The only real criticism I have is that it can really be a massive early game issue for new players. The frustration of dying over and over again to a boss like Father Gascoigne can easily be compounded upon when having to take breaks to farm considerably harder enemies than the beginning of most souls games. Conversely, if you're really enjoying leaning a new boss, stopping to farm vials can just feel like a chore and a bore in the middle of what's supposed to be one of the most engaging aspects of the game.

Otherwise, I really enjoy them as a set piece as you mentioned. It's a game mechanic carefully woven into the narrative which I can definitely appreciate. Not a perfect healing system, but an essential part to the world building and game design philosophy.

Blood vials are a divisive aspect of the game. For experienced players yes the game seems generous, but for most new players they quickly run out and find themselves needing to farm to have enough to play with. They shape the lore around the gameplay so they could just as easily invent some contrivance to explain blood vials regenerating at lanterns like they did for estus regenerating at bonfires; the lore isn't the reason why they don't regenerate, it's because they were trying something new with the rally system. It's definitely an annoying thing early game and while I agree some people blow it out of proportion it's not at all an unreasonable criticism.

I'm tired of people using thematics to justify pointlessly tedious gameplay mechanics. Sorry.

Lore must not be above gameplay. You are playing the game, not watching it.

I didn’t have any trouble with blood vials. A friend of mine ran out of them before he even reached Gascoigne. Skill levels vary, and a “limited” supply of blood vials does not account for that.

I use the cum dungeon exclusively for staying topped up on vials and bullets.

I fully concur!

It's a valid complaint. When you are kinda noob to the game. You eventually left out of vials... When you know what you are doing, that's not a problem anymore...

for me, gameplay>lore

but thats valid

Possible that the Blood is just blood infested with the special parasites, so its perfectly viable that its fairly plentiful.

My first playthrough, sure I’d run out if I hit a wall in the game & would have to farm some echoes to buy more. Never really bother me though. If anything the farming made me better at the game. After that first playthrough though I pretty much never ran out.

You say that experience differ based on skill level which is true, and that's why it's even more agonizing for noobs to run out of the blood vials. They struggle with progressing-the-game/beating-bosses and then they are reminded how shit they are by having to go through tedious farming.

People just have to realize that no game is perfect. Every single one is going to have something that someone doesn't like. It may even be something that a bunch of people agree that they don't like, and that's okay.

Farming for vials isn't my favorite thing and I went out of my way to mitigate it (buying vials when leveling, using high echo dungeon), but when I sit down and think about it, I like a lot of weird little mechanic intricacies way more than I dislike running out of vials and having to get more.

Nothing about blood vials or bullets bothers me. What pisses me off is having to go to your stash to replenish consumables like fire paper, sedatives, etc. IMHO, that should be done automatically upon death or return to the hunter’s dream.

It can't be laying around just everywhere, except on random citizens or troll dudes of Yharnam that happen to carry two or three vials of the stuff just... on their person. Pretty rare indeed for the everyman to have just oodles of the stuff.

In any case, regardless of lore, it does a lot of damage to the actual fun factor of the game and punishes mistakes in a very time consuming, non skill testing way. At no point while farming blood vials did I feel more "in tune" with the world around me, killing the same enemies over and over.

It absolutely is a valid point of criticism if the experience is different depending on how good a player is. I put in 350 hours into one Elden Ring playthrough + DLC before I touched BB and BB totally clicked for me, I found it incredibly easy compared to ER. I steamrolled through the entire game. I didn't even realize the finite blood vials could be a problem especially with cummmpfk.

Then a friend of mine started playing Bloodborne, his first Soulsborne game, and had a very miserable time. Constantly out of blood vials, getting his ass kicked while farming sometimes and struggling on Father Guacamole.

That IS a very jarring and dumb gameplay decision. If healing is a core aspect of your gameplay loop and you make it require farming.. thats a bad move. Like I said it didn't even come to my mind that this might be an issue but for a new player this is awful and immediately puts a bad taste in your mouth about the genre.

