Chapter 80 - #80: Silver’s Bloodborne Gameplay

Chapter 80: Chapter #80: Silver’s Bloodborne Gameplay

Exactly seven days later, the final hours of the countdown bled away.

Since eight o’clock that evening, millions of players had been guarding their monitors. Silver sat in his streaming chair, his expression unusually solemn.

This was Sprout Studio’s very first massive, AAA-scale title. It carried a profound, heavy significance for the entire gaming industry.

A designer like Nova treated his craft with a terrifying level of reverence. He was a man who never disappointed, ensuring that every single aspect of his games—the modeling, the orchestral scores, the UI design, the tactile feedback of the combat—was polished to absolute perfection.

At first glance, a Nova game was always breathtaking. But the deeper you dove into the mechanics, the more you realized just how brilliant the underlying architecture truly was.

When the countdown clock finally ticked down to zero, Bloodborne officially unlocked globally.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but the real-world weather outside Silver’s window perfectly matched the game’s aesthetic. A pale, haunting moonlight pierced through the thick, overcast clouds, casting a silver glow over the city.

Because Ethan had initiated a global pre-download campaign, players didn’t have to wait for massive files to install. The absolute second the game went live, they were in.

"Alright chat, the wait is finally over!" Silver rubbed his hands together excitedly.

Across every major streaming platform, the directories looked virtually identical. Almost every single top-tier creator had the dark, gothic cover art of Bloodborne dominating their broadcast.

Clicking into any streamer’s channel revealed hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers.

Even though the sadist’s games were widely considered ’must-buys’, not everyone had the free time or the disposable income to play on launch night. The real world was full of adult responsibilities, so millions tuned in to live vicariously through their favorite creators.

Right now, the title Bloodborne was an absolute traffic magnet.

And this year, the viewing habits of the audience had shifted drastically. Instead of flocking exclusively to the elite, mechanical gods to watch speedruns, massive crowds were deliberately hanging out in the streams of average or heavily-panicking players.

There was a profound, addictive joy in watching an arrogant streamer get absolutely demolished by the sadist’s level design.

The lore established that the virtual world was centered around a remote, ancient mountain capital called Yharnam, a city world-renowned for its miraculous medical healing techniques.

But the ancient capital was isolated, xenophobic, and deeply cursed.

Over the years, countless desperate, diseased, and tortured souls had traveled to Yharnam seeking salvation. The player’s protagonist had arrived in the city for the exact same reason.

Silver didn’t hesitate.

He immediately clicked [New Game].

The absolute second the screen faded in, a haunting orchestral arrangement swelled through his headset. Paired with the eerie, gothic architecture of the moonlit city, the atmosphere felt incredibly sinister, oppressive, and fundamentally dangerous.

What shocked Silver the most was that the opening in-game cinematic looked exactly like the E3 promotional trailer.

That meant Ethan hadn’t used pre-rendered, outsourced CGI to trick the audience. The unbelievable graphical fidelity shown on the main stage had been real-time, in-engine footage running natively on their hardware.

Terra’s baseline software engines and graphics hardware were decades ahead of Ethan’s original Earth, possessing the raw computational horsepower to generate true, 1:1 photorealism.

But until now, Terra’s developers had only ever used that power to create sterile, soulless tech demos.

Ethan had taken that bleeding-edge technology and weaponized it.

The visual caliber on display eclipsed anything the industry had ever seen.

It possessed the breathtaking, meticulous environmental simulation of a masterpiece like Red Dead Redemption 2, combined with the suffocating, photorealistic lighting and visceral gore of the Resident Evil engine, dialed up to an absolute maximum.

Silver held his breath, his adrenaline steadily rising under the weight of the gothic choir.

In the dimly lit room, his pupils dilated.

Unlike the audience watching the compressed broadcast, Silver was directly interfacing with the game on a high-end monitor, his headphones isolating him completely.

The sheer atmospheric immersion was suffocating.

Even though he had watched the E3 trailer a dozen times, the actual art direction running in real-time managed to leave him speechless.

The city beneath the hazy moonlight slowly came into focus. In the suffocating darkness, the flickering orange glow of distant torches cast long, mathematically perfect ray-traced shadows against the cobblestones.

Dense, volumetric fog rolled naturally through the Victorian streets, reacting dynamically to the light sources.

The oldest and strongest human emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

The camera’s perspective was slightly blurred, utilizing a flawless depth-of-field effect to simulate the protagonist slowly waking up from a deep, anesthetic sleep.

In the center of the dark, grimy room, a figure sat in a wooden wheelchair.

