Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

After Black Isle (Fallout, Planescape: Torment) dissolved, the people that worked there split into two teams - Troika Games and Obsidian Entertainment. Troika unfortunately died quite some time ago, but before their death they made three amazing RPGs. One of them is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

What's cool about this cult classic is that it's very easy for modern gamers to get into - every single piece of dialogue (side quests/main quests) is fully voice acted by a superb cast, and it's using the Source Engine, which still looks really nice in HD buffed up by some AA.

And what an amazing RPG this is, dripping with a fantastic, engrossing atmosphere that's completely unique, a great story and a brilliant array of side quests that dwelve into the mythos of this universe. This game can be summed up as Deus Ex set in modern LA with a vampire theme, with a spice of horror and goth thrown into the mix. You can pick between a nice array of different types of vampire to play as that will affect your dialogue options and the way the game progresses; Character progression will depend on how you play.

The characters are all memorable thanks to the impressive facial animations and extremely impressive voice acting, besides the fantastic writting Black Isle have been known for.

There's also two types of combat - melee and gunplay. The gunplay is a little improved over Deus Ex, meaning that it's simply not good if you don't put points into your gun skills. As for the melee, it's surprisingly decent. I enjoyed the melee combat, it's in third person, you can defend against attacks and use an array of combos (by using different key combinations) to make the opponent helpless against you.

This game was almost unplayable at release date because Activision and Valve practically screwed Troika completely (hence why they're dead), but thanks to an extremely dedicated community that knew what a gem this was, most (if not all) issues have been fixed, so DO NOT PLAY without the Unofficial Patch.

It fixes a ton of bugs, balance issues, animation issues (iirc it also fixes the combat, that's probably why i enjoyed the melee wile others didn't) also it adds a widescreen patch in which you can play in HD glory and a graphical facelift thanks to ENB series (which makes the game look far better than in my screenshots)

Highly recommend this game to any RPG fan. As with Planescape: Torment, this game has wonderful writting, a good story, is completely unique and has no modern equivalent. And thanks to the unofficial patch, Source Engine and wonderful 100% voice acted dialogue, it's a easy masterpiece to get into.

I really wish this game had done better so we could see more. I myself didn't play it until a couple years ago though.

One of my all time favorite games (hence my avatar of Jeanette) seems like someone else on this board has great taste in games :P

I have played through it two and a half times once as a toreador and once as a malkavian. The malkavian playthrough was quite fun.

Yup. As far as story driven rpgs go, give me games like Bloodlines, Torment...over Bioware's rehashing of characters, themes and plot devices any day.

Great RPG indeed and definitely one of the more memorable ones out there in terms of setting and atmosphere.

Yeah, Jeanette and the other sister will stay etched in my mind for a wile. Now that was a great, great quest.

I'm a fan of Black Isle and their legacy, but this game is the only one from them that i haven't put much effort into. I did play it years ago, but i don't remember getting that far, maybe less than a quarter into it.

Right now, i'm taking my time doing side quests and slowly advancing the main plot wen i feel like it, the side quests are so good, varied and interesting, that i just can't help myself.

This is my favorite horrible game of all time. Even with the unnofficial patches, the melee combat, gunplay and stealth border on being just plain broken. In spite of this, I've beaten it at least 3 times when these days even beating a game once might be a stretch if the game isn't very good. Everything about this game is awesome, except for the execution. Everything they -tried- to do is great, even if they weren't that successful at everything they tried to do. Open world city hubs, modern non-fantasy/sci-fi setting, branching dialog trees and varying levels of success in sidequests, great writing, etc.

However, this is a pretty oft-spoken of game on this forum. While this is a nice post, I doubt there are that many who might read it who don't already know about this game. Also, I don't agree that Troika is this holy, blameless creature when it comes to the many, many problems that VTM:B has.

-Byshop

I'm enjoying the melee combat, it's challenging and feels nice, so i don't agree there. I think the gunplay is a little improvement over Deus Ex (the way the reticle expands is straight out of Deus Ex, though now it only expands if you run) and it still is not good and requires a good chunk of skill points if you want to play with guns. As for the stealth, i've barely used it, but i agree that it's not good either. Doesn't hinder me though, it's really fun creeping in on someone and jumping on him to feed.

