When I first playedBloodbornein 2017, myPS4was brand new. It had been a 2016 Christmas present as I jumped back into games after college, and when I got around to buying my own games for the new console, FromSoftware’s masterpiece was high on the list (especially because it was only $20 at that point).
Until that Christmas, I had mostly been playingPS3andGameCubegames, so everything on the PS4 looked impressive.Uncharted 4was the height of the visual fidelity I experienced in those early days, but Bloodborne impressed me, too. It looked a little dated in the ways that FromSoft games always do. Your character model looked last-gen, but the game made up for it by giving you as many sliders as I can recall seeing in a character creator. I do remember being immediately impressed when the opening cutscene introduced Gahrman, the wheelchair-using NPC who alludes to the concept of blood ministration and presents you with your contract. I remember thinking that his beard and hat were incredibly realistic, and I was surprised because none of the gameplay I had seen from Bloodborne indicated that it was the type of game that would splurge on pretty cutscenes.
But when I booted up the game again this week, I was surprised by howoldthat scene looked. Gahrman looks like a pretty good PS4 character model, but the distance of three years since I last played my PS4 (and, more importantly, the distance of eight years since the game’s release) has rendered him unimpressive.
The rest of the game, similarly, is showing its age. Some of those signs of the passage of time are small. When the game tells you, for example, to press a button, the onscreen prompt reflects the old colors of the face buttons, which were removed in favor of uniform black on theDualSense. The skybox over Yharnam is less detailed than I remembered, too, though that doesn’t harm the vibe. A huge red moon being the main thing you see all the time contributes to the feeling that this is a uniquely bad night in a violent town.
So, the game has aged, but not terribly. I still think the city looks good. But, it mostly looks good because it’s an impressive display of design and art direction. The graphics are detailed enough — especially the cobblestone streets and brick walls — but it isn’t a graphical showcase. I don’t know that it ever really was.FromSoftware’s games are outstanding, but the studio relies heavily on asset reuse and has never aimed to beNaughty Dog. Its games emphasize play over graphics, which is why they’ve become a genre unto themselves.
I don’t mean this as a dig at Bloodborne — it remains one of the best games ever made — but more to reflect on the passage of time. In my mind, I just played Bloodborne for the first time; it still feels new to me. But if I think back to where I was in 2017, I quickly realize that that isn’t true. I had been out of undergrad for 10 or 11 months, and now I’ve been working full-time for seven-and-a-half years. I was dating my college girlfriend then, and now we’ve been married for more than five years. My niece, who’s in second grade now, was an infant. I lived in a different state, with different people, where I did a different job. So much in my life has changed, and it’s only natural that my standards for what looks current-gen would change, too.
