Bloodborne at 60fps is finally starting to look like a reality.
YouTuber and FromSoftware expert Lance McDonald has released a preview of his unofficial patch, which should allow players to finally circumvent the game's 30fps cap.
The limitations of the base PS4 console were a significant part of the game's framerate cap, but while subsequent FromSoftware games like Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice were updated or released with support for the PS4 Pro's improved hardware, Bloodborne never received a similar update. As a result, it remains all but locked to 30 frames per second. While a debug setting allows the framerate to be increased, doing so would have unintended consequences for the rest of the game as well.
After nearly two years of research and development, however, McDonald has managed to reliably unlock the game's framerate, finally allowing the game to be played at 60fps. To do so, he says he studied the changes that Dark Souls 3's PS4 Pro enhancement patch made to that game, and then "back-ported" what he found to Bloodborne. As a result, he says he's "been able to completely eliminate the 30fps cap from the game."
McDonald has had to make some of his own improvements to allow Bloodborne to hit the 60fps mark, but says that his patch makes the game "an almost entirely new experience." There have been a few hiccups, with everything from cloth physics to enemy pathing routes requiring some manual tinkering to get working as intended and a drop in native resolution, but McDonald claims that the update works pretty consistently across the base game and its expansion.
McDonald is hoping that Sony or FromSoftware will step in with the release of the PS5, with either a patch or a full recompiling to take advantage of the new hardware. As a result, he told Kotaku Australia that he doesn't plan to make his patch widely available until after the new console arrives, meaning fans might be waiting a little while for a fresh run at Yharnam.
If you're not quite ready for next-gen, here are 30 of the best PS4 games to check out.
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I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.