In early 2025, when Bluepoint again pitched the idea of Bloodborne remake, the studio was told that the numbers made sense but FromSoftware didn’t want it to happen, according to people familiar with the process.
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida shared a theory last year that this might be the case, saying in an interview with Kinda Funny Games that he thought FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki was interested in remaking the classic game but too busy to do it himself and “doesn’t want anyone else to touch it.” He added that he thought PlayStation would respect Miyazaki’s wishes despite owning the franchise.
Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.
To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn’t let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it’s locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.
They weren’t an outside studio though they were owned by Sony. I don’t think there was really any fear of then doing a bad job considering how good the Demon’s Souls remake was.
They did strong changes to music and visual design - a lot more than preservation, mucj closer to “Who shot first?” in Star Ward.
It really doesn’t need a remake, it just needs a port to modern systems, upscaled textures, and bumped up to 60fps. It doesn’t need anything else, and it’s weird that Fromsoft hasn’t bothered to do any of that.
It makes sense that they wouldn’t want Bluepoint to do a full remake too because they took a lot of weird liberties in Demon’s Souls IMO. They’re 10/10 technically but they changed things that didn’t need to be changed and refused to touch things that everybody wanted changed (why is the gargoyle’s AI still broken…)
Have you seen what you can do with ShadPS4 on the PC? Upscaled resolution, Ultrawide dimensions, 60FPS and other tweaks, the textures are good enough it feels like playing Elden Ring, it’s a fantastic experience.
I’m totally keeping my eye on the emulator, but from what I heard it still needs more time. I’ve heard of occasional crashes, vertex explosions, random graphical issues happening. Also, it needs a really good computer to run at 60fps.
I’m excited for when it does work flawlessly, but I do wish they’d just port a native version to PC.
Check it out and see what you think, I’m having no problems running through and I just defeated Vicar Amelia. There is a bit of slowdown sometimes but it’s not ruining the game for me.
I’m guessing the code is a broken mess and it would be not much more work to just remake it then fix said mess.
Every time this comes up I say the same damn thing.
“FromSoft doesn’t own Bloodborne, this is a decision that rests entirely on Sony”
It does, but it’s about respecting the wishes of original creator. They want to keep working with him so don’t want to mess up their long term relation with a short term benefit.
It could quite simply be that Sony already knew Bluepoint was on the chopping block when they made the request.
So they just brushed them off with a deflecting “nah, FromSoft doesn’t want to do that” response.
There could be some fineprint in the contract that gives FromSoft a right to veto or something in that regard. Or it could just be respecting wishes, as others said. We can’t know and it doesn’t really matter either.
I guess now we know what landmine they stepped on.
