Did you know? A lot of people have enjoyed recent games made by From Software. So much so that they talk about it, and quite a lot, in fact! They talk about everything, from the lore, to the game design, the impact it had on other games, how it works and does not, how it is made, all sort of fascinating things. A lot has been said, and, from the look of it, people won't shut up about those games for quite some time.
Hi there. I'm one of those people. I'm gonna talk about Bloodborne, because I finished it for the first time quite recently (yesterday as of this writing in fact), and now I Have Multiple Thoughts, and I need to bore other people than my roommates with them or else… well, let's not focus on that.
Some prior context
Like many people, I discovered From Software with Dark Souls. It took some time for me to get hooked, and, quite commonly, I failed quite a bit on my first game. So much so that I decided to restart my playthrough, and also decided to beat the game with a shield in each hand. Not even the bonewheel shield¹, mind you, just some random basic shields. That's how I finished the game for the first time. It was extremely hard and stupid, and I suffered way more than I should, but I still did it because I'm that kind of person I guess.
Afterwards, I completed all the achievements. Then played Dark Souls 2, that I did not complete to 100% nor enjoy that much at the time (although I quite love it nowadays), completed Dark Souls 3 at 100% too, then Sekiro to full completion, then back to Dark Souls 2 to do the same (I finally learned to love Dark Souls 2 more than Dark Souls 3, even though I played Dark Souls 3 way more thanks to multiple mods). And of course, in 2022, like many people, I did a major playthrough of Elden Ring and, by doing some copies of my savefile, managed to get 100% on that too.
That's all the games I played from From Software by that time. You may notice two specific entries missing from that list: Demon's Souls and Bloodborne. The most savvy of you have already guessed why: I did not own a Playstation 3 nor a Playstation 4 (and I don't own a PS5 either for that matter), and so could not get my hands on those games. I had seen some Let's Play and lived vicariously through them, but like many others, my only hope to play either of thoses games was mostly a PC port that was and still is highly unlikely.
However, two things happened at the end of 2022: First, me and my significant other moved out to live with two other friends in a wonderful little home, and it so happened that those friends had a PS4. Second, one of those roommies, praise them, saw fit to gift me a copy of Bloodborne. As I was busy with some other things, I only started playing it in the middle of January, and finally finished it on the 29th.
I have many things to talk about, some of them most people are already familiar with (I could gush about the environments, the atmosphere, the enemies), and some other things that would not be shared by that many (like the "fast-paced combat" which is really… not so fast in 2023, or how "easy" it was for me compared to other souls games²).
The thing I will focus on will be, as you may have guessed from the title you read so long ago⁵, the Chalice dungeons, initially a controversial concept that ended up quite loved by the community. More importantly, I will talk about how they are a precursor to — and I will argue far better and more successful than — the crypts in Elden Ring.
Chalice dungeons and catacombs, what are we even talking about?
Chalice dungeons
Let's get everyone up to speed. In Bloodborne, Chalice dungeons are completely optional dungeons that you may enter to find loot, especially blood gems, a specific type of items that may be imbued in your weapons to improve your stats. Chalice dungeons vary both in strength and atmosphere. Although all of them are part of a labyrinthic series of catacombs and share a lot of similarities, there are a lot of touches to make each of them a bit special. They are divided into four big categories, each with its somewhat unique flavor, both in atmosphere and enemies, including bosses.
A dungeon is structured in big chunks, usually three. Each chunk is divided into three sections: the entrance, where there may be a side labyrinth part that always contains some loot (be it special material to enter the Chalice dungeons⁶, gems or even special versions of your weapons), the main part, the exit corridor (which may also contain a side-part, like the entrance), and finally a boss that you have to defeat to finish the chunk.
The main part of a chunk is also always following the same structure: extremely early, in the very first room past the entrance, you will see a closed gate with two statues and two purple lights surrounding it. To unlock it, you will have to find within this main part a lever, guarded usually by a stronger enemy or a pack of enemies. Once you've done that, you backtrack to that lever and proceed with the exit corridor and then the boss. Beyond that, it's either another chunk or the end that sends you back home.