He spread his hands out in a welcoming gesture, staring directly into the camera.

[Ah, yes... Paleblood...]

[Well, you’ve come to the right place. Yharnam is the home of blood ministration.]

[You need only unravel its mystery.]

[But, where’s an outsider like yourself to begin?]

The blurry perspective gradually cleared, as if the protagonist was finally blinking the haze out of their eyes and seeing the world sharply.

The vague figure in the wheelchair was wearing a tattered black top hat.

The old man, his face obscured by bandages and a scruffy white beard, slowly rolled his wheelchair closer.

The micro-geometry on the character model was absolutely staggering.

Silver could literally see the individual frayed threads on the old man’s coat reacting to the subtle drafts in the room, and the subsurface scattering applied to his exposed skin made him look terrifyingly, uncomfortably alive.

His raspy voice echoed with a strange, unsettling warmth, enhanced by an advanced spatial audio engine that made it sound like he was whispering directly into Silver’s physical room.

"Where do we start?" Silver whispered, repeating the NPC’s words.

His mind was still trying to process the lore when the old man provided the answer.

[Easy, with a bit of Yharnam blood of your own...]

Reflecting the faint, flickering light of the fireplace, the old man leaned in close.

The camera pushed in until the man’s bandaged face and blindfolded eyes filled the screen.

Every pore, every speck of dust dancing in the firelight, was rendered with psychotic attention to detail.

[But first, you’ll need a contract.]

"Holy fuck, the sadist’s transitions are unbelievable!" Silver gasped, his eyes wide. "I was literally just sitting here wondering what the contract was going to be. I didn’t expect it to be the character creation screen!"

He had been completely sucked into the environmental storytelling, genuinely feeling like a helpless patient on a surgical table.

Unlike traditional RPGs where the player is abruptly dumped into a sterile menu screen the moment they hit ’New Game’, Nova had woven the UI directly into the narrative.

Just as the old Blood Minister had said, the player was an outsider seeking a medical procedure.

Filling out the "contract" to dictate your physical appearance and background provided an unparalleled sense of immersion.

Silver scanned the ’Origin’ options, which dictated the character’s starting stats and background lore.

There were nine distinct choices:

Milquetoast, Lone Survivor, Troubled Childhood, Violent Past, Professional, Military Veteran, Noble Scion, Cruel Fate, and Waste of Skin.

"Just taking a quick look here... it seems the base attributes are roughly similar, with each origin offering slight stat distributions tailored to different playstyles," Silver muttered, analyzing the build options.

Even though this was his very first blind playthrough, as a gaming veteran, he took his character creation incredibly seriously.

He quickly did the mental math.

The standard origins all started at Level 10, with a total base stat pool of 60. However, the final option, Waste of Skin, started at Level 4 with a flat stat pool of 54.

Gender, age, and facial structure were fully customizable, but strictly cosmetic; they had no impact on the actual gameplay math.

"Don’t even worry about it, chat. A pro gamer like me obviously has to pick the absolute hardest origin. We’re going with Waste of Skin," Silver boasted loudly.

His mouse hand moved in a blur, snapping to an option and rapidly clicking the confirmation button to load into the game.

Watching his rapid-fire cursor movement, the stream chat collectively paused for a second before completely exploding.

[

NicoGab: ??? Bro, don’t think I didn’t see you literally click ’Military Veteran’!

JordanK: Did you really just call the Military Veteran a Waste of Skin?

crazyGamma: Tell me a joke: SilverShot playing the hardest difficulty.

goonerpromax: You talked all that trash and still panic-clicked the highest vitality class LMAO

GamerDad88: CAUGHT IN 4K. Absolute coward behavior.

]

Silver completely ignored the barrage of mockery.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

The sadist’s reputation for punishing difficulty was known worldwide, and the Waste of Skin class was practically a massive, glowing neon sign warning players of early-game suffering.

Of course, Waste of Skin had its long-term benefits.

Because it started at a lower level with flat stats, it offered the most freedom for min-maxing a highly specialized build later in the game.

But in a Nova game, those kinds of hyper-optimized challenge runs were strictly reserved for the second playthrough, or for absolute masochists.

[Good. All signed and sealed.]

The old man nodded, the cinematic seamlessly picking back up.

His blindfolded eyes seemed to stare right through the camera.

Following the natural downward pan, the player could finally see their own body lying flat on a grimy medical gurney.

From this first-person angle, the player could only see their heavy leather boots strapped to the bed, the worn, scuffed texture of the leather gleaming faintly under the sterile medical lighting.

[Now, let’s begin the transfusion.]

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