The funny thing is that none of the games Black Isle, Troika or Obsidian have ever made were close to perfect and without flaws. None, not one of their games weren't crippled by a number of flaws, not just a couple. But there's just so much diamond in the rough unparalleled (quest design, atmosphere, writting) in my opinion, and that's why i love their games, and i'm really loving Bloodlines aswell.

I don't know what relevance that has to you. As for me, even if i get one view, i'm cool. Instead of starting a site, or a blog, i'm mearly writting here. :)

No one said that Troika are blameless, or holy (what? who would even say that?). But what i am saying is the fact that Activision pushed the game for a more earlier release date, wile Valve on the other hand wanted a later release date.

That type a pressure would have screwed over anyone.

Give me an unpolished gem over a polished run of the mill turd any day. Especially when it comes to rpgs.

Think me and GodModeEnabled have advocated this game for years. I completed it 4 times. Malkavian was my favorite play, followed by making the ultimate toreador slut.

I suddenly got the feeling to play it again....

Good thing these games can be polished thanks to community fixes. I have the original copies of Fallout 1 & 2 in my collection, and they're practically impossible to play without a game breaking bug happening every 15 minutes, if left vanilla.

But thanks to countless issues resolved and the HD patch, they're a bliss to play.

@ Lucianu "if you don't put points into your gun skills"

I suppose things like that makes it a better RPG, but over all, it makes the rest of the game worse.

Man I hate "points" .

This is a game where your choice of clan can entirely change your gameplay experience. Malkavians are crazy, but insightful. So, maybe sometimes the TV starts talking to you, but then others, you can convince an enemy that his partner is actually food and needs to be eaten. Or you have the ugly Nosferatu that have to stick to sewers and dark alleys to avoid being spotted and thus breaking the Masquerade.

it's a brilliant RPG with some truly amazing questlines. The overarching story is okay, but really the best part of the game is the characters you meet, how diverse and interesting they are, and how you are able to interact with them. If you haven't played it, you should really try it. Pretty much anything from Black Isle and the companies formed by ex-Black Isle employees is worth trying.

The animation in Vampire still puts a lot of similar games to shame. I hated playing things like Oblivion, Fallout, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution and having characters stare at me with an intense lifelessness. In Vampire, characters felt alive, even though most were undead. They laugh, they cry, they giggle. Jeanette, for example, will say something sarcastic and her body movements will follow it up. She'll slyly smirk while resting a hand on her hip in a relaxed manner.

I also love how different clans meant significantly different playthroughs. As a Tremere, most people will hate you. As a Nosferatu, you have to stick to the sewers. As a Malkavian, I had no idea what I was saying.

The atmosphere, the music, the story. All so great. Plus, there were singular encounters. You fought a ghost one time, you fought a Werewolf one time. It did so because it fit the world and it fit the story. It didn't repeat things because of lazy developers, but it always offered something new.

Glad to see it getting more praise almost a decade after release.

Absolutely love this game, been a huge supporter of it since it came out. And by love I mean, it's in my top ten videogames of all time. Even if it's imperfect.

Got my boxed copy with manual, so beat that!

It's challenging for sure, but it's also very, very rough (as in unpolished). Too many times it's easy to get hung up on minor debris on the floor or get stuck behind an NPC because the bounding boxes are HUGE. On more than one occasion I got stuck behind a homeless guy because he followed me down a narrow passageway or staircase (this would happen a lot in the stairs that lead to the prosthetic limb manufacturer's office). When you compare Bloodlines to HL2 it looks like garbage. Even compared to other 3rd person/first person games the overall gunplay, movement and melee combat was very unpolished.

My point about the forum post was that this content should be a blog.

I was being a tad hyperbolic, but when you blamed only Activition and Valve for the game's failings you implied that Troika wasn't to blame. I was clarifying that Troika wasn't blameless. Temple of Elemental Evil was also plauged by bugs and neither Activision or Valve were involved in the development or release of that game.

-Byshop

@ Ish_basic

Sorry, Way too Hardcore for my taste. Still need to get around to playing Alpha Protocol

AP is another game I hold in equally high esteem to Bloodlines for a lot of the same reasons, but AP is a much more polished game in a lot of ways.

