At this point, “Bloodborne 60fps” sounds exactly like “cheap rent” or “werewolf-human relations” to me – it doesn’t exist, as much as I wish it did. Knowing this, battle-weary Bloodborne fans and modders have banded together to deliver a highly competent PC emulator that may not be the real thing, but at least looks like it.
As demonstrated by Digital Foundry in a new YouTube video, the latest shadPS4 emulator build successfully boosts the entirety of the 10-year-old Bloodborne to 60fps – except for in places like grubby Central Yharnam, where shadPS4 struggles to keep up with all the densely packed, bearded beasts and instead briefly drops to closer to 40fps.
Even so, shadPS4’s current state resists crashes at its native 1080p, or at 1152p, if your PC can handle it. And adding any number of ridiculously impressive mods help make it feel like a genuine remaster.
Fromsoftserve’s Bloodborne Remaster Project, for example, offers moody improvements to the richness of Bloodborne’s many shadows, soft and more realistic lighting, and it reduces the action RPG’s aliasing. In a new video, creator fromsoftserve shows off small, additional changes that also make a big visual difference; fog is more diffuse than in the original, and fromsoftserve’s upgraded some textures through an ongoing attempt to add parallax occlusion mapping.
“I just finished my first full playthrough on the emulator,” one commenter writes about shadPS4 on Digital Foundry’s video. “Since I fell in love with Bloodborne almost 10 years ago, I wanted this game on PC, and especially at 60fps. Even though the developers probably wont read this, I really just want to say: thank you for making my dream come true.”
Sony isn’t ready to wheel out 60fps Bloodborne just yet, but it is prepared to help Dark Souls and Elden Ring dev’s parent company pump out 9,000 original IPs by 2027.
