Unlike its predecessor the Dark Souls franchise, Bloodborne is a one-off title by FromSoftware that is so popular that people are demanding another one for its unique setting, lore and potential.
It's about a man (or woman) who travel to the city of Yharnam to be cured for an unknown disease using its legendary healing blood. In exchange, you sign a contract that bounds you to the Hunter's Dream and you are tasked with finding something known only as "Paleblood" in the Gothic Nightmare city of Yharnam. You take up the mantle of Hunter and are sent out to kill every beast and maddened human that gets in your way.
And it just gets more horrifying from there.
Many consider it to be their favorite game, and possibly one of the greatest Horror games (if you consider it one) of all time, so there are some who think of using it to make their own game.
(But don't forgot to check out So You Want To Write A Story for elements and advice that hold across genres.)
Necessary Tropes
- Cosmic Horror Story: While the first half of the game bases its aesthetics and story-elements on Gothic Horror, the rest uses a lot of the kind of thing H. P. Lovecraft would cook-up; Eldritch Abominations, people being driven to madness from the horrors and knowledge they witness, unfathomable worlds, all tied with a pretty little bow made of an absolute, nihilistic take on mankind's insignificance in a world that doesn't revolve around them. Of course, playing a game where you are given free rein to fight and die and fight some more until you win — especially when you need to kill a god of unfathomable terror — falls closer into Lovecraft Lite territory, but it does not make things any less terrifying. For further details, visit "Write a Cosmic Horror Story".
- Dream Land: Much like with H.P. Lovecraft, Bloodborne describes the various Eldritch Locations as different types and levels of dreams and nightmares, death simply a method in which people "wake-up" from one world to another.
- Eldritch Abominations: Most of Bloodborne's bosses are either the kind of thing you could totally picture H.P. Lovecraft or one of his billions of nerdy fans would make. They'd be beast-like, be a Body of Bodies or some other unfathomable thing that you can very well kill if you bury yourself in whatever it has that passes for a shin and hit it long enough until it dies.
- Gorn: You can't make a Bloodborne game without blood. Copious, splattering, rivers and oceans of sanguine, caking the walls, the floors and one's clothes after they fly spurting out of the gushing wounds of your enemies.
- Gothic Horror: While a Dark Fantasy all the same as every other Souls-like RPG, what distinguishes it from its predecessors and successors of the sub-genre is that much of its visual aesthetic and even a few of its narrative motifs and story-elements — vampires, werewolves, religion, the destructive capabilities of the scientific method over faith and nature, tragic, Byronic Heroes, etc. — borrow a great deal of British and European Gothic Stories. For further details, visit "Write a Gothic Story".
- Morph Weapon: Iconic trick weapons that can switch between a "fast but weak" attack and a "slow, strong" attack.
- Sword and Gun: The Player Character has two arms; one that holds the trick weapon and the other that has a support weapon, and the overwhelming majority of support weapons are some kind of gun.
Choices, Choices
- Ambiguous Time Period: While the original game's setting has often been compared to Victorian England with a very Eastern-European sense of architecture, this doesn't necessarily mean that a new game or story needs to stay there. How would a world like Bloodborne learn to split the atom? Or invent digital devices? What about a Wild West setting, or Africa, or China? There are "Eastern Lands" that exist here, with Old Hunter Yamamura as the proof. What is going on there?
- And Then John Was a Zombie: The game establishes that all of the blood people have been sharing was turning people into mindless werewolves, with implications that it is only the Player Character's contract with the Hunter's Dream that protects them from this. The closest the Player can get to becoming a beast is by equipping the Beast's Embrace Oath Rune and the Beast Claws from the DLC. Can't we do better than that? Can't we incorporate the process of beasthood in a more creative manner while not sacrificing the player's options?
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Healing Church acted as an answer to a question the Cosmic Horror genre never bothered answering: what would it be like if the Cults from Lovecraft's stories were the mainstream, dominant religion, and what kind of culture would that create? How would mass worship of the Old Ones effect the human population? Splinter groups and divisions existed in the original game, but what about new denominations or competing faiths? Historically, the Catholic Church and Protestants fought wars, so what would be analogous to that?
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: The overwhelming majority of the beasts present in Bloodborne evoke the idea of werewolves; humanoid wolf men with an insatiable hunger for humans that come in many shapes and sizes. However, it is shown that the same blood that causes all of it also effects animals, mutating common dogs and crows and snakes. In the Hunter's Nightmare, it turned Ludwig into a horse-monster. Perhaps people who studied the old blood figure out why they turn into wolves and alter it, creating Bat People, Spider People or some other freak of nature.
Pitfalls
- Angst Aversion/Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The story of Bloodborne tends to crush hopes more so than it gives it, with many characters dying horribly, suffering great tragedies or going mad in a world that is almost literally out to get them. All the mindless violence, bombastic music and gorgeous environments in the world won't save a game that deters people from playing it from its sheer hopelessness. If you want players to keep playing, give them a simple goal and enough likable characters to make you sympathize with them.
