Yoshida-San Was Once Making a Bloodborne-Like Asymmetrical Game That Got Canceled

Alessio Palumbo
Bloodborne

Naoki Yoshida made a big name for himself with the Final Fantasy XIV comeback, leading him to be chosen by Square Enix as one of the producers of Final Fantasy XVI (which is now basically complete, he said just a few days ago).

Prior to all this, though, Yoshida and other Final Fantasy XVI developers such as director Hiroshi Takai were making a game he described to be similar to FromSoftware's Bloodborne, albeit with the addition of asymmetrical multiplayer. In his biweekly Famitsu column (via VG247), Yoshida talked a bit about this project that eventually got canceled.

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That’s probably the closest example. Not an RPG, but a fairly hardcore action game. We also had a few sci-fi elements in there. When I first saw Bloodborne, I thought, “Where have I seen this before...?” *laughs*

It was going to have 5-player multiplayer, where 4 of the players are on the protagonist side. The remaining player takes the PK (player-killer) role. The PKer has to fight the other players 1-on-4, but they have the strongest abilities out of all the characters to make up for it. However, if the PKer died in the game, their character would be deleted and they’d have to start anew. It was a vicious system.

It was basically Bloodborne plus that system... If we’d kept going, I think we’d still be working on it right now. I think it would’ve been a huge failure. At the time, I was the director and Takai-san was kind of like the manager. But I couldn’t help but want to put the work in the hands of the young workers, kind of like a parent wanting their kids to learn and grow. I didn’t know how much longer we’d be working, and I felt compelled to train candidates for the next director... And I got into heated arguments with Takai-san because I was entrusting them with too much. Takai-san once called me, saying we needed to have a one-on-one chat.

Yoshida and his team may have not gone forward with their project, but Bloodborne fans can still hope FromSoftware will one day return to the IP, as teased recently by former IGN journalist Colin Moriarty.

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