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How Bloodborne's hidden content found an audience
Three years after its release, people are still finding new things hidden in Bloodborne's darkest corners.
Created by the legendary Japanese studio FromSoftware and part of the cult Souls series of video games, Bloodborne is a PlayStation 4 exclusive that, even three years after its initial release, continues to attract the affection of its most ardent fans.
The twisted brainchild of Hidetaka Miyazaki, Bloodborne draws from the devilish works of HP Lovecraft and Bram Stoker, placing you in a nightmarish gothic world packed with twisted monsters, enigmatic characters and intense boss battles. Despite the time that's passed since the game's last major update – 2015's DLC pack The Old Hunters – Bloodborne remains in the headlines, and last year it got another boost when fans unearthed unused content buried deep within the game's code.
"There were two major elements that kickstarted the datamining," explains prolific game hacker ZullieTheWitch. "First, someone was able to dump the full Bloodborne files in a readable state, and second, a PS4 save editor was released that allowed us to use the information from the file dump for practical modification to the game. More recently, some dataminers with hacked consoles or dev kits have been going even further with it."
Fellow hacker Sanadsk goes into a little more detail. "The biggest barrier was getting the files of the game because we can’t just view the PlayStation 4 files, but this was made possible with the advancements in the PS4 scene very recently," he adds. "The manner for finding each element of cut content differs depending on the content. For example, the character models need to be converted to be properly seen, then it’s the matter of applying the textures and animations which need to be first converted from the PS4 format and then viewed in computer-based modelling programs."
We're not simply talking about a few unused items or pieces of artwork here; locked deep within Bloodborne are two boss monsters – The Great One Beast and a variation on The Moon Presence – which not only come with their own attacks, animations and AI routines, but also have their own levels. "Usually, unused bosses and enemies are just left there as models," says Sanadsk. "But these two had their own levels in which you can fight them without directly modding the game files, and they are mostly finished bosses in terms of animations and AI."
Amazingly, not only has this new content been shared online, it's actually possible to fight against some of these bosses thanks to the way in which Bloodborne's procedurally-generated Chalice Dungeons work. These locations are created by the player in-game and it's possible to enter another player's dungeon using a 'Glyph' system. "One of the most significant things I was personally able to do was share access to some of the cut content with the general public through Bloodborne's built-in Chalice Dungeon system," says ZullieTheWitch. "There are special files that the game uses to load the assets into the map," adds Sanadsk. "We used these files to determine which dungeons load some of the unused assets, then we used a PS4 Save Editor to load these dungeons and access some of the unused bosses and enemies and be able to fight them in-game without having to edit the files of the games directly."
This element of the game has undoubtedly helped raise awareness of Bloodborne's hidden content; games having unused assets is certainly nothing new, but it isn't often that this content is available for players to experience without hacking or otherwise modifying the game code themselves. "It's incredibly rare in any game for people with no modifications to their system and no external tools to be able to see cut content first-hand just because one player found it, and it was the most amazing feeling to have been the one inviting people in," says ZullieTheWitch, who was the first to open the door to this process. "The biggest parts of that accessible content were the two almost-finished bosses that players were able to fight for the first time at the end of last year."
You can see some of Bloodborne's cut content in this video:
So, why's there so much unused content within Bloodborne itself? What makes this game so unique in this respect? Sanadsk thinks it's a hallmark of the Souls series, from which Bloodborne is derived. "Souls games in general always have a lot of unused content left in the files," he says. "But I think why Bloodborne specifically had a lot of unused content is because it's a new IP and FromSoftware were experimenting with lots of different ideas. It’s not surprising that a lot of it didn’t make it into the final cut of the game, since the world of Bloodborne we have now is very different to the original world FromSoftware envisioned for the game. This can be seen in some of the dialogues of unused NPCs, in which a lot of them say 'Umbasa' – a direct reference to Demon’s Souls [the first Souls game and a PlayStation 3 exclusive]. This shows that the game was probably a Demon’s Souls sequel of sorts very early on in the development."
ZullieTheWitch agrees and thinks that the abundance of hidden content has a lot to do with series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, and the ever-changing vision he has for the franchise. "It's something that's happened in most of the Souls series. I imagine Miyazaki is very driven by his artistic sensibilities and so if his vision for the game changes over time, some elements from early development might no longer fit the game and get abandoned, or he might have some ideas that don't have the time to be fully realised."
But why has it taken almost three years to unearth this stuff, given the fact that the Souls series is so fiercely loved by its fanbase? "I think it’s the PlayStation exclusivity thing as we couldn’t access the PlayStation 4 files until very recently," replies Sanadsk. "So we've had approximately three years without knowing anything about what’s left unused inside the files of Bloodborne." Given the stature of the game in question, it's perhaps unsurprising that these late discoveries have triggered such a wave of interest. "Generally in the gaming community, people love to see the early ideas of games," continues Sanadsk. "Seeing how the game has changed throughout the years of development, it gives a better idea on the thought process of creating such games."
See another of the beasts that missed Bloodborne's final cut:
While this content should have remained on the cutting room floor in the eyes of FromSoftware, ZullieTheWitch feels that its emergence has changed the way some fans perceive the game's story and lore. "The storytelling of the Souls series is mainly built around painting a big picture and then only showing the player bits and pieces of it, so they have to imagine the parts that they can't see. Because denial of information is so important, it makes any kind of extra detail deeply appealing to the player base and so fans of Miyazaki's games have a big appreciation for cut content. In some ways, the cut content has made things more obscure, because it's given a glimpse into this entire alternate take on the setting that's separate from what we got. The lines between what could've been, what was intended but didn't make it in and what is part of the world but was purposefully withheld have been blurred completely."
Sanadsk agrees and says that since the unused content has come to light, some fans have reassessed their stance on the game's deeper narrative. "There are a lot of new lore implications about the world in Bloodborne which have given us a much bigger idea about concepts that were rather peculiar in the game, but a lot of people still make the argument that it was removed from the final version of the game because it wasn’t what they had envisioned for the story. But when you think about it, some of these dialogues were translated and recorded so it’s clear that they weren’t just concepts they didn’t like, but rather things that they removed very late in the development of the game. I wouldn’t say it has changed our vision of the game completely, but it has given us a much better look into some of the peculiar concepts."
Given the length of time it’s taken for this content to appear, it's easy to speculate that more hidden treasures await. However, our pair of industrious hackers aren't hopeful. "The datamining has gone pretty deep at this point," says ZullieTheWitch.
Sanadsk agrees: "I've covered let’s say, 90 percent of the unused content of Bloodborne on my channel, but there are still a couple of unused mechanics, animations and items that I will be showing soon. But generally, the most notable and biggest unused content in Bloodborne has already been covered, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t stuff in the files that we still didn’t find, because there are some small things in Demon’s Souls that people still don’t know about."
It won’t, however, be from lack of trying. ZullieTheWitch concludes, "I don't expect any more major finds, but with a fanbase like this, even minor finds have their appeal, so people are going to leave no stone unturned."
