Just about every time Sony announces a new State of Play showcase, many start asking the company for a remastered release of PS4-exclusive soulslike title Bloodborne. Digital Foundry, however, has been able to figure out how to run Bloodborne on the PS5, and in a video, showcased how well the modded console could run the title.
Before getting into the details of how this was accomplished, however, Digital Foundry first establishes the baseline performance of Bloodborne on its original launch platform. The title, even now, suffers from quite a few performance issues, including being locked to a frame rate of 30 FPS despite suffering from inconsistent frame pacing, which tends to introduce quite a bit of stuttering. It is worth noting that the title also didn’t benefit much from running on the more powerful PS4 Pro.
Playing it on a modded PS5, however, results in Bloodborne running at a higher resolution and also maintaining smooth frame rates of 120 FPS thanks to variable refresh rate support, and even gameplay improvements thanks to lower latency, which lead to snappier controls.
To run Bloodborne on a PS5 like this, however, the console has to be modded quite a bit through exploits only possible on older console firmware versions. These mods essentially involved giving the software systems that run PS4 games on the PS5 more access to the current-generation console’s modern features, like additional RAM and even support for variable refresh rate. Paired with the fact that the PS5 is also much faster than the PS4 was, the title is able to run in a smoother manner.
The video has noted that, though introduced via mods, the enhancements that have been showcased in the video could be possible for Sony to implement on its own if the company had any interest in doing so.
The fact that neither Sony nor original developer FromSoftware has any interest in revisiting Bloodborne in some way has been evident for quite some time. Interestingly, shortly after the closure of Bluepoint Games – a studio well-known for its work on remakes and remasters – was announced, a report indicated that the studio had even pitched a remake of Bloodborne. However, FromSoftware was seemingly not keen on the idea. As for Sony’s role in this, the report has indicated that Sony simply wants to respect FromSoftware’s decision on the matter.
Last year, former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida had also spoken about a new Bloodborne game being unlikely to happen due to just how busy director Hidetaka Miyazaki is with his other projects.
“I have only my personal theory to that situation,” explained Yoshida in an interview. “I left first party so I don’t know what’s going on, but my theory is… Miyazaki-san really loved Bloodborne, you know, 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 does not want anyone else to touch it.”
In the meantime, Bloodborne is getting an animated adaptation, co-produced by PlayStation Studios, Lyrical Animation, and Seán “Jack SepticEye” McLoughlin.
