Gadgetory

hey what's going on everyone I'm Jeff Bakalar and if I look a little weird it's because I haven't slept in about thirty hours and too busy playing blood-borne it's one of the most infuriating unforgiving relentless games I've ever played but it's awesome to help me talk more about the game I'm joined by GameSpot senior editor Kevin vanore thank you for joining me today sir oh it's my pleasure thanks for inviting me so when I talk about me being crazy about blood-borne it's a lot of people have come to me said hey Jeff this game is too hard I can't play this game what do you have to say to those people it introduced what blood-borne is to those people and why Lord blood-borne is a third-person action RPG that's built in a way in which you are supposed to die over and over in order to learn its patterns in order to learn how to progress and so there's a lot of risk and moving forward into new areas but there's also a lot of reward and doing so but it is it is quite hard one hit from an enemy can take off a huge chunk of your life or as I found out the hard way kill you entirely with one shot oh yeah that's that's absolutely true depending on the enemy you're facing so I guess for me you know I have a tough time explaining to someone who's a casual game or who even maybe there was someone who's a seasoned gamer who plays a couple new titles a month and then they jump into something like blood-borne and it rips their their legs off essentially how do you sort of give someone a tempered expectation about what they can experience in the game for me I sort of say look this is a game that honors the the you know traditional sort of difficulty that the games of yesteryear used to use to possess but now you know it's this sort of contemporary Flair if you will that that blood-borne in some of the games made made by these guys in the past I've been able to achieve how do you how do you all wrap it up I mean the important thing to note I think is that it's always fair you'll see speedruns of of this game and games like Dark Souls from you know from from people that can get through the entire game without ever levelling up using their using the starting weapon so it's important to note that you always have the tools to win you know it's its little stuff like learning how much space to put between you and the enemy or or how much you know how much distance the enemy can cover between you and him so you know you always have the tools to succeed but it's it's all about not so much a reward from moment to moment but like the tension leading to that moment and then getting the incredible reward when you finally when you're finally victorious against a huge giant monster the likes of which you've probably never seen yeah that's a big thing for me I've played about a little over 20 hours of blood-borne and after I got through that first boss it took me about 11 times or so and which I feel like is is good right yeah a clear beast is that the one you're talking about yeah the Clerc beast real ugly viewed and you know I I just I you know I got to the point where I had done it and then I was like wow I'm nowhere near any level of progression in this game at all for me it's it's it's it's tough to have someone wrap their heads around that this is gonna be a game you have to do your homework on that you have to commit on a level that you've never committed maybe not just a game but in life - anything like this before and I think for me it's that barrier to entry that is such a turn-off and I think with blood-borne you get this sort of weird juxtaposition where you know this is a game that's being advertised on a mainstream level it comes off as this you know easily accessible maybe actually almost like a /m up sort of game but then you know you you look at it from the other end alright you you paid your $60 you boot up blood-borne and you are just pounded relentlessly for me that's that's the internal conflict that I experienced with this game what do you think about that well I understand that I you know I'm coming from a place where I play all of the games that sort of led to blood-borne which are Demon Souls Dark Souls and Dark Souls - and then you you have to kind of let the game teach you how to play video games all over again because all of the things that you bring to it that you've sort of filled your mind with and sort of wrapped your fingers around that the stuff doesn't work anymore yeah and so you have to kind of you know like let the game speak to you and sort of look at the intricacies and and and sort of forget all of the things that you brought to the game and you still are not told and anything about the game you're not told what to do you're not told where to go how do you feel about that angle to the whole experience well I finished all on my own and and in about 60 hours so but I get bit again it's important to note that I come in with a with a pretty rich experience with all the games that came up to it so forth so I so I knew more or less how it was gonna work for me I'm curious about blood-borne popularity I don't know if you've been messing around on Twitter today it's been trending for almost 15 hours what's going on this none of these games have ever gotten this public sort of groundswell why do you think blood-borne is getting that treatment people I mean people love it and and part of it is that it's it's still fairly singular I mean I mean it does come from a tradition that that I sort of started with Demon Souls and went to Dark Souls so but it's not really a tradition that's made its way into other mainstream games and I think there's another part of it too which is you're you're talking about a console exclusive you're talking about something that's only on the PlayStation 4 and by very nature I mean I mean you know how it goes in in the world of system wars and things like that sure people really care about their system exclusives and I I think those those two things combined especially when this is the first game from from software that's the the developer of blood-borne and and Dark Souls and those other games I mentioned this is the first one that takes it into a new somatic territory so the other games were were all they were all you know dark medieval fantasy and this takes place in sort of a more there's sort of a more Victorian London semi steampunk vibe to it sure and so you know be you you've got that formula but you've taken it to a new place and there are enough tweaks to it to make it seem legitimately different from from the games that led to it III read your review you obviously liked it a lot is there anything that you would sort of knock against it oh yeah I mean one of those things is one of the the new things to this series of games is something called chalice dungeons so these are sort of standalone procedurally generated dungeons that you can create by performing a particular ritual within the game and they're they're a little problematic and if you don't keep up with them as you play through the the main storyline you can end up running into some problems because they don't scale to the difficulty so you might have to go back and play a whole bunch of really easy dungeons and when something's really easy in blood-borne it's honestly not all that much fun because it takes the tension out of the game and the game thrives on tension so without that you sort of miss out plus the glitches and and I will say that it's been a while since I played a game with loading screens this long as a game it's amazing as a piece of software maybe not quite so much sure yeah I found the loading times to be a little suspicious as well sounds like they're working on it but we'll have to wait and see how the dust settles and hopefully that improves Kevin Van Ord ladies and gentlemen thanks so much for being here but my pleasure that's gonna do it for me make sure you read Kevin's review over on GameSpot and read my piece on CNET as well follow me on twitter at Jeff Bakalar tell me what you think of blood-borne and we will see you guys next time