I have no issues with it mechanically. The game clicked for me, so the only times I needed to farm echoes to buy vials was when I stuck on a boss or in an area, both of which happened only in the DLC. Otherwise I had no issues going through areas and clearing bosses with the vials on me or in storage. If you play aggressively enough, like the game expects, then farming to buy vials shouldn't happen too often.

I never once had to farm for them and I was dying PLENTY! I would just spend whatever I had left after leveling up on vials or bullets and I always had a stock pile

It's an aspect of the game that pushes you to play the correct way and forces you to actually have to "learn" the game. (be patient and vigilant, get aggressive when needed to gain back the health you just lost, draw out individual enemies, etc). Once it clicks, you might say "hey wow, I've had 18 vials for quite a while" but the inexperienced player is scraping by on 3 vials. Just another reason why I respect this game

The easy solution is to farm easy to kill enemies and buy a stock of vials, then when you level up spent your leftover echoes on vials and bullets.

There's a cap on blood vials. I almost hit it. I DID hit the cap on quicksilver bullets.

I didn't really buy many vials, and rarely farmed them. But what I did was practice getting good at parries at the start of the game. Which meant parrying against those ogre guys, who always drop vials. Eventually you get a lot of vials that way. That made early game not have a problem with vials. Then later, as long as you don't use as many vials as you earn while killing and exploring, the numbers just keep increasing.

It’s a game that forces you to be aggressive without no real options to just tank damage. It’s easier to burn through blood vials when you’re just ripping and tearing your way through the game and not parrying or backstabbing

I actually think they were an improvement on the gameplay in a bunch of ways. They solved the longstanding issue in the souls series of inconsequential ground loot.

In pretty much every soulslike ground/enemy loot is always a weapon/armor piece you can't use or a consumable you'll never need. In Elden Ring this issue is made even worse with crafting materials.

In Bloodborne you literally always want bloodvials and quicksilver bullets. In fact, nearly all of the consumables in Bloodborne can be extremely valuable. Fire paper, antidotes, beast pellets, you name it. Loot is nearly always valuable.

If you need to include unfun game mechanics to make it fit with the lore, maybe the lore is the thing that needs adjustment not the other way around

“I understand that there are valid complaints against the gameplay mechanics of blood vials… but the lore says this!”

Story is never a good excuse for poor gameplay design.

Weird I’d always have around 100 in storage

Why would something that can be game ruining be justified by a lore detail, they couldve change the lore if its so important to have it tied together so tightly

I didn't like it in my first play through. But it's brilliant: you return to the streets of yharnam to hunt beasts for blood. At this point, you have become a blood drunk hunter yourself. The very thing you have been warned from.

I think the mechanic is subtlety trying to get you to grind (for levels), if you have died repeatedly to the same boss you’ll have to start farming for vials and as a consequence you’ll be able to level up your character making your next boss attempt easier. If you’re not dying to bosses you’re probably not going to need to do the farming as long as you’re taking care of enemies on the way to the next boss.

I mean idk why it would be that weird from a lore perspective to say the dream provides blood for the vials like the way that bonfires provide estus for the undead. both are equally valued in their respective world. i don’t mind the blood vials a ton but i did enjoy lies of p’s system where you had a refillable amount and you could get some back from attacking enemies, i thought that would’ve fit super well with bloodborne’s regain mechanic

I’m so tired of people complaining about people complaining about blood vials.

/j

Lore is cool. Still isn’t a fun mechanic.

Who cares about lore implications when it affects gameplay.

It's only really an issue early on, and the game does an extremely good job at making them drop generously from enemies that are extremely weak to firearms, teaching you how to parry and how not to be greedy. And once you beat BSB, which is still really early game, it becomes a non issue due to a certain Chalice that allows you to get a lot of echoes and in turn max out your vials and not have to worry about them for pretty much the rest of the run.

So the substance of your argument is that vials should be farmable but not reset on death is because that's unrealistic?

You think it "fits perfectly" that the bath messengers can sell an infinite number of them?

I'm okay with that because that's the problem players face when they new to the game, and still halfway through too.

Which means

This game is still attracting new players.

After almost 10 years from it's release!