-Byshop

I agree that it's unpolished but i definitely can't help but feel you have played at the very least with a ancient version of the unofficial patch (there have been 5 major updates this year alone, of which the last two fixed a huge amount of bugs, current one released a couple of weeks ago).

I believe you, i mean, you have got no reason to lie, but my experience is completely different from yours. I'm pretty far in the game (25+ hours) and have explored every knock and cranny completing side-quests and so forth, but i have not experienced the things you mentioned.

I definitely don't think it's nearly as unpolished as Alpha Protocol, right now. I don't know of any community patches but vanilla Alpha Protocol is far more unpolished than Bloodlines + 8.8 unofficial patch.

I agree that it doesn't look as good as HL2, because it's a earlier version of the engine, but it doesn't look like garbage in HD with AA. Given the fact that you can also add ENB series to make it really, really good, i don't see any problems with the graphics.

Overall, i respect your experience, but that's not going to change my experience with the game..

So can we just agree that Bloodlines is unpolished, rough around the edges in many ways and still requires a few updated patches. But it still is a great, unique RPG that's worth playing?

Give the game a try until you reach the Ocean House Hotel quest. That quest is very early in the game, and it's extremely memorable, thick with atmosphere. A lot of people love Bloodlines for that quest alone.

Overall, it's a very unique game. Unique experiences are the reasons why i haven't quit gaming yet.

I played this game before the unofficial patch and was blown away. People who complain because it's unpolished are way too superficial, and should probably ask themselves why they are playing games. I'd say that it's comparable in polish to KOTOR, which sold a bajillion units (while being clearly inferior in many ways). This game is still a lot better in many ways than the recent offerings from Bioware and Bethesda and stuff.

Troika is gaming's biggest loss of the last decade. It's a shame that this game didn't sell better. Releasing on the same day as HL2 was such a stupid move.

Everyone keeps saying it but it's baffling why no company has follow up on a game like it. Especially when all the Twilight stuff was throwing vampires into the lime light again. Even if it's an indy development, even if it doesn't use White Wolf Licence, people lap up the whole vampire, werewolf thing.

Actually... Didn't I read on Gamespot somewhere that a proper white wolf MMO was on the works. That's good and all but trouble with it, being an MMO it's about the gear and numbers, story and character goes bye, bye.

Yeah, White Wolf Publishing (owners of the IP) ended up merging with CCP Games (EVE Online) and are currently working on a Word of Darkness MMO. Development has been pretty slow though, considering it started production in 2009, but they have been actively working on it.

One of the best RPG´s ever made even with all the issues it had(and some that still has),amazing experience.

You're right that I haven't played any of the unofficial patches that have come out this year, but they don't fix the kind of problems I'm talking about. The unofficial patches address issues like broken scripting in quests, dialog errors and typos, missing content (content that exists in the game assets but is inaccessible in the final official release of the game), number stats like damage and buff duration, etc. This is all great stuff, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't address core gameplay issues like hitboxes or getting hung up on environment debris. I've done at least 3 full playthroughs on this game that I remember and did partial playthroughs with Malkavian and Nosferatu just to see how different the experience is with the more extreme classes.

When I say the game is rough, I'm not talking about a few missing graphic settings like AA and AF. The version of the Source Engine they used was, at its core, the same engine used for HL2 although at the time they were developing the game some of the features were unfinished which is why the game is pretty short on graphics settings. The great NPC AI in HL2 and that you get to play with in Gary's Mod also hadn't been completed, so Troika had to develop their own which wasn't nearly as good. But that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I'm talking about muddy and low resolution textures, horribly jerky character animations in the world and in combat (although not in conversations, that part of the interaction they did very well), overly simplistic 3d models (people looked fine, but other things in the world like cars looked like they were painted concrete slabs with octogonal wheels) and mediocre map design (the parking garage, for example, is malproportuned to the point that the cars inside wouldn't actually be able to move around inside it, if they were capable of moving and not just part of the map as well).

I'm not trying to change your opinion on the game, I'm just expressing mine, and there's no obligation for us to agree on anything. Your post reads like a blog post, but you posted it in the discussion forum so I'm discussing the game. The writing, atmosphere, dialog, humor, story, and music are all great but the -game- part of this particular video game is pretty bad. While I agree that this is a real diamond in the rough, it's also not a game I can unreservedly recommend to people because of it's major, major flaws.

