Bloodborne is now very playable on PC via PS4 emulation

Digital Foundry’s Thomas Morgan has donned his Hunters Hat and taken up his trusty Trick Weapon, walking viewers through a buttery smooth 60 frames per second trip to ol’ Yharnam all thanks to … well, not Sony, no.

Instead, all thanks is due to some incredible progress made on the shadps4 emulator, whose 0.5.1 version has improved performance in 2015’s Bloodborne considerably, to the point where the game is “almost entirely playable, crash-free, start to end,” says Morgan.

It’s been nearly a full decade since the release of From Software’s PS4 exclusive, Bloodborne. For most of its ten-year existence, the passion of its formidable community of fans has been matched by a growing frustration, compounded year by year, over publisher Sony’s inability or unwillingness to give the game the remaster treatment. This frustration has been brewing almost since the beginning; just a year after the game’s release, the PS4 Pro promised improved performance for existing games … except Bloodborne saw no such improvement. Same with the PS5 and now PS5 Pro’s release. Each time Sony misses an opportunity to do right by this crowd, it compounds this frustration.

In fact, this frustration has become something of a cottage industry itself! One need only peruse the Google News search for Bloodborne. It’s a whole thing! In fact, just last week longtime PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida – newly departed from Sony and unencumbered by the need to hold corporate discipline – addressed the mess.

“Bloodborne has always been the most asked thing,” Yoshida told Kinda Funny Games. “And people wonder why we haven’t really done anything, even an update or a remaster. Should be easy, right? The company is known for doing so many remasters, some people get frustrated. [Ed. note: this is what we in the biz call an understatement].

“I have only my personal theory to that situation. I left first-party so I don’t know what’s going on. But my theory is […] Miyazaki-san really, really loved Bloodborne, what he created. So I think he is interested but he’s so successful and he’s so busy, so he […] cannot do it himself, but he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it. So that’s my theory. And the PlayStation team respect his wish.”

It’s not simply being playable on PC, at a decent frame rate, that this signifies. It also opens the door for other enhancement “via reshade mods, texture boosts, improved lighting and much more,” Morgan says. He points to the Bloodborne Remaster Project from modder fromsoftserve (lol). As is evident by its title, this mod aims to give the existing Bloodborne that fresh remaster smell, so it’s not just framerate that’s improved but lighting, textures, shadows and more. For a game as atmospheric as Bloodborne, you can see how this would make a big difference. (The image at the top of this post is from their page on Nexusmods.)

If you want to try this all for yourself, be warned: You’ll need a rather decent gaming rig, and of course a copy of the game on your hard drive which … I dunno, maybe you inherited a mysterious drive from a distant relative and it was on there? Morgan says his test rig had a Ryzen 7 5700X alongside a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, which is to say his computer is gooder than mine, and probably yours. But as with all things computing, optimizations coupled with new hardware will inevitably drive performance up and cost down. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether that happens before Sony does or doesn’t choose to give the people — lumbering through town, pitchforks and torches in tow — what they want.