Fear the old blood, new hunters

May you find your worth in the waking world

It still would make sense if the Blood was abundant.

Yharnam is overrun by inhabitants who are somewhere between completely insane people and flat out beasts. That isn't because nobody tries to cull those threats - but no matter how much you hunt, there will always be more beasts to slay, transformed by the healing blood.

Also, the designers didn't have to make every item blood. It was a choice that you heal by using blood vials, so it isn't really an excuse.

Lastly, it is worth considering that the rules of causality are clouded by a dream like haze. Just like you meet the same enemies revived at the same place, there could have been a stash of blood vials that resets.

It’s a feel-bad punishing mechanic in a game that’s already difficult (obviously mileage varies on difficulty). Lore aside, it’s bad gameplay but not the end of the world. 

It punishes players trying to learn the game and get better agressively. You not only die, but potentially lose a pool of currency, but now you also lose a resource you'll need to try and meet or beat your current progress. Worst case scenario a new player is left re-zoning to defeat and farm the one enemy they can to get some back, or they're spaced entirely out of wanting to play the game and drop it.

A "get good" mentality is often the mentality a lot of soulsborne players have to "remedy" any difficult sections or design gripes. Its ok to say its a bad system. It was bad back in demon souls when you had to farm grass, and its not great here. Is it the end of the world levels of bad? no, i agree with you on that. But it was strange for them to do considering we already had flasks and the system was performing perfectly fine.

Sorry, but no, excusing frustrating game design because "it fits the lore" is a non-starter. FromSoft need to be held to a higher standard than that. They do plenty of other great ludo-narratively consonant mechanics, they clearly know how to do so. If you put a shitty mechanic in your game because it supports the lore, then you need to change the lore or change the mechanic. It's as simple as that.

I mean yeah it wouldn't make sense for blood vials to be a refillable healing source but it also does it make sense that blood vials are literally infinite in the game? Not really a big deal either way it seems

Coming from attempting dark souls I found the blood vials extremely generous but I know it's a person dependant thing.

https://preview.redd.it/yy03sysgb7cg1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f493c11311a29ee3a1539e8b07abb8ad421642df

It was my first fromsoft game so I had no experience with a refilling health potion of any kind. The way I saw it, it was raining blood vials in the beginning. When I started showing the game to my friends, they either quit because it was hard, or they didn't, but either way, blood vials wasn't a complaint for any of them. I was really shocked to find out that people were so divided on it. When I finally played Dark Souls then Sekiro, a refilling health potion was kinda crazy to me.

No amount of solid lore can make farming fun. Especially in the game with by far the worst checkpoint system in the franchise.

You’re sick of people complaining about it? I’m sick of the answer being “just make fewer mistakes.” Yeah, buddy, I’m trying to do that already.

“That depends on how you play and how good you are with the game so its not a valid point,” oh, crazy, get better at the game and the healing isn’t as big an issue? Super unhelpful. They’re a chore if you use them in a meaningful capacity, and we don’t have to deny issues in even our favourite games.

I never had an issue with limited vials. Not even at the beginning. And not because I'm good. When I had few vials I would preserve them for tight situations. Don't just spam vials. Learn mechanics and don't be afraid of dying. Using 20 vials early in a boss fight and never being close to win is just stupid.

There's lore reason, sure. But the actual reason vials are limited is because they're not supposed to be your primary source of healing. Rally is far more effective and all the tools given to you supplement using it first, and blood vials later. Hell, the game even tells you that using too much blood is bad.

Making vials limited is just another way to encourage you to rally.

Ive never farmed for vials a single time. When finishing a level with 100k+ echoes, just sacrifice leveling up one time and spend all of it on vials. Or do a chalice run and spend all of those echoes on vials. Theres literally an unlimited supply of them. not too mention they drop like 75% of the time you kill an enemy. Problem solved.

It’s a game with a fabricated story, so yes, I would like them to replenish. I prefer quality of life vs lore.

Alls I'm gonna say is that if someone is running out of blood vials so often that they feel like gathering them is a chore, Bloodborne might not be the game for them. Not because of the farming, but because they're clearly not good at the easiest game in From's catalouge. At least, not good enough to learn from their mistakes.

