Your favorite video game doesn’t need a remake

When you watch as many video game showcases as I do, you start to notice some patterns in the chat. Casual requests for certain games have a way of snowballing into memes. If you watched just about any stream this June, you probably caught pleas for Hollow Knight: Silksong news, even when that didn’t make much sense. WhileGrand Theft Auto 6 is still the king of fan begging, I’ve noticed a rival in the wings recently: Bloodborne.

Fans of FromSoftware’s 2015 PlayStation 4 classic have begged for any scrap of news about the game over the years. Some of those demands are reasonable; requests for a PC port, a 60 frames-per-second (fps) update, or sequel seem fair considering its pedigree. But last month’s PlayStation State of Play pushed me to my limits when I saw Sony’s YouTube chat floodied with chants of a Bloodborne remaster or remake.

As a career fun killer, I’m here to burst some bubbles: No, Bloodborne does not need a remake. I’d go as far as to say that few, if any, of your favorite games do.

Remake overload

To give the Bloodborne hive its due, requests for a remake or remaster aren’t unreasonable. We’re currently living through a double-dip boom for the video game industry. Just about every major publisher is revisiting their classics to some degree, whether it be Square Enix withFinal Fantasy 7, EA with Dead Space, or Sony with The Last of Us. Even Nintendo is all-in on that trend with retouches ofSuper Mario RPG, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, and more. If you love Bloodborne, I can see why you might want Sony to give it some overdue love.

What’s more absurd is the idea that a nine-year old PS4 game is in desperate need of a revisit outside of a modern platform upgrade. Bloodborne still feels like a perfectly modern game by today’s standards. It still looks and plays great today; any flaws it has are still largely present in recent FromSoftware games like Elden Ring. Aside from doubling its frame rate, there’s little FromSoftware could likely do to retouch it in the