Week 07 - By the Gods, Fear it

This past week we finalized and playtested our paper prototypes with the class. My partner and I’s prototype project is based on Bloodborne, an action role-playing game (RPG) created by the Japanese company, From Software. In their time they have also created highly regarded titles such as Demon Souls, Sekiro, and the Dark Souls trilogy. To many players, these games are seen as some of the most difficult ever created. To this end, as someone who has played many games with RPGs as the majority, I can agree. However, Bloodborne is often seen as the ‘easiest’ as its playstyle mimics many other RPGs in the way that being aggressive is more often rewarding unlike the more wholly methodical way of play that Dark Souls follows.

Hbomberguy, a verified gaming youtuber, has a series of video essays called [Game] Is Genius/Garbage, And Here’s Why, in which, within an hour or two, all aspects of the chosen game are examined and analyzed. In his essay relating to Bloodborne, he analyzed two specific parts in extreme depth - the replayability and environment. Our paper prototype of the chalice dungeons focused on these aspects as well. 

As we created our paper prototype, we thought about what we considered some of the core aspects of Bloodborne itself- the combat and how the environment affects how you play. One important point of the original game is how punishing combat can be despite rewarding aggression, however, the initial combat we created was too detailed for our prototype as we shifted to an environmental/replayability focus. With simplifying our combat to a two dice roll, the game became much more difficult but “maybe, for some games, fairness is not a good thing” (Bloodborne is Genius, And Here’s Why, 00:07:38). What we ended up with was much closer to the punishing, repetitive pattern of Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons than what we originally came up with and became part of our prototype.

In Bloodborne, the environment is shaped by the actions you take and how you interact with this changing space is shifted as game mechanics are introduced. In a theory Hbomberguy created called play conditioning, he states that the “actual experience of how [game mechanics] are introduced to the player influences how [the players] behave in their interactions with them” (Bloodborne is… 00:18:24). What we created reflected this as collecting the resources present in our prototype could change how the player interacted with the given game space. For example, the blood vials could give you an extra roll, and seeing that some people would save them for important battles or others use them immediately to get further presented a wonderful example on different player behaviors and the mental conditioning the game provides- just like the actual video game.

This can further be seen in Bloodborne in that “no weapon is clearly better or worse” and that “these changes gently coaxes the players into thinking the choice they made is valid instead of living in constant fear that their hamstring themselves” (Bloodborne is… 00:38:15 - 00:38:32). Many games have problems with weapon balancing due to differences in play styles or type of weapon. However, Bloodborne manages to create different weapons and playstyles while applying similar damage to everything. Of course some are more advantageous but there is always a work around given for drawbacks such as blood gems, which power up weapons. This is another form of play conditioning, where the mechanics of combat change with each weapon and players must learn to adapt. But ultimately, this choice does not reflect badly onto the player like other RPGs such as Dragon Age where only a few of the large selection of weapons can be considered ‘viable’ in the meta.

While we could not deliver the same experience as exploring the wider world of Yharnam in Bloodborne provides, we did try to stimulate play conditioning and the importance of choices as well as emulate the emotions that exploring chalice dungeons give through the environment. Through a changing game space and particular enemy placements where “even previously visited areas are a little bit different either visually or otherwise” we presented a paper prototype of the chalice dungeons that accurately reflects the environment and the repetitive nature of the dungeons without forsaking the brutality of the base game (Bloodborne is… 00:57:32).