Gameplay looks good, though I'm curious as to how the more aggressive approach will feel in-game, since I always feel less apprehensive/freaked when the game is forcing encounters at quicker paces. Think Dead Space - it has monsters popping out every which way like it's some kind of festive ritual and practically shoves the combat at you, favouring the quick trigger over the gradual tension build, and none of them really feel threatening, even on the hardest difficulty. I never experienced a struggle. Once you know where the enemies are going to come from, it's just a matter of shooting at them from far enough away so that they don't one-shot you.
By contrast, Demon's/Dark Souls doesn't lack in enemies, but the way they're handled is different, and the atmosphere shows; I found myself looking around more cautiously, which resulted in me admiring the scenery more, and taking in how well-designed and gorgeous it all is. The games almost never rely on the "woooo everything is dark and spooky and HEY the lights just flickered BOO MONSTER" brand of scary and instead chooses the part where everything is a threat, in effect pushing you back behind a shield to proceed, or at least preventing you from mindlessly blundering through the maps. And heck, even when you know all of the enemy patterns and all of their positions, you can never just brush past them. Each encounter requires your attention.
I'm also wondering about the plot, and how that's going to be taken. Dark Souls 2 lost out on a lot of what made Demon's/Dark Souls' plots so great, and that's that it's never thrown at you, it's shown. You don't need to be told Lordran is a terrible place, because you can see it, and you can feel it. You don't need an NPC to say that Anor Londo is a lonely place that represents lost glory, because the emptiness of the huge, grand buildings do the telling for them.
They also don't sacrifice detail, either. All of that can be found in small, bite-sized item descriptions, which makes collecting them all feel less like a chore and more like an unraveling mystery that actually adds to your experience of the regular game. There's never really any shoehorned exposition, which gives the world significant depth without feeling like your character is running into encyclopaedias all the time. I prefer this setup to that of Skyrim's, where NPCs would babble on about generic world-building facts at the expense of personality, just avatars for the script writers to show off their amazing talents at creating hella lore.
So yeah. I'm looking forward to it, and I have decent expectations. I only hope Bloodborne goes the Demon's/Dark Souls route and not the increasingly Skyrim-y Dark Souls 2 Dead Space one.
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