Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Tom Warren

Microsoft announced its plans to bring Xbox 360 games to Xbox One yesterday, and I’ve had a chance to take an early look at some of the titles available to Xbox preview members. Behind the scenes, Microsoft has built an Xbox 360 emulator that runs on the Xbox One to get these games working, and it’s easy to spot. When you first launch an Xbox 360 game on the Xbox One it starts a setup process that includes the Xbox 360 boot up animation and even the Xbox Live prompt to note you’ve signed in. It’s a little surreal, but there’s a virtual Xbox 360 running on my Xbox One now.

I’ve tried Banjo-Kazooie and BattleBlock Theater, and both work well with no performance issues. These titles are barely pushing many pixels, so I wouldn’t expect to see any problems. Once you’re in a game you can access achievements and it brings up the quick access part of the familiar Xbox 360 dashboard. The dashboard is also shown whenever you select storage for games, but it doesn’t randomly appear elsewhere and it just feels like a regular Xbox game otherwise.

If you already own digital copies of Xbox 360 games then they’ll show up in the my apps and games section on the Xbox One. From there you just download them and then they’re listed like any other game, just with a clear Xbox 360 label on them. Discs are also supported as long as you keep the game inserted in the tray while you’re playing. Xbox 360 games blend in seamlessly with my existing list of Xbox One games, and I can take screenshots or game clips of Xbox 360 titles. Because Xbox 360 games run just like Xbox One titles, you can even snap another app side-by-side without any performance issues. If you didn’t see the boot up animation or Xbox 360 dashboard at any point, you’d just think these were any other Xbox One games.

Most of the 22 games currently available are basic titles, and Microsoft is promising it will have more than 100 games available in the fall with hundreds added over the coming months. It’s a rather impressive achievement that Microsoft has managed to engineer its Xbox One console to run old Xbox 360 games, and it will likely make the console more attractive for those considering the move from an Xbox 360. Xbox One Preview members can test 22 games right now, and the rest will be available in the fall. Microsoft is also planning to release a new dashboard update for the Xbox One in the fall with Cortana integration and a huge new design.

by Dave Thier

Fallout 4 is on its way, and we’re all waiting for the big press conference next Sunday to tell us more about it. In the meantime, we get to guess. It’s been a long time since we last had a Fallout game, and this is Bethesda’s first chance to play around with the meaty new hardware of the Xbox One and Ps4. How will this new game evolve with the times? My personal wish list is extensive, as is only natural, but there’s one hallmark of the previous games that I hope Bethesda chooses to leave behind. Longtime Fallout fans already have an inkling of what I’m talking about, probably: V.A.T.S. Hear me out.

For those that don’t know, V.A.T.S., or Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, is essentially a compromise. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were built on the same engine as The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and that engine was woefully unprepared to handle an actual first-person shooter. Since there was no way to juice it up so that it felt satisfying in an era of Call of Duty, Bethesda instead fell back on the series’ roots, allowing players to pause time and select which part of the enemy they wanted to shoot at, with different hit percentages for each part. It was brilliant at the time: it took what could have been a non-functional shooter and turned into a big, 3D, old school CRPG, with the cinematic flare that came from its myriad slow-mo headshots.

But here’s the thing: V.A.T.S. has served its purpose. It ushered this wonderful series into the modern day, and now it’s time for it to go.

This time around, I want Bethesda to build a shooter that actually works. We’ve seen that stat-based RPG’s and shooters can mix just fine with games like Borderlands and Destiny, and there’s no reason Bethesda can’t make something that feels uniquely Fallout while still giving us functional shooter mechanics. V.A.T.S. just has a way of breaking the gameflow and taking you out of the world, which is a shame when the world is as thoroughly realized as Bethesda games tend to be. I expect this version to be a whole lot more seamless this time around, and the combat is part of that. Getting rushed by a supermutant just doesn’t have the same impact when you can pause time and line up a headshot.

It’s possible that there’s still a place for V.A.T.S. in a new game, but it has to be as an add-on, some sort of special power that only gets rare use. The important thing is that V.A.T.S. can’t be a replacement for an actually functional combat system. It’s 2015: time to get things in order.

by Nick Robinson

Konami is trying really, really hard to make you forget that P.T. ever existed. That plan is backfiring.

In the wake of Silent Hills’ cancellation, Konami has done virtually everything in its power to scrub P.T.’s existence from the face of the planet. First, it quietly revealed plans to remove the game for download. After that, the company made good on its threat, but those who had grabbed it previously could still re-download it. Then, in a nearly unprecedented step, Konami had the game wiped entirely from Sony’s servers, even for players who had downloaded it previously.

