Dark Souls remains FromSoftware’s gold standard for difficulty, as Bloodborne’s creators admit making it harder would’ve made it unplayable.

Over the years, FromSoftware has put out a lot of franchises, practically pioneering the whole Souls genre out of sheer will. However, this has also occasionally led fans to debate which one game by the studio is better than the rest. The Dark Souls trilogy usually leads the way in this discussion, as the franchise keeps aging like fine wine as the years go on.

The Dark Souls trilogy has been defining the Soulsborne experience for a long time | FromSoftware

Other games like the massively popular Elden Ring and the PlayStation Exclusive Bloodborne come close, but none of them beat the impact that Dark Souls Trilogy has had on both the audience and FromSoftware alike. One of the reasons it’s just better is how perfectly it balanced the intense difficulty with the fun combat it featured, something that Bloodborne could only have dreamt of having.

Bloodborne couldn’t be tougher than Dark Souls because of this one reason

Bloodborne difficulty could not be set higher than that of Dark Souls | FromSoftware

FromSoftware has crafted the perfect reputation for itself after creating the infamous brutal battle experiences gamers witnessed in past games like Sekiro and Dark Souls. Unfortunately, the studio had to hold back a bit when it came to potentially the best PlayStation exclusive of all time, Bloodborne.

Revealing how the game would have been unplayable if the difficulty level happened to be more than what the players experienced in Dark Souls, Masaaki Yamagiwa from Sony’s Japan Studio revealed the following in an interview via PlayStation Lifestyle.

Their team’s intention is not to raise the difficulty level, because if it’s more difficult than Dark Souls, it’s going to be pretty much unplayable for anyone. Instead, by introducing an aggressive fighting combat style, they want to maintain the difficulty level of Dark Souls but make the player feel like they’ve achieved victory because they made moves.

While this statement reveals why Bloodborne wasn’t harder than it already is, it also showcases the trilogy’s status as the gold standard for difficulty when it comes to FromSoftware games. This further shows how crucial the trilogy has been all this time for the studio to grow in the past decade.

FromSoftware and the Dark Souls lifestyle

The iconic trilogy set the standard for difficulty in Souls games | FromSoftware

It’s no secret that Bloodborne was designed with a combat philosophy different from Dark Souls. While the famous trilogy required the players to be more careful and use more strategies while playing, Bloodborne, on the other hand, called for more aggression.

Furthermore, shields were practically useless and parries were more rewarding for the players, making the game feel more fast-paced at the time. If the creators themselves admitted that making Bloodborne harder would be a mistake, that’s a clear indication that Dark Souls already hit the peak of how far the studio can push with the difficulty.

It is also why Dark Souls remains the signature FromSoftware experience, because even the developers knew that going beyond it would be too much. So far, only Elden Ring has managed to reach the level of significance the trilogy holds for the studio, and it has given Hidetaka Miyazaki the perfect chance to combine the two franchises and deliver to the player the upcoming co-op title, Elden Ring Nightreign.