When I first succumbed to the hype and decided to give Elden Ring try it, never having played a souls previous game, I bounced pretty hard in the game. There were just a lot of things I didn’t like about the experience: the strange and annoying messages from other players; the general air of inscrutability, including a lack of clarity as to what he was supposed to do, much less why; the feeling that it was clearly a console game ported to PC; and the fact that the big guy on horseback kept handing me my ass on a polished gold platter that matched his armor. But a few months later, while my wife was away for a couple of weeks, I decided on a whim to try again, and when she returned, I had logged about 200 hours in the game, died countless times, and managed to fight until the final battle. I got hooked.
Since then, I’ve played virtually all of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games: Dark Souls I-III, an axand night rain. I have not finalized any of them, to be clear. I’m still mean to them. But for some strange, possibly masochistic reason, I keep coming back to them. All but one: transmitted by blood.
Because? Well, I’ve never been a console fan, and Miyazaki’s gothic masterpiece remains, famously, a PlayStation exclusive. For over a decade, PC gamers have been hoping against hope that the game will one day come to Steam, but there’s no sign of this ever happening and, if anything, the fact that Sony seems to move away of PC releases in general seems to have put the final nail in the game’s splintered wooden coffin.
Having said all this, you can play transmitted by blood on PC, and the good news is that while doing so isn’t as easy as “buy a game on Steam, wait for it to download, play,” it’s a lot easier today than it was last year when I first tried to get it up and running on my gaming PC, and the experience is honestly pretty decent.
So where do we start? Well, Carl Sagan once observed, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Likewise, if you want to run transmitted by blood on a PC, you must first invent the PlayStation 4.
More specifically, you must first emulate the PlayStation. If you haven’t worked with emulation before, it basically involves setting up a virtual PlayStation environment on your PC and then using that to run the game. This is necessary because a game written specifically for PlayStation is compiled to run only on that hardware. Trying to run a PS4 binary on a Windows computer would be like getting into a taxi in New York and giving the driver instructions written in Japanese to an address in Tokyo. Even if he could understand both the language and the way it is expressed, you would be asking him to do something impossible.
In theory, transmitted by blood could be ported to Windows in the same way as the souls Games have been, but doing so would involve taking the game engine code, rewriting the parts that were designed in a way that optimized them for the PlayStation environment, and then compiling the result into an executable that would run on Windows. Even if the code were available, this would be a major task, and the code is largely No available.
So, okay, what we need is an emulator. Again, the actual PlayStation software is closed source and copyrighted, so the majority of the work to get this done is finding someone with the knowledge, time, and motivation to start from scratch and write a program that can translate the instructions provided by a PS4 binary into something a Windows PC can understand and run. Fortunately, those people existjust like a working PlayStation emulator: shadPS4.
In addition to the emulator, you will obviously also need a copy of the game. If you have a friend with a PlayStation, you can purchase a DVD copy and then download the files to a USB stick or portable hard drive. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail on how to do this here, but there are plenty of guides online. I also won’t speculate on whether there are other methods to obtain the game files.
Once you have the game and shadPS4 files, you will need to install the former on the latter. Again, this process is less complicated than it used to be:
And then you’ll be ready to go, right? Well, not entirely. While the transmitted by blood The emulation has much fewer bugs than a year ago, it is not perfect. As it stands right now, the biggest problem you’ll encounter is that the game is prone to “vertex bursts.”
If you’ve ever played with 3D software, you might have an idea of what this means. Basically, a 3D model is defined by its vertices: points in 3D space whose positions are fixed by their x, y, and z coordinates. Connect two vertices and you have a two-dimensional edge; connect three and you will have a two-dimensional triangular face. Connect several triangular faces along their shared edges and you have the beginning of a mesh, a three-dimensional manifold that encloses a region in 3D space.
Once you have a mesh, you can apply colors or textures to their faces. At the simplest level, this involves telling the GPU: “Hey, find the triangle defined by vertices A, B, and C, and set its pixels to red.” All of this means that a 3D game’s ability to successfully render graphics on your screen depends on it having an accurate and reliable record of the position of each vertex in each frame. If something goes wrong with this (if the vertex positions sent to your GPU are incorrect, or if the data is corrupted in some way), the textures and colors explode out of the faces they are supposed to occupy, and you end up with this:
This issue has plagued the shadPS4 implementation of transmitted by bloodSo much so that if you Google “vertex blast,” the top results are basically all related to emulating the game on PC. The problem appears to originate from a system called FaceGen, which allows you to customize your character’s face, as well as providing variation in NPC faces. There is a fairly detailed examination of the topic. here—It seems to have something to do with the way a PC distinguishes between system RAM and VRAM, while the PlayStation does not, but the linked blog post provides a much more nuanced explanation than I feel qualified to attempt.
This was one of the two problems I encountered last time and the good news is that today there are two ways to fix it. There is now a feature in shadPS4 that aims to mitigate the issue, although it comes with a significant performance hit. The alternative approach is to simply disable Facegen. This is implemented via a mod called “Vertex Explosion Fix”, and is the solution I chose. If it’s a choice between better performance and a bit of superficial variation on strangers’ faces Town of the Damned-Types of looks I’m chopping with an axe, I’ll choose the first.
The other problem with the version of the game that has been on my PC for a year is that for some reason the game’s particle effects didn’t work. Some of these are essentially eye candy, like the cascading specks that float slowly from the sky above Yharnam. It’s annoying not to have others, but they’re ultimately not the end of the world, like the explosion and flames that spread when you throw a Molotov cocktail into a crowd of sullen farmers.
But two of them are important, and their absence made the game unnecessarily difficult: the glowing orbs that provide the location of items, and the red blood stain on the ground that marks the spot where you died, allowing you to recover the item. runes souls The echoes of blood that remain when your character respawns.
I figured if I was really going to write about this, I’d better make the game as functional as possible. This meant re-exporting the game files, verifying that the patch was applied correctly, and then setting up a fresh installation of the most recent versions of both the launcher and shadPS4.
I’m not entirely sure which of these variables (the launcher, the mod, the newly exported game files, or the updated version of shadPS4) made the difference, although I suspect it was one of the latter two. But whatever the case, after a little time to get everything working again, I turned on the launcher, started the game and… particle effects! And no vertex explosions!
And then! Drum roll! After all that, behold the spectacle of me being trampled by something called (see notes) Cleric Beast.
This footage comes from my second attempt; The first time, I managed a miraculous “visceral attack,” which involves firing your gun at the exact moment an enemy is attacking, stunning them and allowing you to safely crush them with multiple strong attacks. That’s why you see me trying desperately and unsuccessfully to shoot this bastard in the mouth again.
Anyway, go ahead and laugh, this is a whole new world of bosses that make me feel stupid and frankly I couldn’t be happier.
