What is The Old Hunters?

One expansion, and the game’s best hour: the nightmare where the first hunters are buried.

The Old Hunters was released on November 24, 2015, Bloodborne’s single expansion. It opens a new nightmare layered on Yharnam’s own: a warped hunting ground where the church’s earliest hunters are trapped, built from the city’s districts rearranged and drowned. At its centre stands the research hall and Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower; at its end, a fishing hamlet, a beach, and the orphan of Kos, the sin the whole nightmare exists to hide.

Where Dark Souls expansions came in twos and threes, Bloodborne received exactly one, and it is widely treated as the game’s essential second half rather than an appendix: the lore of the old hunters, the origin of the nightmare, and the series of bosses, Maria first among them, that the community ranks at the very top of FromSoftware’s work.

INSIDE THE NIGHTMARE

What the expansion holds

Lady Maria

A boss fight built as a duel of hunters, speed, poise, and a clocktower, that routinely tops greatest-boss lists for the studio’s entire catalogue.

The Fishing Hamlet

The expansion’s last area moves the horror out of the gothic city entirely: rain, boats, and a village that knows what was done to it. The Lovecraft debt is paid here in full.

One and done

A complete-edition release with the expansion on disc followed, but no second expansion ever came. On this shelf, restraint is part of the object: Bloodborne is a game plus one perfect addendum.

What is The Old Hunters?

INSIDE THE NIGHTMARE

THE FIRST WORD