I can’t believe how far Bloodborne emulation has come in just the last 2 months
I want to be very clear from the jump here: You cannot currently play Bloodborne on your PC without a lot of pain-in-the-ass setup. Even if you do spend hours just to get the game to run like I have, it’ll become clear very quickly that PS4 emulation still has a very long way to go, as evidenced by frequent crashing, lighting glitches, slowdown, and largely absent sound effects. But it’s absolutely wild that it works at all, because it’s been just two months since the developers behind open source PS4 emulator ShadPS4 started publicly showing off its progress.
If you judge by YouTube video titles and clips you see on social media, you might get the impression that in the last few weeks Bloodborne has now been emulated so effectively you can have a good time playing it on PC. There are plenty of videos out there that aren’t intentionally misleading, but there are also ones with descriptions like this:
“This is totally not for algorithm: we’re now running bloodborne in 60 fps PC pc bloodborne shadps4 emulator ps4 emulator bloodborne in 60 fps high fps no crashing crash fix shadps4 rom hack”
Something tells me that description very much is for algorithm. Anyway, my point is, unless you enjoy tinkering with games more than playing them, you shouldn’t try to emulate Bloodborne just yet, because this process currently involves more hoops than a hula convention:
- Jailbreaking a PS4
- Ripping a copy of Bloodborne
- Dumping PS4 firmware files
- Updating Bloodborne to 1.09
- Patching the updated Bloodborne executable with Lance McDonald’s 60 fps patch
- (Probably installing Microsoft Visual Studio to have the C++ development files necessary to install the above patch)
- Downloading cheats and patches via the emulator and configuring them to deal with the current busted and quirky elements of emulated Bloodborne
- Watching it crash over and over and wondering if you need a different build, a different computer, or a different hobby
YouTuber Modded Warfare has a nice, easy-to-follow walkthrough of this process, but you’re probably still going to have to do some Googling and troubleshooting along the way to even attempt to get Bloodborne running. I did it after a good two hours of fiddling—but the game crashes on me incessantly. This is about as much Bloodborne as I’ve played so far:
Aaaaaand crash. I’m going to need more time to work out whatever arcane ritual folks on YouTube have performed to hack their way around these crashes. And the busted lighting.
It’s absolutely wild that this is possible at all, though. I spoke with the lead developer of ShadPS4 in July, when Bloodborne could boot but didn’t even get past the character creation screen. “We really didn’t want for users to have great expectations on that yet since it is really still very WIP,” developer George Moralis said at the time. Unfortunately, with each new YouTube video those expectations are becoming harder to rein in, because the progress has been remarkable.
I mean, just look at this:
Watch On
Meanwhile, here’s a video from Moralis himself showing off progress from a recent build of ShadPS4:
Watch On
I think we’re still likely many months away from this kind of experience being anywhere close to effortless. For now, it’s only achievable with a lot of patience and the right cocktail of patches and modifications. But I can’t help being excited by the progress, which is so much more impressive than I expected to see since July. Based on its current trajectory, at least somewhat-playable Bloodborne emulation is shaping up to be a hell of a Christmas present.
