20 vials is a lot, if you’re dying that much you should probably go somewhere else. Not all interactions with games are meant to be frictionless.
The problem I have with that is, would the game actually change at all if you just went back up to 20 vials every time you rested? For the player who’s progressing at a constant rate and doesn’t die too frequently, you pretty much already experience that. It’s not like vials are exceptionally rare throughout the game, and FromSoft was good about adding them to difficult areas. The only people the vial system is really bad for are players who are already slightly struggling, and I think those players would enjoy the game a lot more if the vials just refreshed.
Friction is only good if it’s making you interact with the game in an interesting way. The vials don’t offer friction so much as a binary of “Who cares, I have plenty” and “I never have vials and have to farm 30 min for each 5 boss attempts.” Both of those aren’t really interesting gamestates.
I didn’t find myself running out of them very often, and trust me, it’s not because I’m super good at video games. I think what it provides is a prompt to stop and think. If you find yourself without any (and I’d really only say it matters at bosses) then you probably either need to rethink your strategy, maybe go level a bit first (there’s almost always another branching path you can take, or even a chalice), or just buckle down and get serious. The game also gave you a core mechanic to restore health without using blood vials. I dunno that it’s a perfect system but I didn’t have any issue with it. Estus flasks that encourage you to back off to safety while you recover were much more suited to the style of play in the Souls games. If you could heal that fast with a reusable thing, I don’t think you would engage as much with the health recovery system, which was really what the game wanted you to do.
I’ll also mention that I did not find that it took long at all to farm them when I needed to. There were several early areas where you could restock quite quickly.
20 vials is very generous but that’s not what the problem is. The problem is that they are a non-recharging consumable. Unlike estus flasks which fully recharge every time you go to the bonfire, blood vials can run out.
If it’s your first time playing, you might run out. And if you run out, you have to go through a very un-fun and time consuming farming run just to restock
Like I said…not everything is meant to be frictionless. I’m sure a lot of people think losing all your
soulsblood uh somethings? isn’t fun, either.
What load screens?
PC emulation intensifies
60 fps appears
People are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy. Many of the things that they predict will make them happy have been empirically found to make them less happy. For example, the trap of choice: we will go to great expense to preserve our ability to choose until later, but we end up happiest when we choose early (or the choice is taken away from us) and commit to that choice, even often when it was not the best one.
Farming isn’t “fun”. But neither is smashing your head into the same wall for 2 hours. Games need to punish the player. Doing so makes the fun parts more fun. If the game just jumped from climax to climax, it would lose all meaning.
There are mechanics that are better than others for the purpose of punishing the player and that can be debated, but the idea that something should be removed just because it isn’t “fun” or that it makes it a bad mechanic is very shallow and does not necessarily lead to a better game.
Good analysis, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I can only speak from personal experience that I didn’t vibe a lot with farming vials just to give a boss another try. It kind of makes sense to balance out the amount of vials you get, but I felt it didn’t add to the challenge, personally, but rather made the game more tedious and annoying at times. If I want to keep bashing my head in against a boss because I’m stubborn and don’t want to let up, that should be my perogative to decide and not the game’s. It feels a little like an arcade machine gating me from further playing the game because I didn’t throw in another quarter.
Don’t get me wrong - Bloodborne sits in my top 3 favourite soulslikes. But I think they could have done without non-replenishing healing items and it wouldn’t have made the game worse in the slightest. There are a lot of different mechanics in soulslikes that add to the challenge of the game without adding artificial scarcity to a required item that you use on the regular. For example, it makes sense that Beast Pellets are non-replenishing because they’re not an integral part of the gameplay loop like healing items are unless you know what you’re doing and/or are speed running the game. Same with the sugars in Sekiro.
Didn’t like it a lot in Demon’s Souls either where it was a lot more of a problem to me because the levels themselves were really difficult to navigate through vs. the bosses themselves.
In the end, the game is still fantastic. I just think a lot of players bounced off the game simply because healing needs to be farmed for.
It’s the only one I know well. Isn’t it also unique that you can heal yourself by doing damage? It stands to reason they’d look for a way to balance that mechanic with scarcer healing artifacts.
That’s something I thought of too, yes. The rally(e?) mechanic allows you to regain the damage you have been dealt within a certain time frame. It’s like the red portion of your health in Monster Hunter games which you regenerate when not taking damage for some time, but here you need to go in for damage.
Visceral attacks immediately heal that lost portion and with runes you can heal even more than the health you’ve lost.
It pushes you to be aggressive, and people who fail to adapt and over-rely on health potions are going to feel like they are being forced to grind. I liked the tension between wanting to heal, but wanting to conserve pots, and so trying to hang on for a free heal longer than I would otherwise. That gamble was important to the game, and there has to be a penalty that players don’t like for that tension to exist. I feel like whatever mechanic they used would have drawn complaints, because not liking it is a feature of the mechanic, not a bug.
It’s like wanting to have a novel with no antagonists, no people you don’t like.
Different strokes for different folks in the end, I guess. Awesome that it worked out for you the way it did. I see where you’re coming from. :)
It’s hard because I do like what Blood Vials help to add to the game, and generally what they were going for. I don’t think just copying and pasting the Estus system exactly would have worked for Bloodborne’s combat pace, I think having more fast to use but individually weaker healing items suites it well. They just kinda fumbled the availability, they went with something more like Lifegems from DS2 but without the nerfed Estus that helps to make them relevant.
It’s probably a hot take, but I never going going to the two brick boys under the bridge and taking their blood forcibly to be that arduous. Definitely personal preference though.
![[BB] I'm just playing, Bloodborne - you know I love you 💜](https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/c555cb8d-e11b-4902-ba88-a7e6650c5b89.webp){kind=link}