Having trouble with Bloodborne’s boss fights? Leave the game running on your PlayStation 4 for half a day and the brutal beasts become a breeze. That’s not good.
Redditor meatballz (thanks to Oscar for the tip) discovered the bug in From Software’s latest after the boss battles in his marathon session became much easier after the 12 hour mark. Exiting the game completely and restarting got the bosses back on track, so he left his PS4 running Bloodborne overnight and tried again—easy boss fights.
I just tested this yesterday by turning off the PS4 power saving options and leaving Bloodborne running all night. Sure enough, when I played in the morning Logarius had transformed from an intense spell casting maniac into a senile old man who did nothing but attack with his scythe over and over. BSB stops jumping all over the room and doing multi-hit combos and just politely spams his side-swipe, Amelia stops healing, One Reborn stops pooping acid, every boss changes in some way and ultimately becomes much easier.
Meatballz posted a pair of videos to show the difference in boss fights between bugged and non-bugged games. First we have the regular version of the Logarius boss battle.
Here’s Logarius on a system that’s been running the game for over 12 hours.
That’s a pretty massive difference. In the second video Logarius seems restricted to a single, easily-countered move.
In a response to the original post, Selakah outlines some of the crippled bosses they’d experienced on their initial play through.
- Mergo’s Wet Nurse did nothing but walk towards me while flailing. No dark cloud phase. She was basically stuck walking towards me like a slow lawnmower.
- Micolash did nothing but try to hit me with his fists. No tentacle attack, no cosmos attack.
- Ebrietas repeatedly faceplanted and spit blood at me. No cosmos attack, no forward lunge, no variations.
- Logarius just used his scythe attack, zero spellcasting. He was permanently stuck swinging at me like this.
- Abhorrent beast did nothing but his 3 hit combo in every phase.
While the Reddit thread refers to the bug as a memory leak, other Redditors have confirmed that the bug occurs even when switching to a new character, which should technically free up resources. Online status doesn’t factor into it. Some are saying it also occurs if you merely suspend the game instead of closing it completely, others report suspending the game clears the issue.
This is not the sort of glitch you want in a game designed to challenge players’ skills. Its existence also brings into question every spectacular boss feat or speed run we’ve seen since the game launched—had they unknowingly left the game running for 12 hours?