Bloodborne Servers Undergoing “Emergency Maintenance”

According to the official website for Bloodborne, the game servers, which are necessary to peruse the game’s multiplayer functionalities, are currently offline for “emergency maintenance”. The message doesn’t elaborate as to why this maintenance is necessary, and the Bloodborne developers gave no warning about the maintenance beforehand, strongly suggesting this wasn’t planned:

We are currently conducting emergency maintenance on the game servers. The maintenance should be complete within a few days. We will update you again once the maintenance ends.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for playing Bloodborne.

Interestingly, Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek is suggesting this might be because players had found an exploit that would let anyone access the content from recently released DLC without paying for it, though there is no proof that is the case:

Now, while Bloodborne has player-vs-player mechanics that are crucial to the game’s longevity, it’s hard to imagine anything being so game breaking that it’d require the game’s online modes being brought down entirely for several days.

However, a few days ago, a user posted a thread on the subreddit titled (Old Hunter free DLC glitch.) The post has since been removed, but several users claimed whatever trick had been originally listed did give free access.

I’ve since discovered the supposed steps, but in the event it’s not fixed when the severs come back online, I’m not willing to outline them in this post. Since the game’s offline, I also haven’t been able to test whether it works myself.

Again, I’ve asked Sony about this, but haven’t heard back.

Being able to gain access to a $20 set of DLC without paying for it would definitely constitute an (exploit) that would require (emergency maintenance.)

Either way, hopefully whatever problem forced Sony and From Software to turn off their servers will be fixed soon. The DLC for Bloodborne has just been released, and there is no doubt many players are currently looking for help to overcome its challenges, whether that comes in the form of summons or messages left on the ground. While From Software’s action-RPG are perfectly competent in offline mode, there’s something to be said for how much richer the experience feels when they’re played online.