Now here is something really cool. Lance McDonald has spotted evidence of a PC version of Bloodborne: The Old Hunters Edition. According to McDonald, this PC version was used internally for internal/debug purposes and was never meant for a public release.
Do note that we’re talking about a fully playable PC version of Bloodborne. Yes, some may say that games are coded on PC but this doesn’t mean that every console game has a native PC version. That’s not how things work. And if that was the case, studios wouldn’t be having so much trouble porting their console games to the PC.
Bloodborne: The Old Hunters Edition running on PC spotted. pic.twitter.com/dbtdkVvUVg
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) May 21, 2023
As McDonald noted, the Fandom page of Bloodborne features screenshots from the PC build. Marco Domenech, FromSoftware’s artist who submitted the screenshots, was apparently using the internal PC version of Bloodborne.
We should also note that this PC version is not related in any way to the recent remaster/remake rumors. And no, this doesn’t mean that FromSoftware will eventually release Bloodborne on PC. That ship has already sailed.
In short, you should temper your expectations. All this proves is that FromSoftware had an up-and-running PC version of Bloodborne. However, due to a Sony/PS4 deal, that PC version never saw the light of day.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Oh come on now! You’ll get to see it in the upcoming PS showcase. Have patience. Jeez.
All “exclusive” games has a PC version. “Porting” a game is not hard, the hard part is computers have an infinite amount of different configurations of hardware and software, contrary to consoles.
You clearly don’t know anything at all about game coding.
XD
Good.
That’s why we have API’s removing access to the metal on PC. It’s BS to site the huge number of configerations of PC as being an issue, especially now that software houses, more and more, are using off the shelf engines to which they add little more than scripts.
exactly nvidia and intel have a near monopoly, most AAA games require dx12, its idiotic to blame different configurations at this point.
You don’t have any idea about game packaging, do you?
Porting a game to run on PC is more than simply repackaging it.
Games are developed on PC, but consoles have not only API differences, but also unique hardware features.
Yes, even today. Consoles have unified memory, that alone enables something that is not possible on PC, the equivalent on a PC would be to have a mirror of everything game related that is in the ram memory also on the GPU memory.
That alone is absurd.
On top of that, consoles have something called “free data reinterpretation”.
This enables you to perform CPU tasks on data and then, on the same data, perform GPU tasks too, and reading the manipulated bits as the datatype you see fit for the situation.
Yes, UE5 do this on consoles, but it does not do it on PC.
And thats because we dont have unified memory, we can’t perform CPU operatios on the VRAM.
Not without murdering the GPU’s memory buss performance.
Is not as simple as clicking “package -> windows” on the engine’s editor.
And that is not taking into consideration games that do heavy usage of vendor’s specific API functionality, like Sony’s implementation of framerate limiter or memory traversal with re-sorting.
The more a game takes advantage of a console’s API and architecture, the harder it is to port to PC, specially if the game is designed around that platform advantages (like PS5 absurd SSD read speed and its ability to feed data directly to the memory without CPU preprocesing).
And I say this as a game developer.
I hate exclusives and bad ports. But there is a lot of work in making exclusives work on PC and not be TLOU.
I only read “You don’t have any idea…” of your post. Is not recommended to start with something “offensive”, just an advise.
there’s a thing called a GAME ENGINE, that does all this stuff and
the game engines have different underlying API paths depending on the target hardware, in the example you made, in UE5 & UE4, all it takes to port a PS5 game to PC is a 15 min tweak and building the game, yes that’s all it takes, but you’ll need a Controller, and there’s no UI in the menu to PC settings, but you get the point
Some games already have that settings in some debug menu already
modern engines were developed to ease cross development, not make it harder
Yes and no.
I work as a game dev, is not that simple. Especially when a game has been heavily optimized for a particular console. PS5 is a prime example, while the engine do have it’s own API to do some tasks, you can also go deeper and perform source engine modifications to improve performance on specific platforms or do game specific logic.
And those are the scenarios where the porting stops being simple.
If porting a game was as easier as right click, package, you wouldn’t need specialized tools to read uasset files for some games, they should load as binary files on a blank project without any issue aside of missing references, instead of plain crashing the engine.
I really want to invite you to build an open world game, for example, that looks as good as it can on PS5 (using the native PS5 API) on UE5.2, using the PS5 exclusive high speed low latency prefetching.
Then port that game, with the exact same settings to PC, and try to make it run as fast as it does on PS5 without needing 16GB of VRAM.
You are going to have a nightmare. A terrible one.
On PS5 we prefetch 4 seconds of assets. On PC we prefetch 15. That alone accounts for 2.9GB of assets on PS5 vs around 11 on PC. Unless you want to rely A LOT on asset streaming on PC, making the game incredibly memory bandwidth intensive. And guess what? You also need that memory bandwidth to move RT calls to the CPU too 😀
No. It does not take 15 minutes of tweaking. It takes way more than that. We are just seeing the very first “last gen only” games. From here and onwards, this will be more and more visible.
this false statement keep being repeated, even by publisher like EA apologizing for Jedi Survivor
The pc does have infinite configuration, but that doesn’t matter
having 6 or 8 12 …etc CPU cores doesn’t require special tweaking, a CPU is just a CPU, modern game engines spread load across many threads
PC have only 2 GPU manufacturer & hundreds of GPU models, but that also doesn’t matter, because they all are accessed using DX12/11 or Vulkan making the hardware difference almost irrelevant
So PC devs should have an easier time developing for PC than for consoles, yea you heard that right, and the point about scalability across different GPU performance, engines for over decade now have graphics Scalability built into them by default
this PC devs will blame anything to non tech savvy gamers except blame valid reasons like their own bugs, their draconian Denuvo DRM,
All sony has to do is tell From Software to collaborate with a capable PC porting studio like Nixxes (which sony also owns), give them a reasonable time frame and budget, and that’s it. Extra profits just like that. It’ll easily be one of their best selling ps4 ports on PC, if not the best.
FS is not an internal studio, Sony has nothing to tell them, if they want a port FS has to be implied to collaborate with the porting studio and Sony’s gonna pay for their services.
The other solution is to remake the game from scratch using internal studios since they have the rights just like what they did for Demon’s Souls.
He said cabable which FS isn’t ?
He said capable talking about the porting studio, while FS are not that good in that particular task, they’re miles ahead 95% of AAA studio when it comes to making games, and i’ll take a sh*t port of a good game over a good port of a sh*t game anyday
I would give it to Iron Galaxy, those lads and lassies proved their worth over and over again.
the pc version has existed for years but sony wanted to re-release demon souls and that took a while, so at that point might as well update or remake the original game, clearly at some point it will be released on pc after the ps5 version.
Waiting for that build leak!
We must make a combined effort to hack Fromsoftware and get the PC version. Hack them and beat the f*k out of them.
Doubtful they ever finished playable build just to scrape it tbh.
That’s actually the difference now. Lance always knew there was some part of a playable PC build, but this actually points to a completed build.
Even Sony aren’t that stupid to just shelve it. It’s either somewhere or this is another BB myth. To be honest my experience point to the latter option. I know we all want to unlock that garbage framerate, but I think this is not cooked just yet.
Who the hell is Lance McDonald?
Console makers and their BS exclusives are a cancer on gaming. Its like if Nvidia or AMD made games that could only run on their graphic cards. Total BS.
Every game made on pc first. Tested by developer first before they made final version. Internal purposes = testing by developer