Known Bloodborne detective and Playstation modder Lance McDonald dug up data that has led many to believe there could be a fully operational but unreleased PC version of the title.
Bloodborne fans have spent years requesting some love for their favorite title. Any time a smidge of news related to the title drops, the game is almost immediately trending on social media with fans excited about a possible re-release or remaster.
Lance McDonald is one of many fans who has spent a great deal of time investigating Bloodborne’s game files and has discovered a great many things about the title. He even discovered that players can get Bloodborne running at 60FPS by simply changing a single line of code.
Now, McDonald has shared a discovery that one of the game’s artists, Marcos Domenech, contributed screenshots to the Bloodborne wiki that Lance believes are from a fully playable version of the game on PC with the DLC included.
Bloodborne expert discovers dormant PC version of the game
It’s important to note that, when it comes to game development, pretty much any game will start off on the PC. Consoles are what these games eventually get optimized for, but there’s a “PC version” of pretty much any game at one point.
However, there are a few crucial details in how Lance discovered this that illuminate why many believe this is from a completed build rather than just an early development version of the title.
Bloodborne: The Old Hunters Edition running on PC spotted. pic.twitter.com/dbtdkVvUVg
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) May 21, 2023
Lance explained that the file type’s name gives away that it’s from Bloodborne’s debug menu — one that allows users to detach the camera from the player model. This isn’t possible to do on the console version without modifying the game in some way, meaning that the screenshot must have been taken from the PC version.
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Additionally, the shot is taken from an area in the DLC for the title, DLC that came out around 8 months after Bloodborne’s initial release. That means that the build being used was much further along than early beta builds for the game that would have never seen the light of day.
That, and the loading emblem used for early builds of the game isn’t present in the screenshot. Instead, it’s the one that was used for the title’s full version. With it being a screenshot taken from the debug menu on a version of Bloodborne close to the final game, this was a dead giveaway for Lance.
Lance claimed in the past that the FromSoftware team had the game running on PC and that that version had just never been released. This could be due to Sony having exclusivity rights for the title. Though, with the company releasing some of their biggest exclusives on PC, it’s hard to say when or if they’ll decide to port Bloodborne to PC.
Even Lance wasn’t convinced they’d ever do it, regardless of if there’s a fully-functioning PC version lying dormant at FromSoftware or not.
This is from years ago I only just noticed it today. I think a lot of people thought I was lying when I said Bloodborne already runs on PC and the dev team were using it regularly. But if you wanted actual proof, there you go.
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) May 21, 2023
For now, it seems Bloodborne fans will have to wait for the title to be brought into the modern day. It’s been almost a decade since its original release in 2015, but fans are still grabbing at any straw they can in hopes that FromSoftware or Sony will give an update on a possible follow-up or remaster in the near future.