Yesterday, From Software released a patch for its critically acclaimed video game title, Bloodborne. The developers claimed that the patch will improve loading times in the region of 5-15 seconds along with several fixes which you can read over here. As our initial analysis suggested, loading times for Bloodborne were extremely long, resulting into frustration. In a game where you are supposed to die a lot, long load times just adds more madness to the agony.
One possible reason behind the long load times was the complete resetting of the game whenever the player dies. The engine has to rebuild everything from scratch, collect all the assets and reframe them again, the levels, the states of the NPCs, physics and just about everything in the game. Technically speaking, the long loading times are somewhat understandable, but to the end user who is not even aware of the background process, longer loading times are nothing but a nuisance.
So have things improved with patch 1.03? In order to know more we tested the game across a few levels and compared it to the times we found on 1.01 to 1.03. Please note that the analysis was conducted on the 500gb stock HDD that comes along with every PlayStation 4.
Patch 1.01 (old loading times):
Central Yharnam To Hunter’s Dream – 11.26 seconds
Hunter’s Dream To First Floor Sickroom – 32.04 seconds
Hunter’s Dream to Nightmare of Mensis – 23.66 seconds
Central Yharnam [Respawn] – 28.05 seconds
Forbidden Woods [Respawn] – 21.63 seconds
Old Yharnam [Respawn] – 49.34 seconds
Hunter’s Dream To Great Bridge – 29.86 seconds
Hunter’s Dream to Nightmare Frontier – 29.40 seconds
Blood Hunter’s Mask Used In Old Yharnam – 29.23 seconds
Patch 1.03 (new loading times):
Central Yharnam To Hunter’s Dream – 7.94 seconds
Hunter’s Dream To First Floor Sickroom – 27.13 seconds
Hunter’s Dream to Nightmare of Mensis – 19.89 seconds
Central Yharnam [Respawn] – 23.23 seconds
Forbidden Woods [Respawn] – 13.76 seconds
Old Yharnam [Respawn] – 24.39 seconds
Hunter’s Dream To Great Bridge – 24.33 seconds
Hunter’s Dream to Nightmare Frontier – 21.07 seconds
Blood Hunter’s Mask Used In Old Yharnam – 19.78 seconds
As you can see from the results posted above, the improvements are pretty drastic in some cases while most of them are within the 5-15 seconds bracket that the developers claimed. We highly recommend patch 1.03 for anyone who is playing Bloodborne and given that From Software have actually replaced the static loading screen with useful information, it makes the loading times fa less excruciating.