P.T.’s total eradication from PSN is such an unusual move that it actually renders the PS4’s game deletion screen incorrect or, at least, misleading: yes, it says you can re-download the game from your library in the future, but only “if you have a license” for it — and in the case of P.T., Konami just simultaneously revoked that license for every single person on Earth.

The consequence of Konami’s decision is this: There are now a finite number of copies of P.T. in the world. Starting this week, P.T. will never be downloaded by another human being ever again — the number of copies of P.T. will, from this point on, only ever decrease (barring interference from hackers and game archivists). Konami, in an almost impressive display of corporate anti-art, has found a way to attempt the first-ever murder of a digital game — and not just any game, its own game. This is likely one of the only times we’ll ever see this happen.

Of course, P.T. isn’t actually going anywhere; the game was downloaded over one million times, which means it’s backed up across over one million hard drives and SSDs in over one million PlayStation 4s all over the world. In reality, the game is not going to truly disappear — at least not until those hard drives start failing. But even then, Konami’s attempts to restrict access to P.T. are foolish, because copies will be made and encryption barriers will be broken. The coolest part, though, isn’t just that Konami failed — it’s how spectacularly the company’s plan has backfired.

The weird irony is that, had P.T. simply remained available, the number of people who are interested in playing it likely would’ve stayed roughly same as the number of people who have it already. But that’s not what happened; instead, Konami introduced scarcity to the equation, and instantly made P.T. one of the coolest, most fascinating games in the history of our medium. As of this week, P.T. is essentially the first rare, collectible digital video game. That’s … kind of rad.

Let me be clear: I hate, deeply, how Konami has handled the cancellation of Silent Hills. I think Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek nailed it last night when he ran the headline “Konami Sucks” — a headline that, in two words, summarizes how everyone who cares about this ordeal is feeling right now. Every single step of the way, it feels like Konami has made the most irresponsible, cowardly decision possible. As of this week, Konami has proven itself a company willing to go out of its way to actively destroy a critically acclaimed piece of art the millisecond it no longer financially benefits from that art’s continued existence. But believe me when I say there’s a silver lining: P.T., a game that most of us — even those of us who loved it — were mostly done talking about, is now more than ever a piece of gaming history to be treasured.

There’s been speculation that this isn’t the ending Konami wanted for P.T., that Norman Reedus’ face vanishing from the Silent Hills website was an indication that its contract with him had ended, and the decision to yank P.T. was out of the company’s hands. Even if that’s true, it feels like there are a billion other, far less nuclear ways Konami could’ve solved it: why not remove the sole cutscene that contains Reedus’ image (an ending that less than 0.1% of players likely ever saw), or work with Reedus, who publicly mourned the game, to keep his image in? Nuking an influential piece of artwork from orbit hardly seems like the answer. It’s a move that makes them look apathetic to the needs of their audience at best, and hostile at worst.

It doesn’t hurt that even before its recent demise, P.T. was already one of the most mysterious, interesting games ever created. Everything about P.T., from the bizarre concept of a ‘Playable Teaser’, to the pseudonymous manner in which it was released under the ‘7780s Studio’ moniker, to the way the internet came together (and continues to come together!) to solve its myriad riddles, would’ve been enough to make it historic on its own. Now, on top of all of that, it is rare. You couldn’t have come up with a better ending if you tried.

Rest assured, there are loads of people catching up on this week’s news who, before now, hadn’t heard of P.T., and suddenly they are dying to play this game. And they can’t — not easily, at least — and that’s sad, but at least they’re now aware of it. Even if they don’t know exactly what it is, they’ve heard of it, vaguely, and now it’ll remain in their memories forever; that mysterious, free PSN horror game that vanished in 2015. In a lot of ways, this is how urban legends get their start.

As a matter of fact, the P.T. apocrypha has already begun — just yesterday, a post with over 1,000 notes began circulating on Tumblr warning that this December, every single existing copy of P.T. would immediately stop working, never to be playable again.

Ultimately, this rumor turned out to be false: it began with a tweet of the image seen above from Minecraft composer C418, who noticed the “REMAINING TIME: 220 DAYS” timer listed on his copy of the game. He later retracted his tweet, explaining that P.T. was a PlayStation Plus exclusive in Germany, so the date listed on that screen was just his personal PS Plus renewal date. By then, though, the damage had been done: a cursory Twitter search for “PT December” shows countless people who are now convinced that the game will be disappearing from their PS4s come this holiday season.

