I'd like to talk about defensive options a bit, but first a word on enemy moveset design, since it naturally intersects with defense options.
Enemies in Bloodborne feel ferocious. I don't just mean this in the sense of how relentless they are, or how often they attack, but in execution of each individual attack. It seems like most attacks in Bloodborne go like this: the enemy performs a big windup, clearly signaling that they're about to unleash an attack, then executes in a split second, their limbs becoming blurs and whistling through the air. This, along with the pretty high amount of damage the average attack does at the intended player level range, and how easily stunned and knocked down the player is, communicate a sense of power and deadliness from enemies, which was probably a major goal for the designers. It also creates a certain style of defense from players. Instead of being able to react to attacks, these super fast execution times demand that players anticipate attacks based on prior experience and intuition. This isn't such a bad thing in itself, but in conjunction with flaws in the player's defensive options it becomes ugly. In general, I think the designers may have been overly fixated on making the enemies this way; it's something that I felt in the Souls games as well, but it's intensified here to a degree that's sometimes very uncomfortable.
To explain why it can be so uncomfortable, let's go into detail on defense, starting with dodging.
This is a problem that's been present since the Souls series' inception, but it's significantly more harmful in Bloodborne than any game previous in my experience. Dashing is done by holding the dodge button, so to read inputs the game waits a moment after the dodge button is pressed to see if the button is held. During this moment, nothing can happen. This means that there's forced lag on dodging in addition to the controller to console latency, latency added by the television, etc. In previous games in the Souls style this hasn't been such a massive problem (though it certainly was one), but with the higher level of precision the average enemy demands in Bloodborne this latency can become painfully apparent.
It's sad, because it's super easy to solve: move dashing to the almost totally unused L3 button and make it on a toggle the way Dark Souls II on PC allowed it to be. This would also bring the benefit of being able to dash and move the camera at the same time, though I already gave myself that ability by switching the inputs for R1 and O in the PS4 system menu, something everyone should do! Dodging needs to be as responsive as possible, and getting hit by an attack that I fully anticipated and know that I pressed the dodge button in advance of because the input didn't have time to be read is infuriating.
As for parrying, or "counter shot"-ing, I think it's surprisingly flawed. Enemy stun states have been fundamentally rethought in Bloodborne: instead of actually parrying an action at or near the moment of impact by interacting with it directly to stun the enemy, actions put entities into a "parryable" state during a definite set of frames during the action, sometimes even after the moment of impact, and if a bullet hits them during these frames they will be stunned. This seems to be the designers' method of adapting to a parry mechanic that can work at range. Again, this isn't necessarily problematic in and of itself, but it has some nasty consequences thanks to the way parrying works.
For starters, the Hunter Pistol (the fastest parrying weapon in the game, right?) has at least 10 frames of warmup lag, possibly 11 or 12 if the muzzle flash appears before the bullet itself is spawned. This is already significantly longer than the warmup for most shields in Dark Souls, and is more similar to some of the timings seen in Dark Souls II. Faster enemy attacks don't mesh with this. But there's more.
In my own play, and in footage of others playing, I've been shocked at how often a parry attempt in normal parry range (well inside the range of the attack being parried) succeeds, but the parried attack also connects. In theory, this should only ever happen when the parry succeeds and the attack hits on the exact same frame (and really, this too is a case where the parry should override the attack), so it should be a rare occurrance, but it appears common in Bloodborne. I originally thought that this was because bullets are modeled as objects traveling through space and thus have travel time even at point blank range, and this may be true (if someone can come up with a solid way of testing this that'd be fantastic), but it also seems that enemies react to being shot a handful of frames after they've actually been hit. I don't know how to explain this except sheer incompetence on the part of the designers. Here's a series of images to illustrate:
This is frame 10 of the Hunter Pistol's firing animation, where the muzzle flash appears. The enemy is already mid attack.
Two frames later, the parry connects, dealing damage that's visible on the enemy health bar. The enemy doesn't react yet, despite being vulnerable.
Here's the next frame. The enemy still hasn't reacted, and so its attack has continued, hitting me on this frame.
The enemy finally reacts another 2 frames later:
So that's 12 frames of warmup lag (or 10 plus 2 frames of bullet travel time if that theory is correct) and 3 frames of enemy reaction lag, making the total player action to enemy reaction sequence here take a total of 15 frames, or exactly half a second. This is some rather nasty latency for a mechanic that needs to be very precise. And again, the late enemy reaction is totally unacceptable. The heavier warmup lag on shots is an unfortunate design choice (likely made to make dodging shots in PVP more viable, but I think a better solution could've been found), but the enemy reaction lag seems to be an actual mistake.
I've done a little testing and it seems some enemies react faster to being parried than others, but it'd be awesome if people really dug into this issue. It's really too bad, because the more universal parrying solution guns bring is amazing in concept, but these flaws drag it down. If anyone else wants to do some testing, go right ahead!
my mind is always blown when the game connects areas haha.
