Although I can see where you're coming from, and I'm certain my roommate benefited from me acting as a second set of eyes, all he really did was explore each area thoroughly. Otherwise from Central Yarnham, there's only really one path for progression towards the Cathedral District. From there, the path only really goes towards Old Yarnham. After that, the only new path available is behind the gate in the Cathedral District that you have to buy a key for. So on and so forth. I'd argue that the Forbidden Woods is he only area where things aren't all that clear with a bit of exploration, and that's only because the path through the various wooded paths is more varied than any of the other areas in the game leading up to it.
Although I can see where you're coming from, and I'm certain my roommate benefited from me acting as a second set of eyes, all he really did was explore each area thoroughly. Otherwise from Central Yarnham, there's only really one path for progression towards the Cathedral District. From there, the path only really goes towards Old Yarnham. After that, the only new path available is behind the gate in the Cathedral District that you have to buy a key for. So on and so forth. I'd argue that the Forbidden Woods is he only area where things aren't all that clear with a bit of exploration, and that's only because the path through the various wooded paths is more varied than any of the other areas in the game leading up to it.
Except that's completely wrong, and without spoiling I'll just say you can go to about 3 places from the Cathedral area, you can go another 2 from Central Yarhnam, and the Forbidden Woods has just the 1 place you can proceed, the rest are just items and junk.
Though, if you're wondering what comes after where you're at:
After beating the Shadows of Yarnham, the only path forward leads to Byrgenwerth or whatever it's called. There, you'll find a fairly small area all in all that only really leads into a church like building. After beating a NPC hunter on the second floor, you can continue upward, finding a key that will eventually lead you out onto a balcony type area with an old man in a rocking chair thing. Talking to him just has him point to the edge of the balcony where there is a light shining below. Jump into that and you'll come face to face with Rom the Vacuous Spider, the boss you have to beat in order to progress further. If you faced him and weren't doing much, be sure to attack the main body. The head is heavily armored.
This is indeed true, and as I said I already cleared that area, however before I did I back tracked to a different area and I beat Amygdala instead of the spider first, cuz fuck that spider. There are multiple paths to go in Nightmare Frontier as well where Amygdala is, which I plan to explore today, bringing about more paths and probably more optional bosses. The game isn't linear in any sense, you can go do whatever the hell you want really, and there's nothing that tells you you're progressing in the right way (just that you're beating bosses, which isn't necessarily "progression" in the right direction since a lot of them are "optional"). The problem for me is I guess I just don't know if what I'm doing is actually progressing the story, sans maybe 1 or 2 parts, since Bloodborne has a lot more optional bosses than any of the Souls games, so I'm at a loss on where to go that's...progress. Lol.
I think the biggest problem is that, unlike Dark Souls 2 (and Dark Souls 1, I guess, though DS1 was a bit more "open"), you have 0 direction given to you on where to go other than "hey head to this place probably kbai", whereas I'm used to DS2 singleplayer that basically just throws you 4 different paths, 1 of which you sort of have to do first, and the rest just take you on your merry way with no variation in path on the way there. DS2 you were told "hey go beat these 4 old bosses in these 4 areas, than go to this area and beat these bosses!" whereas Bloodborne is mostly "well, here's Yarnham. Um...have fun." Which isn't bad, just different from what I'm used to in a Souls game
There is nowhere else to go unless you haven't gotten the rune tool yet. In that case, there is one more boss you could fight, but it's such a pushover and echoes aren't particularly plentiful leading to it.
See above, there absolutely is. Lol
But yeah, honestly, this game is super easy to figure out if you explore areas thoroughly enough. Not super easy to beat by any means, but otherwise from what I've seen, there is generally only one correct path through an area with either the exit being in the same direction, or with the exit being in another part of the area. The part you're at is really the only place I could see as being a bit confusing.
I'm far too lacking in coherency at this point to adequately respond beyond saying that there is actually a marker for story progression, but it's literally only one thing that happens after about four or five bosses at a time lol.
Which is I think why your opinion differs greatly from mine, I have probably a combined 2000+ hours in all the Souls games and IIRC you said you never really played them I don't like dyingIf you ever played any of the Souls games seriously, you'd know that's sort of flawed logic
Though Bloodborne really does seem to encourage that idea of progression based on steadily rising enemy difficulty. I mean, you can never actually access an area that you are blatantly too weak for by leaps and bounds. Even with the Unseen Village, it is pretty hard if you get dragged there early, but it's leaps and bounds below in difficulty than when you actually have to go that way later on. Compare that to Dark Souls where after the prison, you're just sort of dropped in the middle of an area with multiple different paths that can be taken, with those branching even more if you took the Master Key as your gift, with the vast majority of them having enemies that you simply do not have the stats or gear to stand up against immediately following the prologue. Bloodborne doesn't do that, instead making it so it is pretty damn difficult to accidentally wander far beyond your current comfort zone. I mean, for example, from Central Yarnham, the two most prominent paths end up at either the Cathedral Ward or Old Yarnham. These places don't substantially differ in difficulty, though the enemies in Old Yarnham are arguably easier to fight against since their patterns come down to about two different attacks per enemy. You can't get into the Forbidden Woods immediately after Central Yarnham though, which is a place you would most certainly die many horrible unfightable deaths after the I guess what you could call Bloodborne's prologue sequence. Due to not being able to get to the Forbidden Woods, you can't reach Bygernwerth, which means you can't reach the Unseen Village in the fashion you need to in order to progress the story.
I don't like dying
I don't think I've ever died to any mob in the game unless it was because I ran out of stamina or got swarmed by 10 of them at once. The enemies aren't difficult at all to me, because I have 2000 hours of practice on enemies that work in a similar fashion. Even some of the bosses, like the Shadows, are extremely easy bosses because they greatly resemble previous enemies or bosses (and the katana-wielding Shadows actually seem to be more like players than bosses, but meh) which is why it's difficult for me to discern whether or not where I'm going is "correct". I like it a lot, I'm just saying that my experience is far from what ND's second hand experience is.The whole game is one big difficult enemy when you're inexperiencedAnd again, if you've ever actually played a Souls game seriously, you'd know that there aren't any real difficult enemies
And to be fair, at least in Dark Souls, there really are enemies that will destroy your very core if you try to fight them too early. Like in the Undead Burg, at various places there will just be a single enemy standing in the middle of a path, clearly better equipped than the skeleton warriors all around, where a single hit is enough to blast away your entire stamina bar, leaving you defenseless for the one hit death followup. Granted, I know these enemies are what may be considered to be mini-bosses that won't respawn once they're killed, and hell, maybe it isn't too far beyond them that they actually become rather possible enemies even if you aren't master of the dodge. My point there is that Bloodborne doesn't do that. The very beginning of the game is the one place I can think of where they put an enemy you just couldn't kill with any level of ease, and even then, he's guarding absolutely nothing. Not a shortcut, no items, just a dead end that he decided was his home. After that, even if the enemies are a little difficult like an enemy hunter (which tend to have fairly simple attack patterns, largely being restricted to what you as the player can access as a hunter), I can't think of one place where they just shoved a random tank of an enemy and said "ha hope you don't approach this guy".
The whole game is one big difficult enemy when you're inexperienced
And that's because none of the enemies are really "difficult".
