When I first succumbed to the hype and decided to give Elden Ring a try, having never played a Souls game before, I bounced off the game pretty hard. There were just lots of things I didn’t like about the experience: the weird, annoying messages from other players; the general air of inscrutability, including the lack of clarity as to what I was supposed to be doing, let alone why; the sense that it was clearly a console game ported to PC; and the fact that the big dude on the horse kept handing me my arse on a platter polished gold to match his armor. But a few months later, while my wife was away for a couple of weeks, I decided on a whim to try again—and by the time she got back, I’d logged something like 200 hours in the game, died innumerable times, and managed to grind all the way to the final battle. I was hooked.
Since then, I’ve played pretty much all of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games: Dark Souls I–III, Sekiro, and Nightreign. I haven’t finished any of them, to be clear. I’m still bad at them. But for some strange, possibly masochistic reason, I keep coming back to them. All of them but one: Bloodborne.
Why? Well, I’ve never been a console person, and Miyazaki’s Gothic masterpiece remains, famously, a PlayStation exclusive. For over a decade, PC players have been hoping against hope that the game might one day come to Steam, but there’s no sign that this will ever happen—and if anything, the fact that Sony appears to be moving away from PC releases in general seems to have put the final nail in the game’s splintering wooden coffin.
With all that said, you can play Bloodborne on PC—and the good news is that while doing so is nowhere near as seamless as “buy game on Steam, wait for it to download, play,” it’s a lot easier today than it was this time last year, when I first tried to get it up and running on my gaming computer, and the experience is honestly pretty decent.
So where do we begin? Well, Carl Sagan once observed, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Similarly, if you want to run Bloodborne on a PC, you must first invent the PlayStation 4.
More specifically, you must first emulate the PlayStation. If you’ve not dealt with emulation before, it basically involves setting up a virtual PlayStation environment on your PC, and then using that to run the game. This is necessary because a game written specifically for the PlayStation is compiled to run on that hardware alone. Trying to run a PS4 binary on a Windows computer would be like getting into a taxi in NYC and providing the driver with written instructions in Japanese to go to an address in Tokyo. Even if he could understand both the language and the way in which it was expressed, you’d be asking him to do something impossible.
In theory, Bloodborne could be ported to Windows in the same way as the Souls games have been, but doing so would involve having the game’s engine code, rewriting the parts of it that were designed in a way that optimized them for the PlayStation environment, and then compiling the result into an executable that’d run under Windows. Even if the code was available, this would be a significant undertaking—and the code is very much not available.
So, OK, what we need is an emulator. Again, the actual PlayStation software is closed source and under copyright, so the biggest part of the job of getting this job done is finding someone with the knowledge, time, and motivation to start from scratch and write a program that can translate the instructions provided by a PS4 binary into something that a Windows PC can both understand and execute. Happily, such people exist, and so does a working PlayStation emulator: shadPS4.
As well as the emulator, you’ll obviously also need a copy of the game. If you have a friend with a PlayStation, you can buy a DVD copy and then dump the files to a USB stick or portable hard drive. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into the details of how to do this here, but there are plenty of guides online. I also won’t speculate on whether there are other methods of obtaining the game files.
Once you have the game files and shadPS4, you need to install the former on the latter. Again, this process is less convoluted than it used to be:
And then you’re ready to go, right? Well, not quite. While the Bloodborne emulation is a lot less buggy than it was a year ago, it’s not flawless. As it stands at the moment, the biggest problem you’ll encounter is that the game is prone to “vertex explosions.”
If you’ve ever messed around with 3D software, you might have an inkling what this means. Basically, a 3D model is defined by its vertices—points in 3D space whose positions are fixed by their x, y, and z coordinates. Connect two vertices, and you have a two-dimensional edge; connect three, and you have a two-dimensional triangular face. Connect multiple triangular faces along their shared edges, and you have the beginnings of a mesh, a three-dimensional manifold that encloses a region in 3D space.
Once you have a mesh, you can apply colors or textures to its faces. At the simplest level, this involves telling the GPU, “Hey, find the triangle defined by vertices A, B, and C, and turn its pixels red.” This all means that a 3D game’s ability to successfully render graphics on your screen is contingent on it having an accurate and reliable record of the position of every vertex in every frame. If something goes wrong with this—if the vertex positions sent to your GPU are wrong, or if the information is corrupted somehow—the textures and colors explode out of the faces they’re supposed to occupy, and you end up with this:
This problem has plagued shadPS4’s implementation of Bloodborne, so much so that if you Google “vertex explosion,” the top results are basically all related to PC emulation of the game. The problem appears to originate in a system called FaceGen, which allows for customization of your character’s face, along with providing variation in NPC faces. There’s a pretty detailed examination of the issue here—it seems to have something to do with the way a PC distinguishes between system RAM and VRAM, whereas the PlayStation doesn’t, but the linked blog post provides a far more nuanced explanation than I feel qualified to attempt.
This was one of the two problems I encountered last time, and the good news is that today there are two ways to fix it. There’s now a feature in shadPS4 itself that aims to mitigate the issue, although it comes with a significant performance hit. The alternative approach is to simply disable Facegen. This is implemented by a mod called “Vertex Explosion Fix”, and it’s the solution on which I settled. If it’s a choice between better performance and a bit of superficial variation in the faces of the weird Village of the Damned-looking dudes I’m carving up with an axe, I’ll choose the former.
The other problem with the version of the game that’s been sitting on my PC for a year is that, for whatever reason, the game’s particle effects didn’t work. Some of these are essentially eye candy, like the cascading motes that float slowly down from the sky above Yharnam. Others are annoying to be without, but ultimately not the end of the world, like the explosion and spreading flames when you lob a Molotov cocktail at a mob of surly farmers.
But two of them are important, and their absence made the game unnecessarily difficult: the glowing orbs that provide the location of items and the red bloodstain on the ground that marks the spot where you died, allowing you to retrieve the runes souls blood echoes left behind when your character respawned.
I figured that if I was actually going to write about this, I’d better have the game as functional as possible. This meant re-exporting the game files, double-checking that the patch had been applied properly, and then setting up a fresh installation of the newest versions of both the launcher and shadPS4.
I’m not entirely sure which of these variables—the launcher, the mod, the freshly exported game files, or the updated shadPS4 version—made the difference, although I suspect it was one of the last two. But whatever the case, after a quick bit of messing about to get everything working again, I fired up the launcher, started up the game, and… particle effects! And no vertex explosions!
And so! Drum roll! After all that, behold the spectacle of me getting kerb-stomped by something called a [checks notes] Beast Cleric.
This footage comes from my second attempt; the first time, I pulled off a miraculous “visceral attack,” which involves firing your pistol at the exact moment an enemy is attacking, stunning them and allowing you to swat them safely with multiple heavy attacks. This is why you see me trying desperately and unsuccessfully to shoot this fucker in the mouth again.
Anyway, go on, laugh it up, you lot—this is a whole new world of bosses to make me feel stupid, and frankly, I couldn’t be happier.
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