Bosses that you find in the Chalice dungeons vary. Some are glorified common enemies with bigger numbers. Some are unique to the dungeons. Some are bosses you may have already beaten in the main game. They are not always as polished as bosses in the main game, but they're still fun most of the time.
One important thing that I did not talk about so far is that there is a final division between Chalice dungeons: Shared dungeons and root dungeons. As the name suggests, shared dungeons are shared between players, but not in an online way: they are fixed in their design, meaning that everyone will always get the same dungeons. By contrast and as the name does not suggest, root dungeons are procedurally generated, and when activating a root Chalice the usual way⁷ you will get a random dungeon that probably no other player has done before.
This gives a theoretical quite large replayability but, as always with those kind of things, not really. People were legitimately thinking it would spoil the carefully crafted experience of the Souls game, and that it would become quite boresome and tedious pretty fast. And in a way, it did, but in another way, it succeeded in doing so. More on that later, because now we have to talk about Elden Ring.
Catacombs
Catacombs in Elden Ring are a specific subset of the numerous dungeons that you may find in its truly gigantic map. There are many dungeons, from the enormous Legacy Dungeons like Stormveil Castle to the smaller ones like the multiple mines or caves. Catacombs are (usually⁸) on the small side, along with the mines and caves.
Catacombs tend to follow the same structure: an entrance, where you will find your bonefire site of grace, then a closed gate with two statues that you have to open. To do so, you enter the dungeon in itself, fighting whatever comes your way and looting whatever you happen upon, sometimes with secret side parts with especially rare loot, before getting to a big lever that opens the main gate. You either backtrack or take a shortcut to the beginning, go through the main gate and fight a boss that will drop one big piece of loot.
This base formula quickly changes within the game, and most catacombs add a specific gimmick, sometimes quite expansive, sometimes quite limited. Gimmicks are usually reused, but usually with some more to it than what you saw before. The overall design of the catacombs however does not change: white brick walls, roots everywhere, only the lighting and the occasionally muddy (and poisonous) ground gives some welcoming change.
Bosses at the end of the catacombs are never unique⁹ to the catacombs, at least not the whole of the catacombs: if you do every crypt, you will fight some bosses multiple times, and some even become regular enemies the further you get into the game, be it inside or outside the dungeons. I hope you loved as much as I did fighting those Watchdogs, because you're in for a treat!
As you might have guessed, I did not enjoy that much the smaller dungeons from Elden Ring, especially not the crypts. And you may also have noticed something: they look… rather similar to the design from Bloodborne, and I enjoyed those ones way more. Why is that?
Turns out minor differences tend to add up
There are a few key things that made me like Bloodborne dungeons despite their flaws, while I ended up skipping some in Elden Ring, bored and unable to find the motivation to explore them (and I love exploring, I really do! Exploring is fun! That's a big part of why I love the Souls series!). Here's a list that try to sum them up:
Elden Ring reuses too much of the same content
If you hear me talk about Elden Ring, my main complain is that it was too big. Too long, too big, too much content. I took more than a hundred hours to finish my first (and only so far) playthrough, and that's not uncommon. Yeah, I did most of the optional stuff, but that's still way too much. I can not emphasize enough how tired I was towards the end of my playthrough.
But it's not the hundred hours by themselves that made it hard for me. I have played my fair share of grindy and repetitive games, like Warframe¹⁰ for example. It's the specific blend of the Souls design, which requires to stay at least somewhat focused, contrasted with extremely repetitive content that sealed the deal for me.
