Gamasutra - The Usability of Bloodborne

Gamasutra posted a bunch of interesting articles. The first is a blog post showing by example why a hard game - Bloodborne - and good usability are not a contradiction.

The corpse run mechanic

Another keystone of usability is being forgiving and allowing for error recovery. Bloodborne doesn't allow much flexibility outside of its core, consistent, rules, but the corpse run mechanics do give players a second chance. Especially given that dropped blood echoes (that drop when you die) tend to be placed a bit back from where you actually died. They also are friendly and spawn at the top of cliffs/bottomless pits. The assigning of blood echos to enemies can add a wrinkle to this (particularly if they patrol), but again Bloodborne clearly shows this has occurred via the glowing eyes and also is nice enough to not have bigger monsters and bosses absorb your blood echoes in this fashion. Personally, I recovered my shards more often than not. After-all, I had already got to the spot where I dropped them before and given the consistency of the game it usually wasn't too hard to get back there. Then of course, there is the huge full screen message when you reclaim your echoes. Unmissible feedback for an important moment. Good stuff.