This, I’m convinced, is just the beginning of what I hope will become a vibrant tradition of P.T. misinformation spreading through the internet. My friend Anthony Carboni put it best:

See, what makes spooky gaming myths so chilling is that they’re all unverifiable: Polybius is scary because, according to the myth, it only came to a handful of arcades; the Jvk1166z.esp creepypasta is scary because it’s a Morrowind mod that never actually existed. This lack of availability allows us to suspend our disbelief and more easily buy into the fiction. Konami has inadvertently granted P.T. some of that same scarcity, and in so doing has made one of the scariest games in years even creepier.

And look, even if it doesn’t become our generation’s Polybius the way I hope it does, P.T.’s 2014 birth and 2015 death are already two of the most significant events in gaming this century. In trying to demolish P.T., Konami has actually done the opposite: it has secured P.T.’s legacy as a monumental, scarce, cool-as-hell part of gaming history.

by Giuseppe Nelva

On Thursday Ubisoft teased the reveal of a new Assassin’s Creed game, and a new teaser picture that can be grabbed from the background code of the North American Assassin’s Creed website includes some interesting details:

First of all, a set of brass knuckles, that could be one of the weapons included in the game. Carved on the handle we can see the motto “strength through loyalty,” which is a translation of the popular latin phrase “fortius quo fidelius.”

The picture basically conforms the rumored British setting, as we can see from the “God save the Queen” motto. In addition to that, we also see the mention of “rooks,” which are crow-like birds prominently found in Great Britain, Ireland and Northern Europe.

Finally, we read “We forge the chains we wear in life,” which is a quote from “The Cricket On The Hearth” by Charles Dickens. The reference to the book also points to a Victorian setting, as it was published in 1845, eighteen years into the reign of Queen Victoria.

What this all means will probably be revealed on May 12th, but I can’t say my curiosity isn’t piqued.

by Alexa Ray Corriea

We’re in the eighth generation of home video game consoles, and of the three most popular options, two are not backward compatible. Nintendo’s Wii U offers access to its back catalog of Wii games through a separate console mode and to games from the company’s early days through the Virtual Console. But for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, owners have to count on remastered editions of their favorite older games or services like PlayStation Now if they want access to them on the newer machines.

It hasn’t always been this way, though. Previous console generations had the guts (literally) to run games from older hardware, but over time the cost of adding the extra technology to newer machines proved to be too high. Are we justified in feeling cheated out of consoles with backward compatibility? Or is it all just part of the industry’s evolution towards better, brighter experiences?

The history of backward compatibility

When we say something is backward compatible, it means that the object in question can work with input generated by an older product or piece of technology. If the new, most recent technology can receive, read, view or play input–like media–in older formats, then the product is backward compatible. In the case of consoles, when we talk about backward compatibility, we’re asking if the console can play games created for previous hardware in that console’s family. For example, early PlayStation 3 models could play PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 1 games, while the first run of the Nintendo Wii was compatible with GameCube games, memory cards, and even controllers.

The early years of video game consoles saw backward compatibility as a more common feature. But for some companies, it was harder than others.

Atari: The Atari 7800, released in 1986, was backward compatible with the Atari 2600 but not the console that directly preceded it, the 5200. This was because the 7800 included many of the same chips built into the original 2600. Users could put the 7800 into a “2600” mode that slowed down the console’s processor from 1.79 MHz to 1.19 MHz, which mirrored the 2600’s processor. In this mode, game data was accessed in 4K blocks rather than the 7800’s standard 48K blocks, allowing the newer Atari to read and play the older machine’s games.
Atari never released another true console with backward compatibility, but in 1987, the company launched the Atari XEGS, which could play the entire library of software developed for Atari’s 8-bit home computers. Additionally, the company developed but never released the Atari Jaguar II; the canceled project would have allowed users to play catridges for the original Atari Jaguar and Jaguar CD.

Sega: In 1983, Sega released the cartridge-based Sega Game 1000 in Japan; it would never be released outside of the territory. The company’s next machine, 1986’s Sega Master System, was built to be compatible with the SG-1000’s game cartridges. Following the Master System, Sega opted not to put the previous console’s chips in its next machine, the 1989 Sega Genesis, but instead made backward compatibility possible through a peripheral. Although the Genesis contained an 8-bit processor, this accessory, the Power Base Converter, had to be hooked up to the Genesis in order to play Master System games.

Sony: The PlayStation 2, which launched in 2000, allowed users to play PSOne discs, although PSOne memory cards were also required to access and store save data. PSOne controllers were also compatible with the hardware, although certain functions like the analog buttons were not available to use when playing PS2 games. Early PlayStation 3 models were backward compatible with both PSOne and PS2 games, and save files from PSOne and PS2 memory cards could be transferred to the PS3’s hard drive using a memory card adapter. When Sony debuted the PS3 Slim model in fall 2009, the company removed backward compatibility chips in order to make it a thinner piece of hardware. No PS3 models following the launch of the Slim have had backward capability.