And when I say repetitive content, I mean that part of the content is even repeated from Dark Souls 3. Dogs in the overworld use most of the same moveset as what was found in previous Souls game, the same is true for some other basic enemies (especially the commoners and other "hollows"), but it's especially true for the most common enemy in the crypts, a small gargoyle-like enemy that moves like the Hollow Slaves found mostly in the Undead Settlement from DS3. Having played Dark Souls 3 a lot, as I mentionned, this already jaded me as soon as I entered my third cryp and saw it was still the same base enemy in the whole crypt. Ninety percent of the crypts have this enemy as its main source of fodder. I knew how to deal with them, it was not a challenge, it was not fun. It was just… there.
One thing that should be clear before going further: I am not saying the developpers should not have reused assets and animations from Dark Souls 3. I am not even saying they should have not reused content within Elden Ring itself. Reusing content is fine! I may complain about it, but I usally enjoy it or at worse tolerate it in my games. It's a common practice, and it may bother some people, but I get it. It has its merits, it can make a point about how far you've progressed whenever an early boss becomes a common enemy, it can trigger a false sense of security that is especially useful for Soulslike game… It has many purposes but, most notably for the devs, it saves a huge amount of time and allows you to produce more content without having to start from zero again and again.
But you have to be careful when reusing content. Because if you do it too much… well, people get bored. When they do get bored is, of course, highly subjective. For me, Elden Ring, as great as it is, reused way too much of its own content, be it within the crypts or outside. Sure, that added 10 to 20 hours to my game time, but I would have preferred a much shorter game in the end. To me, those extra hours did not feel that great. Quite the contrary.
By contrast, Chalice dungeons repeat themselves, sure, but… I did not play them as much. I played some Chalice dungeons, whenever I felt like it because it felt fresh, mostly in the middle of my game, and then I went on with the main game because I was getting bored and wanted to finish it. Why did I not do that in Elden Ring? Well…
FOMO's real and it's a terrible thing
In Bloodborne, you do the Chalice mainly for two things: getting some levels, and getting some loot to improve your weapons. If you do something appropriate for your level, you're mostly guaranteed to find both things, unless you already have great loot (in which case, you can surely go to a higher difficulty if available). That's great! That means that you want to do those dungeons, even if it's just for getting a little stronger.
In Elden Ring, smaller dungeons, crypts included, contain extremely random loot. It could be a talisman that may be crucial for a specific build you are currently not doing with your character. Or it could be an incredible weapon… if you were not a sorcerer. Or a quite fun spell! But you happen to be a full warrior build. Or summons! But, if you're like me, you mostly did not use summons for most of the game¹¹. And for the leveling part, well, if you do them whenever you encounter them, you usually get half a level or maybe a full level from them. In Elden Ring, that's not much (you usually end up way beyond a hundred levels, from what I gathered between level 120 and 160 seem to be the norm at the end of the game).
And yet, I still did them. Why? Well, for the exploratory part, sure, and some catacombs were really fun thanks to their gimmick. But also… because you may never know. I really did not want to use a guide to know what was in what dungeons, so I was always hoping that it would be something useful, maybe. And 99% of the time, it wasn't, just another random piece of junk I would never use. And if I used guides to only get the loot I could reasonably use, I would have missed some of the fun content within those crypts. So… yeah. FOMO got me good, and kinda sucked out the fun out of this.
Give me fun bosses or give me death
There are two things that I really enjoy, gameplay-wise, in a Souls game: the exploration and the bosses. Exlporing the crypts was mostly a wash, but as I said before, so were the bosses. Because none of them (more or less, from what I remember) are unique to the crypts, beceause all the crypts look the same, it all blends in. You have seen these patterns before, you dodge mechanically without thinking, you even start to recognize the layouts of the rooms and know where enemies will be hidden, and even if the boss is sometimes hard thanks to inflated numbers, it's not really a challenge in itself, it just becomes… annoying.
But that's when it's at least at the appropriate level. I said I had one main complaint about Elden Ring, and that it is too big. The following complaint that I have is that, as wonderful that the open world is, it fundamentally breaks some core design aspects of the Soulslike genre, mainly keeping most of the game an appropriate challenge for what level you are.
