A decade ago, if you were to say that a single title would drive the progress of PS4 emulation, most would likely call you madder than the beasts of Yharnam, but here we are, with Bloodborne on the PC almost within our grasp.
New videos released over the past week have showcased how capable the ShadPS4 emulator has become in bringing one of the most sought-after games to the PC platform. Just a month ago, Bloodborne barely ran without sound and with broken lighting and textures, but now it can smoothly sail across most of the game’s areas, with some bosses also fully functional. From what we can gather, it appears that only the lighting still poses a real issue, alongside general stability stuff that is likely to impact the game well after it’s available for everyone to enjoy through emulation.
Not only does the game run now, but there are already a dozen different patches for the title that improve performance, upscale the textures, unlock the FPS cap (Souls games are known for their 30- and 60-FPS barrier), and improve the graphics through dynamic fog, lighting, and a whole lot more. While all of that can and will prove tasking on most machines, we’ve seen the title run at as high as 60 FPS on GPUs such as the RTX 4070, meaning that you don’t need a state-of-the-art PC to emulate Bloodborne at the moment, though for optimal performance a beast of a machine is recommended.
Seeing as we’ve come this far with Bloodborne emulation in a mere few months, it’s becoming more than likely that we’ll see the game fully available through the ShadPS4 emulator either by the end of this year or somewhere early in the next. Sony has been actively ignoring the title, opting to work on mind-boggling remasters of recent titles such as The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon: Zero Dawn instead of porting and updating the one title that keeps its PS Plus streaming service afloat.