I genuinely can't imagine how people run out of vials unless they're a game journalist

I maxed them out early while they were still cheap and never had to worry about them ever again. Getting summoned for a ton of co-op helped too. I was always picking up more than I was using.

I had a hard time in the beginning but after awhile you don’t even think about em in terms of running out. Especially playing through the DLC good lord are they plentiful!

You stop having issues with vials once you get good.

I have never had to farm vials in the last 20 million playthroughs.

This is one of the major issues with people who refuse to "git gud." The difficulty they're experiencing, they'll NEVER experience it again.

They want to remove something from the game that goes away on its own anyway.

I get the complaint, but at the same time every lamp trip is:

• level up

• use remaining blood echoes to buy vials

• beat the game sitting at 400+ vials

adding to this post:

the game is a survival horror, yes it is a souls game but it has survival horror mechanics mixed in, just like resident evil where you need to manage your bullets and heals being smart about your resources and fighting strategically, the vials and bullet system is the same way, they need to be a resource that you learn to manage.

often the people that complain about this the most are veterans that are used to estus and cannot grasp the fact that this game is different from dark souls

Ima be honest if you need all 20 blood viles during a boss attempt then you need to go do anything else as get better at the game before trying again. I like having the extra there because it’s saved my ass sometimes but you shouldn’t routinely be using all 20 each time.

I wouldn't put the lore explanation above the mechanical concerns, but I do think it makes the list in favor of the mechanic.

When complaining people usually focus on "it was already perfect with estus," while ignoring what blood vials do that are different. You can hold 20 of them at a time, and they heal a flat 40% of your health bar no matter how big it gets. They have a dedicated button and the time from button to heal is shorter than in any other souls game, and you remain more mobile.

Though the rally system isn't meant to replace healing, I do think it also should be considered a part of how vials work; they go hand-in-hand. If you take damage and back off to heal, you place the weight on vials, and they come up short, and you run out.

But flip it. Because you run out, because vials are so fast, because they recover a fixed amount of your bar, then you need to get in there and let rally do some of the work--and if you do, you'll stretch those vials longer and are less likely to run out.

It's like the hidden damage multiplier (you take extra damage if you get hit during most animations). You can see that and conclude: "needlessly mean." Or, you can ask why, and perhaps conclude: "I need to stand my ground. Not panic. Practice parrying."

If anything, I would say the only gap in the design is that there should be a tool upgrade which permanently makes it so you regain health on a visceral (instead of being a rune), because that's as much of an elegant design loop as recharging estus ever was: you spend health to get blood bullets, you spend bullets to stagger foes and get viscerals, and that gets you health.

All that said, it's obviously still a point of friction and the intention clearly doesn't land for a lot of people. So I feel like they could have added a replenishing heal as an equippable, consumable item that acts like the heals in other games in their catalog (heals a fixed amount, slower, can be upgraded through exploration, replenishes on rest, fewer of them, etc.).

Cummmfpk

I’m not a baby so when I first played and I ran out of resources for gascoigne I simply farmed for more and didn’t whine about it. I used it as a learning experience because I practiced parrying while farming

I like how you can restock your Blood Vials on the go, no need to go back to a lamp.

It was my first From game, it was HARD, very early on I had to farm but quickly learned to spend my leftover echoes on vials after levelling up. Never once did it annoy me that they weren't free. I think most people complaining are coming from DS, I actually have the opposite problem as a BB first player and hate how estus flasks work lol.

Also, there are runes you can equip to heal yourself with viscerals. The rally system exists. You can get blood gems that heal you at a decent rate. The game has several options for healing that always seem to be ignored when they complain about blood vials being finite.

On top of that, the game lets you carry 20 vials at base. That is more than enough healing 99% of the time.

Blood vials were the best healing mechanic in any of the souls games.

Also adding one more thing to appreciate the game.