Microsoft: The Xbox 360, 2005’s successor to the original Xbox, allowed for some backward compatibility but required several more complicated hoops to jump through. Unlike the PlayStation 2 and 3, players couldn’t put previous generation discs into the system and expect them to run. Playing Xbox titles on Xbox 360 required system software updates from Microsoft and emulation profiles. These emulation profiles were created for each individual game–there was no blanket solution for all Xbox titles–and could be downloaded straight to the console via Xbox Live or through Xbox.com and burned to a CD or DVD. Only Xbox 360s with the official Xbox 360 hard drive could run the emulation profiles.

In November 2007, Microsoft stopped creating emulation profiles for Xbox games. To date, there are 461 Xbox titles that are compatible with the Xbox 360. Any game without an official emulation will not work.

Nintendo: While Nintendo’s early consoles ran on their own media–with sizes and shapes of cartridges and discs varying between generations–it all came together with the Wii in 2006. Wii models made pre-2011 were fully backward compatible with Nintendo GameCube game discs, memory cards, and controllers. This was because the Wii hardware had ports for both GameCube memory cards, and peripherals and its slot-loading drive was able to accept and read the previous console’s discs. When playing a GameCube game, however, only GameCube functions were available, and only compatible memory cards and controllers could be used because the Wii’s internal memory would not save GameCube data. Online and LAN features of certain GameCube games were not available, however, due to the Wii not having serial ports for the GameCube’s Broadband and Modem Adapters.

The redesigned Wii Family Edition and Wii Mini, launched in 2011 and 2013 respectively, had this compatibility stripped out.

What’s the current situation?

Right now, Nintendo’s Wii U is the only console on the market with true backward compatibility. Wii software can be transferred to the Wii U and and accessed through Wii Mode by clicking on the “Wii Menu” home screen icon with a Wii remote. Speaking of which, Wii remotes and peripherals also work with the Wii U. In Wii Mode, games can be displayed on the GamePad screen, but Wii Remotes are still required to play them.

Additionally, Nintendo’s handheld lines also hold up in terms of backward compatibility. The Game Boy line read software from most previous incarnations of the handheld, with the exception of the Game Boy Micro. The company’s most current handheld, the Nintendo 3DS, can also play games from the Nintendo DS.

Neither of Sony’s current gaming hardware, the PS4 or PlayStation Vita, are backward compatible. The PS Vita cannot play the UMD discs of its predecessor, the PlayStation Portable, because there is no UMD reader; instead, the Vita utilizes small flash memory cards the size of SD memory cards. Compatible PSP games can, however, be downloaded from the PlayStation Network on PS Vita.

The main reason PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can’t play older games games is because both consoles use an entirely different kind of chip with a different instruction set. While older PlayStations and the Xbox 360 used PowerPC chips, the PS4 and Xbox One completely changed the guts of the system by using an x86-64 architecture, which is closer to Intel and AMD CPUs.

For PS4, Sony’s PlayStation Now service, currently in open beta, does allow users to stream PS3 games, but requires a subscription fee.

Speaking with GameSpot during the PS4’s launch in November 2013, PS4 architect Mark Cerny said that, while the plan for PS3 was to put PS2 hardware in every console, the move was impossible with PS4.

“Software emulation is very hard to do unless you have 10 times the frequency of the previous console,” Cerny said. “Software emulation is not about the overall performance that can be achieved by having a great number of processing units. It’s about being able to do things quickly. You’re trying to emulate your previous hardware, and that takes you a certain number of operations to emulate whatever it was doing. So, PlayStation 1 is emulatable on PlayStation 2 because there was an increase in the frequency of the CPU and GPU to something like a factor of 10. And the same thing is true between the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 2 is something like 300 Mhz; PlayStation 3 about 3.2 Ghz — about 10 times as much. But even so, it’s very, very hard to do.”

“The world we’re in now, though, frequency has stopped increasing,” he added. “For example, if you look at your PC, the frequency of the CPU hasn’t changed much in the last ten years. And that makes emulation just really hard to do.”

Microsoft’s Xbox One is also not compatible with its predecessor’s media. Nor can you use the Xbox 360’s Kinect with the Xbox One; you must purchase the updated version of the peripheral. There is no PlayStation Now equivalent for Xbox One.

How do you make something backward compatible?

The more advanced the technology used for consoles becomes, the more difficult–and more expensive–it is to add the hardware or software necessary for backward compatibility. Consoles with more features will likely be pricier, and a current generation console with a the previous generation’s chipset would be wildly expensive; think of a PS4 or Xbox One with another $200 tacked on to account for the additional parts. This is one reason why Sony and Microsoft have shied away from including backward compatibility in their current consoles.

