire this kind of coverage when other games aren't given that kind of attention.

Details that you might feel are intimate or subtle (not that important) can have a huge impact on the play experience. A perfect example of this is the Company of Champions covenant in Dark Souls 2. All we really knew about the covenant before the release of the game is that From was saying that veterans of the series should head right for the rock as soon as they reached Majula. We didn't know what it would do or how it would impact the play experience, but it was assumed to make the game harder in some way (think Gravelord Servant from DS1).

Information was scarce regarding the Company of Champions, but I was determined to have my first DS2 experience be something to remember so I went all in and decided I would beat every boss under the covenant. I chronicling my DS2 Company of Champions experience in the Company of Champions. Are you in? thread and you can see how I struggled to figure out the systems of the covenant. People were simply bailing on the covenant due to its difficulty so there wasn't a lot of information being compiled on how it worked. I thought the summoning system was busted until I confirmed with a few other people that the White Soap Stone was disabled in the covenant.

The vast majority of people played the game without ever exploring the Company of Champions (it has a leader board so you could more or less track each person's progression in the first few weeks of the game's release). It can be said that with so few people using the covenant it wasn't worthy of being explored or explained when it would end up being a niche feature, but for me it was what MADE my DS2 experience.

Missing something like that in Bloodborne would be very disappointing.

I think there have been enough of these games that Bloodborne will be reviewed fairly, at least as fairly as one can expect. However, if it reviews poorly, be on the lookout for tons of people claiming reviewers "don't get it" even though they themselves will have not played it yet.

Edge had been able to put in 40 hours at the time of this month's publication (scans went online the 12th I think) and several Souls youtube people have been talking as if they've had the game in their hands for some time.

I try not to presuppose anything about what a review must or mustn't contain. I can read one, then I can tell you whether I found it constructive and in what ways. A review review, if you will.

Well I dunno I just read that thing VanOrd wrote. It wouldn't be surprising if they sent copies to YouTubers earlier than GameSpot since those YouTube video really give them a ton of free publicity - way more coverage than any mainstream game site ever dedicates to them. Epic Name Bro and that guy who does lore videos and sounds like he's about to cry at any moment get millions of views so why not.

Either way, one of the big aspects of these games have been the community figuring them out over time together. I can only imagine it's kind of daunting for reviewers to have to play them without any online community or hints to fall back on.

@yummylee: Well, he's not wrong

Bloodborne will be the most divisive game in the series.

If you want the crazy enthusiasts to dissect the game for you, wait for the youtube crowd to get their hands on it.

Read the Edge first impressions. They seem to love it, but said there was little reason to replay the game once you finished. There arent really char classes, and armor/weapons are much less of a center piece then the souls games also reducing reason for NG+ runs. Sounds like they try and offset that with the chalice dungeons. Little sad to hear that, but otherwise they more or less raved about the game even though they had not finished it at the 40 hour mark.

People who got their hands early on the game have already finished it and it sounds like they had some hype inducing things to say. It sounds like Edge's concerns were a bit premature in light of what's been discovered so far. They didn't know what NG+ offered as of their writing and they hadn't discovered the amount of weapon variety that people have already uncovered.

I've gleamed some details, but I've largely stayed away from the spoiler thread on GAF. This is what I mean when I say I'd like to learn new mechanics based information without getting spoiled on other points. The difficulty lies in what I can know before playing the game and what I shouldn't know. I don't know what I shouldn't know and what I should know. There lies the problem and why I'm hoping review can provide spoiler free information. Once the game is beaten I believe people will know what info would be spoilers (there is a mechanic that reviewers have been told to not reveal and it has been consistently marked in spoiler text in the GAF thread) and what information should be known to enjoy the game's mechanics.

Despite what people have been conditioned to think, reviews are subjective.

As a reviewer, there are several things I try to look at objectively, such as user accessibility and value of the available content. You could also try to contrast and compare to similar games, or look at whether or not the game is actually functional, but ultimately the value we put in the various aspects of a game are purely subjective.

It's easy to pass judgment on something like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, because it's controls just doesn't work. It's easy to pass judgement on Assassin's Creed Unity, because while it looks pretty and has some interesting systems, all those things were completely overshadowed by numerous bugs at launch, detracting from the experience at the time of review.

It's harder to do that with something like Armored Core, because while I might consider it ass-backwards as fuck, I can still recognize that it's the sort of game that has dedicated community that would enjoy them no matter how you, me or anyone feel about them.

My point is: Don't let the opinion of critics influence what you like...

My rule of thumb is to simply apply any video game discussion to music to see if it's still valid: If you like blues and someone gives a bad score to your favorite blues album, because they like pop-music instead, it would be absolutely mental to let that influence your opinion blues. Sure, some people might still take music critics seriously, but with music I get the feeling that we all generally just respect that different people like different stuff and it's insane that we don't do that with video games.

@john1912: does that last part mean they are more then 40 hours in not beat it? Or they beat it in under 40 hours if it states I. The article

I don't know how you get off on the idea that this will be dark souls like quality or systems. We have very little actual information on how the game is. This is a new franchise like all new franchises the safest thing to assume is that it will suck with a 90% probability. The footage i've seen makes me worry that they put too much energy on the wrong things.

This game is pretty much review proof. From fans are gonna buy it no matter what.

Is anyone who is interested in Bloodborne actually going to read reviews before they buy it? I think From Software has a pretty good track record at this point. They can just take my money now please. I don't even want to read any reviews on it because I want to go in completely blind. Reviews always give way too much information in my opinion.

40 hours in and have not yet beat the game. So sounds long! They said the world/environments were a masterpiece!