I really like how the game affects you as the player, not the hunter, you. You start the game either a scared newbie or a souls veteran and you will most likely go for the safe and calculated and slow combat which is very punishing in BB. You start realizing that you mist be agressive and make use of the rally system and kill more and more to get more echoes and vials and generally be stronger. In a sense, you are conditioned to be agressive and play how the game wants you to play, which blends in perfectly with the whole blood drunk hunters dont you think? The more you kill the more agressive you get and the more lust for blood you have.

Personally, I don’t have problems with Blood Vials — I’ve played the game enough that enemy drops and pickups will give me enough to last me the entire game — but even Fromsoft realized that not having an auto-replenishing source of healing is not super fun, and went back to the Estus Flask in every game since Bloodborne.

Yeah, it fits in the setting, but a mechanic being frustrating more than it immerses you probably means it should be cut.

If they remade Bloodborne, I think vials wouldn’t be finite, you would be able to warp between and rest at lanterns without going to the Dream, and you probably wouldn’t have to go to the storage box to retrieve items like Antidotes, Pellets, and Paper.

Ass a new in game. I don't know how to farm them.. lots od deaths, 0 healing. Just don't know where go. There Its actuly lots of good places to farm for each stage of game.

It is an early game issue even as a bloodborne fan I can’t deny. Using the lore to explain this is lazy, I agree it should match the game but it don’t have to make game design flaws. So Yeah BV in BB deserves the complain since it can stops many players from continuing the game. I think that you shouldn’t even have to farm something in your first playtrough on FS or SL or MV, it’s only in BB that I was forced to farm blood vials at some point (bullets was okay i popped soul chunk for it)

Ultimately, I don't find any argument that justifies unenjoyable gameplay based on lore reasons persuasive. It makes sense for blood vials to be finite, but does that make the gameplay better or worse? If the answer is worse, then I don't care about the lore.

A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of sheep

For me, before I found a chalice dungeon that gave me a lot of blood echoes for killing the basic enemies, farming for blood vials was a chore and annoying part of the game. So the Chalice dungeons off set that part of the game by giving me a lot of blood echoes to level up and use the leftover echoes to buy supplies. At that point, that is where the game became fun.

Blood vials are actually really good mechanically.

Lore reasons are no excuse for bad design. New lore can be made during development to back better design. But this isn't bad design.

Early on, vials are thrown at you. Slowly, they dry up but remain available in the shop.

This is an excellent gameplay design if you play a specific way:

• First off, later on in the game, whenever you leave the hunter's dream, dump all excess echos into vials. Unless you have hundreds of vials, don't save your pocket change for the next visit. Because pocket change by endgame might buy you dozens of vials.

But that's the easy part. 90% of players are going to have a viceral reaction to main step. Ready?

• During your playthrough, if you ever run out of blood vials, start the game over.

"Eww, gross, wtf" Right? I know. I know. Lose all your progress and start over again? Yeah. Do it. Because by that point in the game, you'll have likely spent a few too many vials on certain fights before this moment. But if you took a second shot at those old fights, now that you've seen much more and leveled up as a player? Getting back to where you were will take a mere fraction of the time. And in that short time, you'll also probably have a better build (you probably also have a few points in attributes you now wish you had placed elsewhere), and maybe wanted to try a different weapon. Starting over after losing all your vials, having bashed your head against a single boss, is actually a really smart playstyle. Consider it going back to grind player levels, rather than going back to grind blood vials. Once you get back to where you were, you'll probably also be able to take down that boss you were having trouble with far more easily. Disgusting idea initially, but it's actually a really good way to tackle the game.

So sick of this complaint after all these years lol anyone who has to actually farm bloodvials throughout a whole playthrough is insane. It’s scarce at the start when you have to go through Gascoigne so soon at the beginning but you get an obscene amount thrown at you just from going around any of the areas exploring and killing all the mobs..so many easy enemies drop 4 vials almost every single time you kill them. unless it takes you 3-4 vials to kill every other regular ass mob enemy you should be swimming in vials the whole playthrough. Not to mention if you do chalice dungeons early (before killing vicar Amelia when blood vials are absolutely dirt cheap in the messenger bath store) you get so much blood echos you can easily buy all the blood vials, bullets, fire and bolt paper, Molotov, blood cocktails you’ll need. I almost refuse to believe people who complain about farming blood vials are being honest it’s such a non issue if you just don’t spend half your vials on every encounter you come across. I think the people who complain about “having” to farm vials are the same people who happily go to YouTube to look up the easiest way to farm a stupid amount of blood echos,souls, runes as early as possible.