But just what does it take to make something backward compatible? There are two ways to go about implementing the feature: hardware implementation and software emulation. Either you have the exact hardware needed to run previous generation games, or you’re using the full power of the new hardware to emulate the previous generation’s software.

The best way to add backward compatibility to a console is to include the important pieces of the previous generation machine’s guts, like the CPU, GPU, and sound chips. For example, the Wii was able to play GameCube games because it was essentially a more powerful version of the GameCube. The PlayStation 2 also had the original PSOne chipset built in.

The other way, emulation, is a little trickier, and there are two different ways to make things work.

Dynamic recompilation ensures the most compatibility. This process takes code that has been written for one chip and, as the code goes through the CPU, translates it into code that the native hardware can interpret. This method may give hardware the best way to emulate software, but you need really strong hardware in order for dynamic recompiling to reproduce a 1:1 experience performance-wise.

Another way to emulate software is to add another layer of software that is written to mimic the hardware a code has been written for. This is the most common form of emulation because it doesn’t drastically affect a game’s performance. A good example of this is Microsoft’s approach to emulating Xbox games for the Xbox 360; individual emulation software was written for each compatible game. That’s the slight drawback: one emulation software can’t be created for multiple titles, so the code has to be created separately for each game needing compatibility. The downloadable PSOne games Sony has released for PS3 and Vita come with emulation code tailored to that specific game, which is why we haven’t seen every PSOne Classic released at once for any of the newer consoles. This is also how Nintendo is handling game releases for the Wii U Virtual Console.

For the Xbox 360, some games had additional compatibility updates to fix problems, but not all of them received these patches. Many Xbox games still have problems running on the 360, compatible or not.

The PS2 had a more powerful graphics system than its predecessor that could do parallel processing. When running a PSOne game on PS2, the timing between the hardware’s parallel processing and the running software had to be exactly right, or the game would break. Later, slimmer PS2s used software emulation for PSOne games, and as a result only supported certain titles.

What do Microsoft and Sony have to say now?

Last fall, Sony’s vice president of Sony Network Entertainment Eric Lempel stated in an interview with Game Informer that PlayStation Now could see the addition of PS4, PS2 and PSOne games in the future.

“In our plans going forward we’re looking at everything so there’s the real possibility that you’ll see PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 4 titles available,” he said. “Right now it’s just PlayStation 3, but these are all options for the future.”

Around the same time, head of Xbox Phil Spencer said Microsoft have heard fans’ cries for backward compatibility, and that something was in the works for Xbox One.

“Back compat is always a hot topic at the turn of a generation, and I get why, especially on [Xbox 360] so many people bought so much digital content and it means that a lot of us, we’re holding on to our 360s,” Spencer said. “I get the question. I totally respect the question. There’s nothing I can say about it right now, but I’ll just say ‘I hear you.’ I definitely hear you and I’ll continue to try to work to build something that can help people out.”

We reached out to Sony and Microsoft for comment on their plans to bring backward compatibility to current consoles. However, neither company could share any information at this time, other than reiterations of what we already know. A representation from Sony said the company’s long-term goals for PlayStation Now include bringing PS1 and PS2 games to service, but for now they are focused on PS3.

So this is where we are today: current consoles are not backward compatible, but with the recent rise in re-releases and remasters of previous generation games, we technically can play older games on newer consoles. The downside of this is the cost, as all of these remasters require an additional purpose. Moving forward, it seems that this is the likeliest way publishers will ensure we’ll be able to play their older games for years to come.

by Chris Pereira

Bloodborne is not the sort of game that explains everything to you, and that’s part of its charm. But it’s only just now, weeks after its release, that players are beginning to realize that they’ve probably been making the game harder on themselves.

Early in the game, you’re given the opportunity to buy the Hand Lantern. This hangs off of your character and provides additional light, something that can be tremendously helpful in dark areas if you choose not to hold a torch in your left hand. There didn’t appear to be any downside to carrying one; unlike the torch, it doesn’t require you to sacrifice using a ranged or two-handed weapon. It’s simply something you buy once and should equip after every death.

As it turns out, there is a downside: It reduces stamina regeneration, making it take longer before you’re able to attack or roll away from enemy attacks.

This is the discovery of a number of Reddit users, including Lucky_Number_Sleven, TCSyd, and Xarius478. They’ve also found that this is true not just of the lantern, but any equipment–whatever you have equipped will weigh you down and cause your stamina to take longer to regenerate.

