On the tenth anniversary of Bloodborne, FromSoftware has made an announcement... of a minor Elden Ring update.
In a post earlier today, the official Elden Ring account confirmed that the game's servers would undergo a two-hour maintenance, starting late tonight in the US and very early tomorrow morning in Europe. Before you get your hopes up for anything to do with Elden Ring Nightreign, however, it's worth noting that "this maintenance does not contain any game related changes."
My guess is that FromSoft is doing something related to the Elden Ring backend ahead of Nightreign's release in May. A 'no changes' update at this point in the original game's lifecycle but only a few months out from the multiplayer spin-off speaks loudly to me of a set of technical changes.
Unfortunately, the timing of this otherwise-inauspicious tweet feels pretty bad. Today happens to be the tenth anniversary of perhaps FromSoft's least-favorite child. While other games have received ports, sequels, remasters, and more, Bloodborne remains staunchly locked to PS4. Modding efforts from the community offered a technical boost, but were eventually struck down by Sony, which then continued to do nothing with the game.
PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida thinks that Bloodborne's long decade in the wilderness stems from Hidetaka Miyazaki's busyness and reluctance to "let anyone else [...] touch it." Whether or not that's true, it doesn't change the fact that Bloodborne's tenth birthday appears to be passing without the kind of fanfare fans have been hoping for, and that this Elden Ring patch feels like it's rubbing just a little bit of salt in the wound.
10 years on, Bloodborne remains an unmatchable feat of atmosphere thanks to the mind-boggling oppressive scale of Yharnam.