It’s a bad mechanic in an otherwise brilliant game. And it’s especially punishing for newcomers. Bloodborne is my favorite souls game now, but I bounced off of it like 10 times because if dying so much when I first started and the flow of the game being ruined because I had to get more vials.

It’s been a long time since I played the game, but from what I recall, the drop rates of blood vials was quite high in the early game but tailed off in the mid-late game. I could be wrong though.

Either way, my main issue with it was that if I’m stuck on a boss and constantly running back from the lantern, I’d be running past all the enemies and consequently not refilling the vials. Thus needing to farm if my stock ran out.

Skill issue? Probably, but didn’t really impede my enjoyment of the game tbf. I got used to slaughtering the scholars and buying vials in bulk.

Wait, people complain about not being handed the thing they rely on most?

There’s a guy right next to the lantern in the first area that drops like 7 Blood vials every time you kill him…

Bloodborne was my first souls game and I was really bad at it. Like dying 10x an hour and took me multiple days to get through Central Yharnam bad. I started running dry on blood vials during my attempts at Cleric Beast and that's when I realized I needed to play smarter... so I started going into boss fights with the intent to learn instead of win. I knew it had to be possible with 0 vials, so my logic was to git just gud enough that I'd have a real chance of victory and then I'd start using vials to cover my mistakes. Never had to farm them again.

Its only bad at the start of your first run tbh

You know how many times i have to stop my orphan of kos and laurence attempts to go fist some pigs just cause i ran out of blood vials. Sorry, can’t gaslight me on thinking this is good game design.

You just buy with leftover blood echoes and if you do run out do a little farm

Bro this game is super old. Who cares what they complain about. They either are going to play it or not.

Having to farm for vials is the reason I dropped bloodborne at first, then I grew a pair and got good where they are no longer an issue

Bruh chill... I don't even care what other people think about the vials. Now you are the one complaining about them lol

But it is a boring and unnecessary mechanic. No other souls game has a finite healing potion mechanic. (At least not for the standard healing items) To me theres no benefit in having to grind them if im too bad to kill a boss in x runs. I wanna learn the boss mechanics without needing to kill trash Mobs. And i wanna spend my echoes on levels and other stuff, not on a finite ressource. Also its wasted time to me.

Yes, some mobs are designed to make you learn the mechanics you need for the next boss. But you know who also does that? The fricking boss himself

Not sure what the problem is now.

Launch gave us 20 in reserve at max compared to the 600 maximum now, which isn't that arduous to fill.

That's what the cum dungeon is for.

I think the prices of vials and quicksilver bullets increasing as you progress through the game contributes to this as well. There's no reason to do this.

Sorry but I just have to disagree personally. If someone tries to tell me that resetting and farming the same part of town for vials infinitely, or buying them from the little fountain guys infinitely, somehow makes more sense for the lore I will just have to laugh at you.

Isn’t the entire game lore wise supposed to take place over the course of a single long night? And you’re telling me the lore is this Hunter stopping to spend hours to grind for vials and bullets? Someone will have to refresh me on the lore - is it canon that all the mobs are brought back to life every time or is that just a gameplay mechanic? My understanding was that the story takes place over one night, the hunter fights through Yharnam one time to get to each of their objectives.

How does it make any less sense that the messengers - who already have an infinite amount of the blood to sell you - just top you off every time you return to the dream so that you can finish the hunt?

If we’re making it about the lore - I argue that narratively you actually have to jump through way more hoops to justify how it works in the game.

And on top of all of that, it’s just not fun. Bloodborne is my favorite fromsoft game thematically, and visually, and gameplay wise only except for that single aspect. Like if I were leading a remaster/remake team, the only thing I would change about the game is just making it so that the messengers top up the hunter’s vials and bullets each time. Because I love the game but absolutely hate stopping to get vials.