There’s still work to be done to work out all the details, but the video above demonstrates the difference when the lantern is and isn’t equipped (both with and without a rune that increases stamina regeneration). It’s clear that the innocuous use of the lantern and other items has been making the game harder than it needed to be.

Shedding the lantern and extra weapons won’t necessarily make Bloodborne a cakewalk, but at least now you have an excuse for that time where you were one hit away from killing a boss.

by Owen S. Good

There’s an easy way to nerf Bloodborne‘s bosses: Leave the game running for about 12 hours.

With the PlayStation 4 finally introducing a suspend-and-resume mode for its games recently, this has the potential to make From Software’s distinctively difficult Bloodborne a lot easier.

Redditor meatballz says he hasn’t tested to see whether this works with the console suspended in rest mode, but others say it does. At any rate, leaving the game running in full state for at least a dozen hours breaks down the baddies and makes them do dumb, repetitive, and easily beatable things. Such as:

• “(Blood-starved Beast) stops jumping all over the room and doing multi-hit combos, and just politely spams his side-swipe.”
• “Logarius had transformed from an intense spell-casting maniac into a senile old man who did nothing but attack with his scythe over and over.”
• “Amelia stops healing, One Reborn stops pooping acid, every boss changes in some way and ultimately becomes much easier.”

Need proof? Here here’s Logarius. Before (i.e., the way he should behave):

And after:

Someone just beat Bloodborne on its hardest difficulty with its weakest, unimproved character class. Maybe this game isn’t as tough as it’s cracked up to be? Nah, forget I said that.

by Michael McWhertor

Bloodborne, a new successor to From Software’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, comes to PlayStation 4 this week. Directed by Souls series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne blends concepts from previous Souls games while managing to carve out its own distinct space. Like its predecessors, it’s notoriously difficult and mysterious. It’s a Souls-like game, but will likely challenge players’ preconceptions of that series.

For the better part of the past week, I’ve played Bloodborne solo. Without much help from the community that previously helped players and complemented the Souls experience so well, I’ve struggled against some of the game’s impenetrability. Bloodborne is a tough game and introduces a few new concepts that often aren’t immediately obvious to the player, so here are a few things I wish I’d had explained to me early on.

I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers, but if you’re looking for 100 percent raw, uncut game mechanic discovery, I do explain some things you might uncover on your own.

Questions? Put them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

For the newcomer

Even if you’ve never played Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, you’ve still likely heard that these games can be incredibly challenging. Bloodborne is similarly tough, but (for the most part) fair. I’ve played Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls extensively, with different characters through multiple play-throughs. But I still found Bloodborne to be hard enough that I’ve considered very seriously snapping my DualShock 4 in half and whipping those broken pieces against a wall.

From Software’s games, from Demon’s Souls to Bloodborne, are designed to be difficult, esoteric and frequently perplexing. There is little in the way of a tutorial, and item descriptions can be vague at best. Everyone in the game, from the NPCs you encounter to whoever wrote the game’s UI descriptions, kind of assumes you know what you’ve gotten yourself into. Bloodborne, like its predecessors, can be deliberately obtuse.

But there’s help! You can get assistance from other players by summoning them to your world to help you out. There is already a passionate community picking apart the game and contributing to its wikis.

I found Bloodborne’s starting area to be immensely difficult; it took hours before I was able to defeat the game’s first major boss. But with practice and perseverance, I managed to make it through. You can too, if you’re willing to put in the work and maybe unlearn a few things AAA games have taught you over the years.

If you have played Souls games, a lot of things have changed

Bloodborne plays like a Souls game in a lot of familiar ways. But some players might be surprised at how sharply it deviates from that series’ conventions.

There is really no magic to speak of in Bloodborne, so if you were a heavy magic user in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, you’ll need to quickly brush up on your melee combat. There’s also little in the way of effective ranged weapons. Yes, about a third of the game’s arsenal consists of pistols, shotguns, rifles and even a cannon, but these firearms aren’t heavy damage-dealers. You can’t cheese big enemies with poison arrows from 100 yards away anymore.

Bloodborne all-but eliminates the shield, an indispensable defensive measure for many Souls players. (There is at least one shield in the game, but it feels like it was included as a cruel joke.) Without a shield, you’ll need to stay on offense. Fortunately, the game equips you with some solid tools with which to be effective while being aggressive.

Bloodborne has a hub, called the Hunter’s Dream, that’s a lot like the Nexus from Demon’s Souls. Players can return to the Hunter’s Dream to upgrade their character and weapons, buy items from vendors and travel to other regions. There’s no bonfire-to-bonfire warping, as in Dark Souls. You’ll need to head back to the hub to get around.

Other items, concepts and mechanics introduced in Demon’s Souls, and later expanded in Dark Souls, have been either rethought or stripped out altogether.

