Modder Explains How He Created That Cool Bloodborne Mod That Lets You Control Enemies

You might have recently seen a cool Bloodborne mod floating around Twitter early this week. The mod allows a player, using a modded copy of the game, to take control of enemies by locking on to them. The creator of this mod explained to me how they created it and their future plans for it.

This mod was posted on Twitter on March 23, Thursday and after a few follow-up tweets showing off more details and features, it quickly blew up. And it makes sense why so many folks liked this mod. Letting you take control of all the crazy and strange enemies in Bloodborne is a wonderful way to get a better sense of how these foes actually work. To take over a creature or enemy, players simply lock on to them and suddenly they are now controlling whatever nasty beast was in front of them.

Currently working on a Bloodborne mod that allows you to take control of enemies by locking onto them. Works on any enemy. Proof of concept but working nice so far, lots of work left to go to make it useable though. pic.twitter.com/Dkmkpa6xpR

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) May 23, 2019

The mod was created by modder Lance McDonald and takes advantages of debug features found in the game, that the developers used and later deactivated before shipping the game.

“The mod is calling the debug menu function that allows you to take control of enemies. The developers built this entire feature themselves but just removed the debug menu from the game,” explained McDonald to Kotaku.

The way this debug feature works make it impossible to finish the entire game as an enemy, as enemies can’t climb ladders or hurt other enemies. Also if players get to far away from their player character they will despawn. McDonald has no plans to change how this feature works, but he does want to make taking over enemies more optional. Currently, locking on instantly takes over the enemy.

“I plan to improve the mod to make it so you don’t just lock-on and instantly take control of them,” said McDonald.“It would be better to be able to lock-on like normal, but then press a special button combination to take control.” However, getting this to work is hard and involves features that the debug option and code didn’t originally include. But not long after talking to me, McDonald posted new video footage showing he had added this button combination feature into the mod.

Okay it’s done. Bloodborne mod to play as enemies. Press L3 to take control of locked-on enemy. Press L1+R1+R3 to return control to player. Pretty happy with this. It’s actually a debugging feature that was removed, I just patched in some sneaky code to access it. pic.twitter.com/4KEcrkpMyN

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) May 24, 2019

The most interesting information the modder shared with me was that he plans to actually bring this feature to other From Software games. “The feature works in Sekiro too. So I’ll get to work on that when I get the Bloodborne one finished.” With Sekiro on PC, it will most likely be easier for McDonald to share his work with other players. McDonald is already making great progress on adding this enemy control feature into Sekiro, sharing video footage of his progress on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/embed/status/1132122809868513280

This isn’t his first mod. On his personal YouTube channel, he has shared some of his other creations and finds, including cut content from various From Software titles.