Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

[Mortis]

This text is partially based on an unfinished Bloodlines review that I started in 2006 and never finished. There is little review content here, but as Armand is planning to play the game soon, I thought I'd make a discussion thread for the game by using this text as a base. For a very different opinion, you could have a gander at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines was the first game ever to be created on the Source engine outside Valve. In fact, the game was "completed" (more on that later) far ahead of its original schedule and Troika Games found themselves to be contractually forbidden to even release the game until Valve would push Half-Life 2 out the door. This would delay the release of the game until November 2004.

Troika Games was founded by Leonard Boyarsky, Tim Cain and Jason Anderson - all former employees of Black Isle Studios, the company known for, among other well-known products, the original Fallouts and Planescape: Torment.

As far as the game itself is considered, Bloodlines' primary strength lies in how it manages to offer the player a diverse array of different gameplay choices: Where Redemption follows the same path no matter what choices you make, Bloodlines' vampire clans are all nigh-carbon-copied from White Wolf's material and are thus moderately, no, principally different. Especially playing with the Nosferatu, Tremere and Malkavian clans results in a substantially different gaming experience. Sadly, most players - including myself - would find it easier to stick to a more basic clan like the Brujah.

For actual Vampire fans, the undoubted strength of the game lies in the writing of the game - in fact, Bloodlines is considered canonical (unlike Redemption, which paid little heed to discipline restrictions and clan balance) and it shows. Characters such as Beckett, for instance, are actually well-established in previous WW vampire lore and the game does extremely well in terms of maintaining a "correct", if you will, atmosphere.

The Troika triplets' (Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson) offerings to the CRPG are undisputed (have a look at Boyarsky's website) and can be considered, without any doubt, some of the driving forces responsible for the renascence of the CRPG genre at the turn of the 1990s.

Ultimately, the Troika trio was betrayed by the very genre they helped create: As CRPGs are usually slow burners in game shops and don't exactly set the marketplace on fire, they nevertheless keep on moving considerable units years after their launch date. Sadly, Activision effectively forced Troika out of business - firstly by forcing them to release a gravely unfinished product and subsequently by not allowing them a longer period of recuperation afterwards.

I can only imagine how it feels to get the shaft from not one but two major publishers (Interplay and Activision). Surprisingly enough, two out of three of the Troika founders are still working in the games business as of 2007.

I've said very little of the actual game, and for that I apologize, but for those wanting wanting to play the game, there are tips to enhance performance:

• Update the game to official v1.2
• Update the game to unofficial (at the time of writing) v4.1 patch (or alternatively, the new "True" patch)
• Make a shortcut to the game, and do the following steps:
  
  • Turn on the Source console: vampire.exe -console
  • Increase the memory heapsize (it should be half your ram; 1gb equals -heapsize 512000)
  • Run the game on low priority through Windows' command.

This is how my shortcut looks like:

Code: Select all

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c start "Vampire: Bloodlines" /low D:\games\bloodlines\vampire.exe -console -heapsize 512000

[Armand]

Hmm, just something that caught my attention... if they were finished early, and were actually prevented by Valve from releasing the game at that point, then how could they also have been forced by Activision to publish it too early as a buggy Crappadocian?

[Mortis]

Finished as in forced by Activision The hard fact is once it became clear the game could not be published at that time Activision granted them an extra month out of which one week was used for actual bug fixing and three weeks for play testing. Judging from the state of the game you'd think they'd needed six months :]

[eci]

I just got into the game and I must say it is the bomb. The way the story is carried is brilliant, also the athmosphere really works for me. Although I've only started playing I can say this is one of my all time favourite games Only problem so far is my cheap-ass setup; the game lags quite badly sometimes and I can't have all the nice graphics turned up ...

[Mortis]

I just got into the game and I must say it is the bomb. The way the story is carried is brilliant, also the athmosphere really works for me. Although I've only started playing I can say this is one of my all time favourite games Only problem so far is my cheap-ass setup; the game lags quite badly sometimes and I can't have all the nice graphics turned up ...

I'm really glad you found it exciting, because Bloodlines seems to be a game that keeps splitting audiences: Some really, really dig it, and some just plain don't - and I never quite understood as to why, since the immersion of the game is top-notch for a "shooter engine" game, right up there with... say, BioShock. The best parts of the game are so transparent, perhaps, that players who are used to more immediate gameplay feedback and rewards are perhaps left scratching their heads.

Just like you said, I too thought that the game was principally about story and atmosphere, conveying the mindset and situation of "the vampire", as a societal concept or state (I think it's always appropriate to discuss "The Other" in relation to vampires ). In that sense I feel the writing is largely comparable to that of the Fallouts... there too, we have "The Other", in the form of the cast-out (rather than the outcast) and the tribal. It makes for a good setting because you're instantly vulnerable, and vulnerability makes for a perfectly good, logical storytelling vehicle.

Perhaps that is indeed why Bloodlines was the game that I found immediate solace in after I had completed my Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 binge, I mean, I really felt like I had nowhere to go after them, game-wise. Now that I think of it, I also felt like I had nowhere to go after Bloodlines and BioShock, too... I guess that's the most immediate emotional response to a succesful escapade (in the sense of escapism ) coming to its concrete end.