• There are just six character stats to upgrade. And, walking back a change from Dark Souls 2, it appears you can no longer respec your character.
• There’s no more equip weight, so you don’t have the option to play as either a heavily armored tank or a nimble ninja. Don’t expect to drape yourself in Havel’s armor or anything. Bloodborne doesn’t have that.
• You can’t upgrade your armor with materials in Bloodborne.
• The upgrade path for weapons is incredibly straightforward and only requires one type of material.
• There is no “Boss Soul” equivalent in Bloodborne, and there are far fewer weapons and items available to the player.
• There is no phantom or hollow state, and unlike Dark Souls 2, dying repeatedly has no detrimental effect on the player’s character.

One change that many longtime fans of Souls games will notice is in Bloodborne’s combat dynamics. In short, if you were adept at parrying and riposting in Souls games, you’re going to love Bloodborne.

How combat works

Bloodborne’s combat is primarily focused on hand-to-hand, up-close-and-personal melee combat. The standard setup puts a firearm in your character’s left hand and a melee weapon — often a transforming blade or club called a Trick Weapon — in its right.

Firearms aren’t very effective at dealing much damage. They also carry very limited ammo. However, they’re fantastic at setting up deadly Visceral Attacks. To pull off a Visceral Attack, you need to shoot an enemy in the middle of its attack animation, sometimes within a very short window of that animation. Fire at just the right time, and you’ll stagger your opponent, leaving it wide open to Bloodborne’s equivalent of a riposte.

I don’t think I can stress just how important it is learn how to use Bloodborne’s firearms appropriately. Staggering your opponent is crucial to winning battles in Bloodborne, far more so than the parry-riposte of Souls games. It’s a risky move, but not quite as risky as it was in Souls titles, thanks to the Regain system.

Regain lets you recover some of your character’s health in the moments just after you’ve taken damage. If you’ve been hit and lost some health, a portion (and sometimes the full amount) of your life meter can be regained if you immediately strike back. This is represented with a pinkish-orange glow that surrounds your character as it retaliates. Regain is super important in keeping your character alive and in good health, so don’t back up if you’ve been hit — stay aggressive.

One more thing: You can also sometimes stagger opponents by charging up your heavy attack. That’s a great way to take down stronger enemies from behind.

Trick Weapons give the player a good variety of combat options. I started with the Saw Blade, which afforded me fast, powerful strikes up close with its compact form, and extra range in its extended form. Other Trick Weapons include one-handed swords that can transform into a heavy hammer or a two-handed great sword. One weapon I found and later stuck with was the Tonitrus, an electrified club that doesn’t transform, but can be powered up for a stronger electrical attack. Through a series of weapon upgrades, it served me well throughout the game.

How weapon upgrades and Caryll Runes work

You’ll be able to strengthen your weapons in Bloodborne in a workshop at your hub. Using Bloodstones, you’ll be able to increase the damage and effectiveness of your swords, axes, clubs and firearms. The workshop is also where you repair damaged and broken weapons, and it appears that’s the only place where you can fix them. I haven’t found any consumable items that repair durability.

In that same workshop, you’ll also be able to add Blood Gems to your weapons after they’ve been upgraded. You’ll need to find the Blood Gem Workshop Tool first, which you should be able to acquire after beating a couple bosses. Blood Gems add effects to your weapons, increasing their damage and adding elemental effects like fire, electrical bolts and poison. Don’t worry: you can swap Blood Gems in and out of weapons back at the workshop whenever you want.

Next to the workshop, at a nearby altar, is where you’ll apply Caryll Runes to your character. They’re the closest thing Bloodborne has to rings and you’ll need to find the Rune Workshop Tool to apply them to your character. Again, you should be able to get this after you beat a couple bosses, so don’t play for 15 hours before finally tracking it down like I did. With Caryll Runes, you can give your character more hit points, better resistances, more stamina and other perks. This is also where you’ll apply Oath Memory to your character, Bloodborne’s version of Covenants.

Other concepts and tips

There’s a stat called Insight that does a few things. You’ll acquire Insight points by meeting certain characters and defeating bosses. You can also manually add Insight by consuming an item called Madman’s Knowledge.

Insight can be spent at one of the vendors in the Hunter’s Dream. Some items appear to be exclusive to the Insight Shop. Insight is also spent to initiate a cooperative multiplayer session. You’ll need to ring the Beckoning Bell to search for other players to play co-op with you and doing so will cost you Insight.

Bells used in multiplayer are available for purchase in the Insight Shop, which is just outside the workshop.

Insight affects another attribute in Bloodborne. The higher your Insight, the more susceptible you are to Frenzy, a new status effect that can cause serious damage and can only be cured with an item called sedative.

