Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption

Back in Black

At the early stage in which I saw the game, it looked like Nihilistic was off to a good start. You start the game alone, but as you progress, you'll eventually have a party of four characters. Control will remain a single-player paradigm, but you'll be able to switch amongst members with a mouse click. In combat, which is in real time, you'll be able to issue group commands (such as "follow me," "search and destroy," "stay put") and let the party members' AI work autonomously. To ease your way into party control, you'll pick up members one at a time, to keep the learning curve a gradual one.

The game's interface is going to be completely mouse-driven and context-sensitive. As in Diablo, clicking on a door is simply going to open or close it, so you won't have to memorize a separate "open door" hotkey. The same will go for manipulating inventory items, weaponry, and in-game puzzle elements.

Character management is largely faithful to the White Wolf model, with about ten physical and mental attributes to tweak. Your stats are going to respond to how you role-play the game. For example, are you a heartless murderer, killing off your innocent human victims after sucking their blood, or do you just feed off your victims and let them live? Progression through the levels will also yield the standard RPG booty of increasingly powerful weaponry, armor, and magic spells (called "disciplines" in Vampire), such as the ability to summon beasts, turn into mist, or cast healing abilities.

Multiplayer capabilities still seemed a bit sketchy for now, but the basic idea seems to be to offer you a variety of different modes, such as human vs. vampires, clan vs. clan, or cooperative play, in which four players could go through the story together. (This has not been finalized, however.)

Finally, Nihilistic is planning to ship the game with both a level editor and user-accessible scripting language. This means that users will be able to fully customize the game.

C.O.D. (Care of the Devil)

Steeped in storytelling, with deep role-playing elements, yet loaded with eye candy and visceral action, Redemption is taking shape as one of the best chances for success for one of the elusive Holy Grails of gaming: the mature, emotionally involving action game. Nihilistic certainly has the right stuff to pull it off, and the game in progress so far shows lots of promise. If it doesn't suck when released this November, then it'll be us doing the sucking - bloodsucking, that is. We can hardly wait.