TLDR:
- ShadPS4 is the first emulator to ever boot the title screen of Bloodborne on PC, as its developers claim.
- Bloodborne is still far from being playable on PC via ShadPS4.
- Sony might be able to shut down the emulator if things progress well for ShadPS4.
How long should we wait for Sony to finally give us what we wanted for years? The truth is Sony has never taken a clear stance on the PC port of Bloodborne, which is why there is a massive hunger among PC players to play this FromSoftware masterpiece one way or another.
Recently, a new project called ShadPS4 appeared online, a new PS4 emulator for PC that is supposed to put an end to the exclusivity of some hotly anticipated PlayStation titles. As the project’s biggest achievement to date, the developers behind it shared a clip on X today, which shows the emulator booting the title screen of Bloodborne on PC.
According to the emulator’s official website, this is something that has never been achieved on any PS4 emulator, but it also doesn’t approve anything about the game being playable on PC.
In fact, ShadPS4 has a long way to run Bloodborne on PC at a state that makes it an enjoyable experience. If you have had any experience with emulators on PC, you know that there are usually some shortcomings in these ports performance-wise.
Nintendo Switch is one of the consoles that we have the best emulators for, but even with the console’s not-so-demanding games, it is usually a massive struggle for the modders and emulator developers to make games run smoothly on the emulator similar to how they feel on Nintendo Switch. Of course, we have had examples where a Switch-exclusive game runs much smoother on an emulator rather than its native platform, but that would be quite difficult for a PS4 emulator.
Although we have got past that generation, most PS4 titles are still more demanding than Nintendo Switch games when it comes to visual quality and performance. This is already a big challenge ahead of the team at ShadPS4 to tackle. Even if they manage to run Bloodborne on PC entirely, keeping the performance at an acceptable level would be a difficult task.
And that’s not even all the challenges they might face. We all know that companies are too greedy to turn a blind eye to emulators, especially if there is one that is capable of running games at a satisfying performance. This was already the case with Switch’s Yuzu emulator, which was shut down by Nintendo and sentenced to pay $2.4 million to the Japanese console maker.
With all that said, ShadPS4 developers have a dream and they share it with many PC gamers who have not been able to play Bloodborne for so long.