Here’s a quick breakdown of a few consumable items and their nearest equivalents in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.

Finally, make sure to explore and talk to as many characters as possible, particularly those behind lighted windows and with candles burning outside their doors. And trust your instincts when it comes to NPCs.

Good luck, Hunter.

by Paul Tassi

It finally happened. As I went to install my Bloodborne review copy on PS4 this weekend, I got a message. “This action cannot be completed, you need 5.72 GB of free space to install this file.” After less than a year and a half of ownership, my PS4 was already full. The Xbox One hit that mark a few weeks ago when I installed Evolve, and now it was official. It’s time to start deleting.

Sixteen games and fifteen months, that’s how long it took to fill up my PS4. That’s including tiny games like 500 MB of Resogun, and also behemoths like 50 GB of Wolfenstein: The New Order. It’s not as if first generation consoles weren’t going to fill up at some point, we all know they will, but in this new age, it’s happening more quickly than ever, and the solutions are awkward for early adopters of these new systems.

I had a 16 GB Xbox 360, which was one of the earliest models of the system sold. And yet, I only started running up against the full hard drive wall near the very end of its lifespan. To download one new piece of DLC, I’d have to delete one or two others. But by that point, the sun was setting on its lifecycle, and the Xbox One was already on the horizon.

Today, however, the industry is different. Both Sony and Microsoft MSFT +0.22% have made a huge push to make digital downloads easily accessible and the preferred option for many players, saving them a trip to the store and allowing them to start playing before the game is even finished downloading. But of course, with 20-50 GB games, 500 GB hard drives with between 360 and 400 GB of actual, usable space, that means your systems can get clogged up very quickly indeed.

But what many may not realize is that it’s not only downloaded games that take up space. Most games run full installs from the disc itself, or have massive DLC-supporting patches that bloat the size of the file. For example, I had a disc copy of Xbox One’s Dead Rising at launch, but after a series of patches, the game ended up taking 24 GB of hard drive space with no actual DLC purchased. And this weekend, despite having a disc copy of Bloodborne, the game takes up 30 GB of space. Dragon Age: Inquisition takes up a mammoth 44 GB, even though I’m using a disc copy there as well.

While I just hit this full hard drive mark now, I expect many avid players will have run into it earlier. I have both a PS4 and Xbox One, which means I’ve divided up third party games between them. If a player is using only one system, chances are if they’ve picked up many of the big multiplatform games just for that system, they could easily max out either console in under a year.

So, what to do? Deletion, mass deletion. I cleared out about a 100 GB of old games on my PS4 this weekend, from Watch Dogs to Infamous: Second Son to Need for Speed: Rivals, and gave Bloodborne a comfortable home. Now, to play any of them, if they were digital downloads I’ll have to start that whole process over again, or if I have the disc, I’ll have to reinstall them from there.

It’s not the end of the world, but it does show the limitations of this ideal digital age full of graphically intense games that have the ability to completely fill up your system in a little over a year if you’re even picking up just one game a month. Even if you still own these games, it does make you cringe just a little bit when you have to delete them from your system, just as it was irritating when I was deleting old DLC to make room for new expansions on my 360, but it’s starting much, much earlier, and is clearly going to have to be a repeated occurrence over the life of both systems.

Obviously newer models of the One and PS4 will have larger hard drives. A special Call of Duty Xbox One bundle already offers a 1 TB hard drive, but costs $585. Eventually, that hard drive size will be standard, and hopefully more terabytes come after that. But for the tens of millions who have a launch-era system, options are inelegant at best.

While you can’t replace the Xbox One’s internal hard drive, you can buy an external drive that you can hook in via a USB 3.0 port. You can replace PS4’s internal drive, but they will start offering external support as well through items like the upcoming Nyko Data Bank which attaches itself to the top of your system like an angular tumor, and allows for more storage space that way.

These solutions are a bit cumbersome, will probably cost at least $80, and are not from Sony or Microsoft directly. But they are going to be almost necessary unless you want to spend the next five to seven years of this console generation deleting and reinstalling games in order to maintain a growing collection. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a digital downloader or a disc-purchaser, as the disk space will be eaten away regardless.

Everyone guessed that the PS4 and One’s hard drive would prove undersized, but we’re now entering a point in time where that’s going to start happening to many, many early adopters. I think both companies would be wise to offer their own official versions of these aftermarket hard drive expansions to compliment the current line-up, and educate more casual players on the proper way to migrate over to a bigger drive. Otherwise they’re going to be forcing their players to erase their own collections in order to keep playing games, and that just isn’t a good feeling this early in the console generation.