This is the only argument in defense of limited vials that makes sense to me. I appreciate it for this and with cummmmfpk it’s essentially however limited as you want it because you can do it even like once and have more vials than you’d ever need

I mean TBH the lore being cool doesn't excuse the mechanic for being bad in a lot of peoples eyes. I like blood vials and I've only ran out of them once so far but people probably won't care.

For 90% of my first playthrough, I had 150+ blood vials and 200+ QS bullets

But how? So I did x level up and was left with x amount of blood echoes, not enough for another level up, and there was no benefit to carrying extra echoes. So I just bought attack buff, healing, and ammunition stuff from the store

Wholeheartedly agree. Bloodborne isn't there to make things easy for you. Gascoigne is the noob killer. If you've not got the determination, drive and perseverance to push past a boss like Gascoigne and you give up because you can't farm blood vials fast enough, then bloodborne is too hard for you as a game. This game is designed to be hard and I agree that because it's lore based as well, blood vials are in perfect quantities (if anything, a bit too abundant)

Typed a whole thing out but felt it could be boiled down to this :

I was so ready to Stan the hell out of bloodborne. Then I played it, ran out of vials, looked up how to get more, uninstalled and played Sekiro instead.(which was great!) Sure, it's cool lore. But ultimately it's a rule that's gonna ruin more enjoyment than it'll bring. It just makes the game tremendously difficult for newer or less skilled players to even try to get into.

poor brick hand guy....

Honestly I feel some may have forgotten (or maybe never knew because they got the updates immediately) that at release you were stuck with a max stack of 99 health vials.

That means if you were stuck at a difficult boss and died 5 times using all vials each time you were bone dry.

On top of that add a now pissed off demoralized player now forced to farm health items. Any love for this mechanic tends to die real quick afterwards.

That's not even mentioning the annoying possibility in the early game of either your bullets or vials getting bugged where if you get too many of either they merge with another item in your storage box and you have to sell all of said item to fix it hoping it doesn't happen again.

Hope this doesn't come off as rude or condescending.

cummmfpk

I mean lore wise, once we as the player character start our journey, isn't it established that by that point the 'special blood' is so plentiful in Yharnam that almost everyone is some variation of beast-man already? Especially considering that even the hunters, the guys who are supposed to hunt the beast that are being born from the blood every night, are now also turning into the thing(s) that they should be hunting?

Ofc, personal gameplay preferences aside, I think it'd be ok from a story standpoint if we did just have a set number of auto replenishing blood vials like flask in Dark Souls.

The only ppl complaining about this are first timers still in central yharnam or those trying to sprint through every area because after central yharnam you should be getting plenty of blood vials it's a total non issue

I prefer bloodvisls because I never have to stop and reset areas just to replenish heals I can just keep going and getting more along the way it's designed very well in BB

I wouldn't use lore as a rebuttal to this discussion frankly, but i will say that this is undeniably a skill issue for people who complain, not a bad design issue.

Blood vials are meant to be managed and used in conjunction with the rally mechanic to keep health high. If you're running out of vials, you're simply using them too much and not using the rally mechanic, or otherwise just playing poorly in general. The game practically suffocates you in vials, and if you take some time farming Central Yarnham once in a while, it's not a big issue either to spend them en masse in boss fights. The issue comes when people get hit, back off and spam heals when they should be using rally.

I'm also one of those people who isn't very interested in the lore and finds farming the blood vials tedious. But that doesn't make the game bad for me. Especially since, for me and I'm sure others, it's related to the contrast with Dark Souls, where you don't have that farming. That definitely stands out negatively in comparison but otherwise if Dark Souls handled it the same, nobody would care. For me, that's just part of Bloodborne and something I've factored in when I'm playing the game.

I feel like any argument about it being a bad system is nullified by the fact you can hold 20 off rip. Every other souls game drip feeds you estus upgrades. Only DS2 and DeS had reliable means to heal outside of the estus progression.