Potential Subversions
- The Main Characters Do Everything: While players could summon Old Hunters to help them, they were just support when fighting enemies. Pretty much all of the side-quests in the game are optional and while helping them can be beneficial in the form of weaponry and items, they don't really push the main narrative further. Is it possible that we can have the actions of a side character impact the main story a little more? For example, in the first game you can accept blood from either Adella or Arianna. Whichever's blood you accept may impact their role in the story, but it doesn't impact yours. What if helping or accepting the help of one character can open up a shortcut special to them? Maybe unique bosses, unique items and weaponry, maybe even unique bosses! This adds replay value for those who are mining for lore and, with New Game Plus, for those who obsess over 100% everything.
Writer's Lounge
Suggested Themes and Aesops
- The Destructive Curse of Classism. Gothic Horror was what introduced the idea of supernatural monsters as being metaphors for certain kinds of people, vampires being portrayed as ancient, foreign invasion and later used as an analogy for Aristocracy and Ruling Class; these blood-sucking withering monsters that literally hunt the peasantry and drain them of their life until they are nothing but mindless slaves. In Bloodborne, the idea of blood-drinking is ingrained into Yharnam's entire culture, with the Vilebloods — an aristocracy with a love/hate relationship with the Healing Church — being the most obvious comparison to the likes of Dracula. The Healing Church distributes old blood like it's bread and water, but the stuff is highly addictive and literally turns people into mindless monstrosities. The Church even poisoned the water supply of Old Yharnam so that the citizens can become dependent on them for a "cure", only for it to cause a beast-epidemic so massive that they burned the place to the ground and locked the whole thing away so that they could pretend it didn't happen. The idea of a government or institution doing this to its own citizens, while nothing new, is a very hot topic of discussion when it comes to things like race and class (like President Nixon and the War on Drugs, or President Reagan and the Contra-Crack Wars). It is very likely that most of the beasts and the people they kill are mostly the poor and middle-class of Yharnam's population. When they started making hunters to help protect the streets, the Healing Church started making their own hunters, many of whom will attack the player unprovoked.
Potential Motifs
- Eye Motifs: Yharnam's culture and the Healing Church that influenced it all stemmed from the teachings of Master Willem, who came to the conclusion that wisdom and insight had to come from "lining one's brain with eyes", so he wore an ornate blindfold so that he could "see" inward. This would later go on to inspire his students into doing the same and eventually the people at large to wear blindfolds. Some ended up taking the idea a little too literally and enemies like the Eye Collectors take to stealing people's eyes, convinced that it would somehow help. Later, various monsters a level or two higher than humanity in the cosmic order start exhibiting dozens of eyes, implying that there is more too this.
Suggested Plots
Being a Souls-like RPG, the plot is more of a Random Events Plot that is beaten with the flat end of a shield into shape. Like with Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne is a game about a one-in-a-million Player Character who is given the same goal as every other similar hero. In the case of the Good Hunter, he is asked to end the night by finding Paleblood. You don't know who left the note, nor are you given any more information. You ask NPCs who don't want to kill you and they tell you to kill beasts prowling the streets and then maybe you'll see or hear about something important, or maybe you won't. Who knows?
This establishes a tone of fear and hopelessness in the setting. Yharnam is a massive city, so when the supernatural can literally be lurking anywhere to kill you, odds are there are a few hidden places of importance in the shadows. While still a carnival of horrors, Yharnam is also a City of Adventure where anything could happen. While you might not learn anything about your journey's end, you can learn and grow and get stronger so that even if your journey doesn't end, you can at least survive long enough to know what you're doing and maybe even figuring out what is so important that living in such a world is worth doing.
Department
Set Designer / Location Scout
Being a Metroidvania game, Bloodborne tells its story through environmental design. If you can see any distinct location in the sky-box, it better be a location that the player can get to later on in the game or else someone is gonna get fire.
The world was designed with a 18th-19th Century Europe in mind while its architecture is farther East like a Romanian Church. The streets are littered with bodies, chained up coffins, hastilly made bonfires with corpses tied to poles. We are witnessing a bustling city that has gone through something violent and apocalyptic. Where these horrors trapped in the city to keep it from the rest of the world, or did they invade it from outside?
Eldritch Locations like the various dream and nightmare realms hold facsimiles of the real world in them, either the ruins of the real world forcibly pulled into a nightmare or recreated haphazardly as if by memory, likely because the Nightmare has no natural environments of its own, or at least none we puny humans can properly process.
Props Department
The Victorian era was in the earlier stages of an industrial revolution. Gas, steam and electricity were around, but they were also not very mainstream and people still used coal and giant cogs and other bulky forms of tech. This also applies to the weapons. You have all kinds of guns, but they are big and ornate, the trick weapons being large blades and saws with hinges. The first hunters were just ordinary citizens, likely using garden tools and cheap weapons made more complex and effective with only a few alterations.
Costume Design
Guns are a thing here, so medieval armor isn't going to help very much, especially when you need to be fast enough to avoid fast monsters like Scourge Beasts. Thick clothes to keep as little blood from getting into your open wounds works fine, but given these dark times, civilian clothes will just have to do.