Some may say that this is a welcoming change, and I agree to a point. It sure does help that, if you're stuck somewhere, you can just do some other stuff, get some levels, some upgrades for your weapons and some new spells, come back and hopefully win this time. Whereas in Dark Souls, if you're stuck on Ornstein and Smough, well… tough luck. Better die a few more times and see if you finally win.
But the counter point to that is that, if you've missed a side area or forgot about a dungeon and happen upon it later in the game… you usually kill everything within it by your mere presence. I myself have killed some dungeon bosses in three or four hits, and was each time thinking "I bet it would have been fun to fight this boss twenty hours ago. Oh well, too bad".
Solutions to this problem exist. Breath of the Wild did that, by increasing the overall difficulty with each boss. However, given the scope, the length and the many, many parameters that would have to be taken into account within Elden Ring, it would have been extremely complex to put a similar system within the game. And it's not even certain it would have been a good thing in the end.
Meanwhile, again, Chalice dungeons can just be done whenever you want, at the level you have access too. You don't have to find them on the overworld, they are just there within the Hunter's Dream (the main hub of the game), ready to be accessed whenever ; you can even pause them and come back later! Sure, if you do them a bit late in the game, you have to do some really easy dungeons before unlocking harder ones. But at least it's just a one-time process that finally unlock the challenge you crave for.
Sometimes, randomness is more fun than half-baked gimmicks
I only did one fully random Chalice dungeon, but even the shared dungeons are clearly built with the same blocks. They were just chosen by the devs to be "the ones that all players doing Chalice dungeons will see".
And yeah, sometimes, they break. You enter a room and there is just one dude in a corner, alone, throwing a knife at you. You kill him in two hits. You turn, check every corner, nothing. And then you get out and continue with the level. And sometimes, you get amazing experiences, you open a door and immediately get ambushed by five enemies at once and you have to handle them quickly or die. It's fun! It's random! The surprise keeps it on your toes. Yeah, it's rough around the edges, but as my roommate¹² who's also a fan of these games likes to say, "those games are better with some roughness and friction"¹³.
Elden Ring has carefully crafted dungeons. Or, well, at least they're crafted. I'm not the only one, it's a common criticism: in the end, all the crypts in Elden Ring tend to… blend. Even with the multiple gimmicks. Only the most elaborate tend to be remembered in the end, like the maze with identical rooms, the ones with the lights and shadows, the jar one, etc. But all the others… look, feel, play the same. And so, we forget about them.
And yeah, Chalice dungeons are forgettable too. But we expect to forget them: they're procedurally generated, after all, they are meant to be used and discarded. Lorewise, this even works, this idea of a gigantic labyrinth of catacombs, everchanging, mysterious, all the same and always different, incomprehensible… It works, it's a bit wonky, yeah, but it works.
But Elden Ring crypts, for the most part, do not. I did not feel that way with the other mini-dungeons, like the caves, the mines or the tunnels, which mostly felt all distinct at least in some way. The catacombs, as another iteration of the design of the dungeons of Bloodborne, were mostly a failure to me, and that's a shame. I really tried to like them and find fun in them.
I did not.
A conclusion of some sort
If you've reached this point and read most of this, well, huh, thank you¹⁴. That means a lot to me, even if, like the catacombs of Elden Ring, I tend to repeat myself again and again¹⁵. My thanks and my excuses towards my roommates and my significant other, who have to suffer these kind of ramblings far more often than they would like. Fortunately, they have learned to nod and smile or flat out ignore me, and they are well in their right to do so.
This was quite long, and for that I'm sorry. I promise that if I do that again (and I might¹⁶), I'll try to not be as lengthy. I'll fail, sure, but I'll try.
