Player Options and Problem Solving: Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons

Words: 2592 Approximate Reading Time: 17-22 minutes

After playing through the Devil May Cry series and writing way too much on them, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about how games help players to progress. There are multiple facets of this question, which may include how a game just gets a player to reach the end, how it encourages players to learn the systems in more depth, how it turns players into experts, and so on. A lot of this is about the game placing obstacles in front of the player, and then giving them tools to use to overcome those obstacles.

I’ve been replaying Bloodborne recently, and while I want to do a sort of retrospective on the various FromSoftware games about this topic, there is a particular aspect of Bloodborne that I wanted to talk about. That subject is the game’s somewhat infamous Chalice Dungeons. Those dungeons are often considered the worst part of the game: they are boring, repetitive, have minimal rewards, and feel somewhat necessary by virtue of the fact that there is content locked in them that players are likely to want to experience.

My goal here isn’t to litigate whether the Chalice Dungeons are “good” or “bad.” I’m not a fan of them myself. And to some extent the argument has been settled by virtue of the fact that later FromSoft games have not included anything similar.

Instead, I wanted to examine the Chalice Dungeons in light of solving a very specific problem. Namely, helping players solve a “power disparity.” What I mean is that many role-playing games, FromSoft’s games among them, give challenges to the player, and strive to not have a single solution for how to overcome that challenge. The games need to provide players with different options for how they can play, and make those options feel, for lack of a better term, “intended.”

I want to offer an explanation of the dungeons in a way that shows how they basically make grinding more interesting. This is not a system that was “intended,” at least according to interviews regarding their development. But one thing that is important about how players engage with games is that they can warp the “intent” of a game to fit their purposes. By which I mean that how players use a system is as important – probably more important – than how a developer wants that system to be used.

And a corollary of that is we should be asking how a system can be used to impact a player’s engagement beyond what is explicitly stated by the developer. Sure, this system was created for a purpose, but if that system also serves another function that wasn’t intended, we should at least examine that function and the role it could have in the game and in future games.

The more we know about examining systems, the easier it is to see these kinds of effects. To predict how players will interact with a game and receive a particular mechanic.

Chalice Dungeons and Intent

So it might be useful to start with a primer on what these Chalice Dungeons are and how they work.

After beating certain bosses, the player receives special items called, well, chalices. Those chalices are used in the hub world to create new dungeons which are procedurally generated. To my understanding, FromSoft put together a wide array of different rooms with various layouts, enemy arrangements, and so on, and then the game puts those all together in somewhat random ways to create a new dungeon for the player to explore.

As you progress through these dungeons, you get additional materials to create more and tougher dungeons. Likewise, collecting different chalices does the same, opening up more places to explore.

The dungeons themselves are not particularly exciting. While there are a lot of different possible arrangements, each room begins to feel same-y rather quickly. There are a few unique bosses located within the dungeons, including a very special boss located at the end of the whole ordeal (which requires running through just about every type of dungeon at least once). And there are a handful of rewards located within these dungeons, such as different variants of the weapons you collect that allow for slightly different playstyles (i.e. perhaps you’d prefer an elemental damage build, rather than a purely physical damage build, and certain upgrades facilitate that change).

Otherwise, though, it’s not a “FromSoft experience.”

I use that term not just to help explain the frustration that many players had, but also to contrast the Chalice Dungeons with their intent.

When Bloodborne was being unveiled prior to its release, the game’s director – Hidetaka Miyazaki – talked about these dungeons and how they would work. And he described a core part of why they were made:

From Software had two objectives in creating the Chalice Dungeon system, Miyazaki said: strategically keep Bloodborne fresh and interesting and give players freedom in sharing strategies and tactics. Miyazaki said he wanted to extend the feeling of playing a game like Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls for the first time, when players are sharing strategies and hints with each other. Over time, players learn pretty much everything about the game, leaving few mysteries to uncover long term.

“Similar to when a game first comes out, when people are talking about completing a dungeon or a level, we want to continue that momentum,” he said. “The fixed format of the dungeon is necessary to keep that idea of wanting players to contribute but also have something to look forward to.

“The sharing of these experiences, we’re trying to expand the scale of the actual share. Players will be able to share these generated dungeons and the methods they used to beat them. [We’re] trying to raise the bar for freedom and scope that allows players to share their experiences. That will hopefully lead to strategies you’ve never seen or experienced. It’s a loop of communication and discussion. It’s somewhat open-ended in that sense.”

So we can see that the goal was the retain that classic “FromSoft feel” of wandering into a new part of the world and trying to figure out how to get through it. Are these enemies giving you trouble? Find a neat trick for taking down a given boss? Then all of that information can be shared with others, allowing the game to retain the collaborative feel that it has technically cultivated since its inception – though it is a feel a lot of players end up rejecting.

Regardless, it seems pretty clear from the reaction of players that the goal here was not accomplished. Arguably, the cause lies in the fact that the dungeons are mechanically similar to running through a zone in a Souls game, but don’t have the clear payoffs for things like new item pickups, environmental storytelling, and unique bosses. After you’ve run through a handful of these dungeons, they start to run together. Each one offers a unique challenge in a technical sense in that it’s composed of different enemies and has different traps and different rooms – but none of that contributes to this idea that the overall experience has changed.

And there’s not necessarily any reason to think this is a matter of implementation. The underlying method for creating these dungeons still relied on the basic principles of room layout and enemy placement that would be familiar for the rest of these games. Rather, it’s the very fact that the dungeons are procedurally generated that causes this problem.

So if we were to merely measure the Chalice Dungeons on this metric, they would absolutely be a resounding failure. Whatever cool and/or useful stuff exists, those things demand too much work to make the dungeons feel worth doing.