It’s one more skill ceiling to manage early, yet it is a system designed to open the player base up to the more aggressive nature of Bloodborne’s combat. Fighting your first boss with 20 heals in any of the souls games would be reason for people to bitch. No, let’s bitch that we have to put forth an effort to have an advantage? Nah, just fight cleric beast with four blood vials and call it even. (Yes of course rally helps mitigate too amongst all that blood. And don’t forget the most easily accessible parry mechanic in any of the games)

I rarely had to buy them or farm them, and I died a lot on my first playthrough, I got every ending 100% the game and am on ng+3, always had vials back at the dream so i personally had/have no problems with it

I never understood people complaining about them. Even on my very first playthrough, as a fairly new Soulsborne noob I don't ever recall having an issue.

Honestly i think it's a fair complaint, lore doesn't excuse odd or antiquated implementation

That's what I really about Fromsoftware games, even the way you heal makes sense in-world

Are there a lot of videos making blood vials out to be a huge issue? From the ones I’ve seen atleast it’s usually a minor complaint.

I personally prefer the estus system, DS1 had the holy trifecta of level/encounter design, enemy placement, estus charges mapped out perfectly in the first half atleast.

It’s so clear that there’s meticulous planning involved, the devs had to know roughly how many hits/mistakes players would receive going from bonfire to bonfire, so the number of estus charges had to be precise. The enemy numbers and strength had to be tuned for early stats, and estus just powerful enough to grant the player X number of mistakes.

I think vials in BB and gems in DS2 are perfectly fine tbh, albeit very easy to farm/obtain (DS2 was way too easy to stock up on gems), but the same level of planning just isn’t there as with Estus.

This doesn’t really affect BB gameplay negatively don’t get me wrong, but as someone who works in a parallel industry, the design principles of DS1 and the estus system just stands out to me so much compared to finite/farmable heals, so it’s just more impressive to me how they balanced it.

I get where you're coming from but you say that players shouldn't expect to be "lying around everywhere" ... But it is. Loads of enemies drop blood vials and theyre also lootable pretty much everywhere so that doesn't make sense.

Also the hunters dream fountain has infinite blood vials to buy so by your logic they... Shouldn't? Like you could easily hand wave that resting at a lantern means the fountain Messengers refill your vials.

I personally don't have an Issue with "finite" vials because I can count on one hand the amount of times I went farming for them in my playthroughs.

Mfw bloodborne was my first fromsoft game. Mfw played the story blind with no spoilers, mfw I was not good at the game, central yharnam was an insane difficulty curve, gascoigne was hellishly hard, mfw I have no memory of ever thinking "man these blood vials are rare" or "why do I have to keep farming for bloodvials" not once in the whole game. I literally just cannot relate a single drop to the blood vial complaints. Maybe they're just people who are used to respawning with full estus flasks or whatever idk. I just usually roll my eyes idfk. Perfect game is perfect game.

https://preview.redd.it/3f0eckb2v4cg1.jpeg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e40fa97cbc3f7b9828b9c7f4c81ba5f44b470335

Honestly I see having to farm for blood vials as a benefit being you should really be farming for all utility items in the game from fire and bolt papers to Malotovs to blood cocktails and all of those things. Even for experienced players if you want to utilize the items and mechanics how they're designed to be used you're going to have to farm for a lot of them. I feel like the complaints of blood vials mostly comes from new or fairly new players who still haven't quite grasped the concept of utilizing consumables in the game. They just run in and hit things until they're low on health and keep healing over and over try and make it through it and not utilizing other things to make bosses easier or even boss runs easier.

No one should ever have to farm them. The game is insanely generous with them. If you’re struggling with blood vials, you are doing something very wrong and should reevaluate how you approach the game.

I don’t get how people have to buy them, I get only being able to carry 20 at a time can be annoying but like…don’t you guys also get massive stockpiles of them? I haven’t ever had to buy them because they seem to be everywhere

People have to actively farm blood vials? I’m positive I’ve never had to do that. Is it not a pretty common drop?

There's no need to farm anything in bloodborne

Grinding itself is also a lore mechanic. Why do you keep farming for echoes and blood vials? Because you’re becoming addicted.

Preach brother!