Bloodborne's bullets have disproportionate hitboxes depending on who's fired them.
As uncovered by prestigious modder meowmaritus earlier this week on Twitter, enemy bullets and player bullets have different hitboxes in Bloodborne. On the left is an enemy bullet with a smaller hitbox, meaning it's technically harder to hit the player, while the on right is a player's bullet with a huge hitbox, making it easier to hit an enemy even if the bullet looks as though it missed.
in bloodborne, the enemy bullets have realistically sized hitboxes but the player bullets have giant bullshit hitboxes, which is the opposite of what i expected ngl pic.twitter.com/rCD5ZbJZjSJuly 24, 2023
There's not really any solution to why FromSoftware did this, but game design theory might teach us something. Empowering the player has been a key theory among more action games than I can count, and making it easier to hit an enemy with a bullet while dodging out the way of a comparatively smaller bullet makes trading fire a great thrill for the player.
You can see video proof of the game design in action below. The player's bullet has a far greater chance of hitting the enemy, even if they try to sidestep the attack, than the enemy bullet does of hitting the player because it's smaller. This is a really neat little trick that FromSoftware was hiding up their sleeve this entire time, without us even knowing.
You can see here the realistically sized bullet hitbox the enemy has then my giant ass bullshit hitbox pic.twitter.com/ZuzeyjQXM2July 24, 2023
As a follow-up tweet from the modder shows, though, this doesn't apply to all the player's ranged weapons. It turns out arrows from Simon's Bowblade have way smaller hitboxes than bullets for some reason, so it's a little harder to land ranged attacks with that weapon than say, for example, the standard hunter's pistol.
We should probably chalk this discovery up to the Bloodborne player base being desperate for a new port or remaster. When a game came out over eight years ago and the player base is still combing through it for secrets, you've got one hell of a dedicated/starved community on your hands.
Evidence earlier this year pointed to a fully playable Bloodborne PC port, but there's doubt it'll ever see the light of day.