Chalice Dungeons and Grinding

But the intended purpose is not the only metric we need to use. What other value could these dungeons have provided to players separate from this idea of “a continually fresh FromSoft experience”?

To answer that, let’s step back for a moment.

When we think about most FromSoft challenges, we think of boss battles. And when we think of solutions, we think of “git gud.” The solution to any given problem is to simply overcome it via skill. This mentality is, in fact, incorrect. There are a wide array of tools provided to the player, and understanding how to make use of those tools is what makes the game engaging. We could choose to keep fighting a boss over and over and over again until we finally win – it’s possible. But we don’t have to. We can try to rethink the problem and how we address it.

Of course, there are plenty of other challenges that exist in these games. Just getting through a zone is meant to be a challenge in itself. And that process might involve interesting solutions beyond merely charging at things and hitting them. Which doesn’t mean that charging at things and hitting them is wrong. But that we can often rethink our approaches and come up with new solutions.

One of those intended solutions is gaining power. Just trying the same thing over and over again until we succeed is often a recipe for frustration. Plenty of possibilities might exist, but the most obvious is simply overpowering the problem. If we put enough points into bumping our stats up, we can tank and deal enough damage to get through the current roadblock.

Gaining power, though, implies grinding. We must run through the same sequence of enemies for hours upon hours, performing the same repetitive tasks to get enough experience for our goal. A problem made all the worse by FromSoft’s design, since death has the potential penalty of erasing our progress. So grinding is both monotonous – as it is in all games – while also not allowing us to be mindless.

So let’s say that you are struggling with a particular boss or zone. And you’ve exhausted your other options for the moment, so there aren’t other places to explore. You could just keep fighting until you win or give up. But eventually that can become boring or frustrating on its own, as you spend hours upon hours fighting the same boss continually. If you feel yourself making progress and learning, this process will feel viable.

But what happens if you feel like you’re not making sufficient progress? What if you want to be able to take more hits, or just do a little more damage? Maybe you’d like to try out some different weapons – perhaps you’ve been focusing on strength-based weapons, but now you think some new dexterity-based weapons could give you an edge in this fight. Whatever the case, putting points into stats requires experience. Which requires killing lots of enemies. And that takes time.

Here is where the Chalice Dungeons are able to shine. Rather than needing to run through the same section and kill the same enemies dozens or maybe even hundreds of times, you can create a new dungeon and run through it. You’ll get the basic experience of tackling a new zone – albeit a somewhat repetitive one – and get experience “naturally.”  That can then be put into those stats you want to pump.

The same idea could be presented for grinding out items. Plenty of players of these games may well remember running into issues of needing specific items. Maybe you need more upgrade materials, or whatever the “special” item of the game is (Humanity in Dark Souls 1, Human Effigies in DS2, Embers in DS3, items for gaining Insight in Bloodborne). Whatever it is, since those items are limited in the main game, these dungeons offer players an opportunity to grind for those items in a way that can be fun.

Now in saying that the dungeons allow players to grind in a non-boring manner, I don’t mean to say that grinding has suddenly been made fun. Running through dungeons can still become stale fairly quickly. Rather, it is a way of thinking about what these dungeons have to offer beyond what was intended by the developers. These dungeons serve a function in Bloodborne – and could serve a function in other games – by allowing another avenue for players to address the challenges provided by the game. Rather than the boring grind of killing the same enemies over and over again, just run through these randomly generated dungeons instead.

A lot of the disdain for the Chalice Dungeons stems from the fact that players approached them as just additional content. And indeed, that is how they were presented and why they were made. And as additional content, they’re pretty weak.

But if we think about them as options – as something to help players without being a necessary component of the game – then they become much more useful and much more successful. Dungeon running is akin to summoning a partner or using a guide – it’s a way to tackle the problem in front of you.

We can still learn a lot about the implementation of Chalice Dungeons and what went wrong, even when assessing them in this light. We can still see their fundamental sameness as a problem. We might see them as ways to grind, but that grind is still running into a problem of becoming monotonous because the dungeon layouts aren’t terribly interesting. Whether they’re being approached as a grind or as additional content to experience, the dungeons still need to offer something each time through. Which means they need to be thought about in terms of playing them over and over and over and over and over again. Sure, each dungeon might be “fresh” in a technical sense…but what does that freshness actually feel like in the end?

Concluding Remarks

One issue I commonly find myself with is not wanting to waste too much time trapped on a particular problem. I play so many games for so many purposes that I don’t have the luxury to get too stuck for days on end. Even hours can be a bit much now. I used to be willing to fight Ornstein and Smough for multiple hours, but now? If I don’t win after, say, a dozen tries, I generally try to figure out something else to do, even if that process takes me many more hours. Because I’d rather go off and do something else that I find engaging, rather than simply keep banging my head against the wall.

And as a result I have become more interested in the ways that games offer players that “something else.” As infamous as the FromSoft games are for fostering the “git gud” mentality, they aren’t really designed for that purpose. Indeed, the very mechanics that many hardcore players – including me – ignore the first time through (such as summoning or magic or ranged weapons) are all tools given to us for the very purpose of rethinking our approach. If we’re struggling with a boss, why not summon a partner? If we’re having trouble getting past an enemy, why not shoot it down with a bow and arrow?

While the Chalice Dungeons have received a lot of dislike, I want the takeaway from this essay to be that there is the seed of something valuable in there. The design of these dungeons as intended was not what most players really wanted, and we can pretty safely say fell flat on its face. But even if completely unintended, the dungeons do help players overcome some specific obstacles that they might otherwise struggle with. And that is an interaction of game design and player need that is worth considering.