Annotations, footnotes, comments and other annex observations that serve as a place for my tangentially related ramblings
1. For those of you who are not in the know, there is indeed one shield in Dark Souls 1 that may be used as a weapon, as dodgy as it may be, and that is the bonewheel shield, a (rare) weapon dropped (rarely) from Wheel Skeletons, an enemy as silly as it is deadly.
2. I am not trying³ to brag, and I'm especially not trying to say that the game is easy. I am saying it was, at that point in time, for me, easy. I first-tried most of the bosses outside of Chalice dungeons (a particular Chalice dungeon was my first real challenge in the game, due to me doing it a bit too early compared to my not-improved-for-a-while equipment and my not-quite-leveled-enough character; after some time, I managed to get through), even DLC bosses. Lady Maria (bless her) was an extremely fun fight, well-designed… but I did not die to her. And I only died once to Orphan of Kos, another wonderful boss that I thoroughly enjoyed. And yeah, I played a lot of souls game, but I died a lot in Elden Ring, even to secondary bosses, even to mini-bosses! Even games I come back to for multiple playthroughs, I tend to die a lot. I usually say that I'm not especially good at those games, I just persevere long enough that I finally learn the proper patterns. And you might say that after so many hours spent playing them I finally reached a threshold that made Bloodborne easy for me, but while that may be true, I think it's more complicated than that. However, this specific rambling would be best in another post rather than in those annotations.
3. Because I am, actually⁴.
4. I'm not. This is a joke. Or is it? (it is)
5. Concision? Not a fan.
6. You have to pay a fee to enter the dungeons and activate them, a fee that is paid both in Blood Echoes (the currency and experience of Bloodborne) and material. It's not really important to the subject, so I mention it here, but know that it exists. You find most of what you need to pay to enter a dungeon into the dungeons themselves, although you can also buy some of the materials in a pinch. Reciprocally, you can also sell them for quite a correct amount, which is useful in the early/mid game, less so in the late game.
7. As you may have guessed, generating a dungeon this way gives you a code that you can give to other players so they may tackle the same dungeon as you. This led to people exploring all the possibilities to exploit the hell out of it, finding dungeons with easily accessible and extremely powerful loot quite early in the game, and finally giving us the infamous "cum dungeon", a dungeon with the code CUMMMFPK (hence the name) that gives you a ludicrous amount of Blood Echoes without doing anything. For those of you wondering, no, I did not enter any of those dungeons, as it requires you to pay for PSN (as far as I know) and I didn't see the point in wasting my money on that.
8. You may include the rather big tombs and graves into the catacombs, but I am not. There are still, however, some large catacombs, mostly those with a labyrinthine gimmick. They still don't get as big as the aforementioned graves and tombs, and especially not as big as the legacy dungeons.
9. From what I remembered and played. I may have forgotten or missed the one unique boss within a crypt, but honestly, I doubt so.
10. This is not a critic on Warframe. Yeah, it's grindy and repetitive. That's expected and upfront and part of the game. It's also very fun and I quite enjoy playing it, usually by long periods (I am, as of right now, quitting the game for a while before probably returning to it at some point in a few months or a year or maybe never, who knows).
11. Using summons is perfectly fine, but I wanted to see how far I could go without them. I usually don't use NPCs as help in Souls game, at least for my first playthrough, just because I love the challenge. However, towards the end of Elden Ring, I was quite broken and tired of the game, especially of MALENIA, BLADE OF MIQUELLA. Like most people and after too many deaths, I simply decided to use the Mimic Summon, died some more, finally killed her, and then went on to finish the game, quickly using the Mimic Summon to speed up the last few bosses because I could not endure the game that much longer. I still really like Elden Ring and plan to do another playthrough or two one day, but boy, those last hours were rough.
12. Not the one that offered me Bloodborne. The other one.
13. That's why she doesn't like Dark Souls 3, the most polished of the three Dark Souls, and I agree with that. I still like Dark Souls 3, though, despite its smoothness.
14. But also… why?
15. The irony is not lost on me, as you can see.
16. This is a threat.