Like I said, it's one of my absolute favorite terrible games.

-Byshop

*high fives*

That's pretty much how the genre is going. Anybody who has a mind to do a large scale (meaning non-indie, $20mill+ development cost) RPG anymore is doing an MMO, and it's shame. I don't know if devs are just finding a hard time getting a single player RPG invested or what. But it seems as we get more MMOs, we get less single player RPGs. There's still plenty of indy stuff, but I really crave more big-budget RPGs.

Anyway, isn't the concept of an MMO in a world like this kinda lore breaking? Hard to keep up the Masquerade if you have a hundred thousand vampires running around the same city areas. I always got the impression that each city was its own court, with a relative handful of Camarilla, a few clanless, and maybe a small group from a competing sect...maybe 50 or so vamps in a large city. Doesn't seem conducive to an MMO.

@Byshop:

From what i've read, the unofficial patches do fix core gameplay issues, animation issues, sound issues, AI issues, graphical errors and texture issues, amongst a wealth of others things, you can read the list of changes for the last 6 updates here.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, i don't know why i kept going back and forth like that. I disagree with almost everything you wrote, so i'll just agree to disagree. Afterall, no point in going in circles.

@Evil_Saluki:

Well, there was that whole DARK thing (which appeared to come damned close to plagiarising the lore of White Wolf imho), but t'was pretty horrific by most accounts (and not in a good way).

You're probably thinking of World of Darkness. That's the White Wolf MMO that CCP (the guys who made Eve Online) are putting together. It looks like it's the best vampire game since Bloodlines, and they promise it'll have the same level of ruthlessness and greifing as Eve.

-Byshop

I've read them too. While there are a few animation and sound glitches, that's still cosmetic. None of that addresses any of the specific issues I mentioned. Hell, you can get stuck on the door leading out of your apartment if you try to go through it too quickly when it opens. The unofficial patches don't fix the giant bounding boxes around NPCs that make it seem like every character has a 2 foot force field around them or the block and VERY often repeated world object assets.

For every pretty view you get like this:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=D736F28A994DAF71!38663&authkey=!ANQqmA_JXzpSZEE&v=3

You can turn and see something like this:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=D736F28A994DAF71!38664&authkey=!AM4FVd2NJI9Z8Oc&v=3

Is that supposed to be a car, or a child's refrigerator drawing of a car? This is a game that came out in 2004, mind you. Vehicles from the original Deus Ex looked better than that. Look at the wheels. They couldn't even manage creating a circle.

Or this:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=D736F28A994DAF71!38664&authkey=!AM4FVd2NJI9Z8Oc&v=3

How exactly do cars get in and out of this parking garage?

Stuff like this ruins the immersion of what would otherwise be a very immersive game.

-Byshop

I really enjoyed the world of the game. But sadly I got stuck in some sewer part with limited ammo...

My thoughts about an MMO White Wolf game also. Players act like dicks, the masquerade has no chance, your going to have naked vampires jumping up on down on cars in daylight singing "Fire" by Kasabian while a Werewolf stands in full form at a grocery store buying health food.

There's much more in there than that, little things that in the grand scheme adds up and makes a difference. As i said before, i never experienced such issues to the degree you have (like getting stuck in debris). I recommend you give the game a go with the current release of the unofficial patch, wen you feel like it, ofcourse. Or don't, it's obviously up to you.

I'm well aware of the bounding boxes for the NPCs, though i never gave it a second of a thought, because well, they never bothered me in the slightest.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems to me like you're just putting a bigger emphasis on the game's flaws, rather than the positive aspects. Like how you're bothered by the inconsistency of the graphics or the unrealistic structure of the parking garage; Things that allthough i do acknowledge as flaws, do not bother, nor hinder my experience with the game.

Bottom like is that i understand why you're bothered , how people weigh in the cons and the pros of a video game is going to vary wildly from person to person. For example, i would never have loved the original Deus Ex without modifying the AI to be a challenge. That horrifyingly bad AI killed immersion for me.

I'm running 8.8 now. As I already said several times, the unofficial patches don't address ANY of the kind of core issues I'm talking about. Here's my character getting hung up on a door on 8.8 in the FIRST ROOM OF THE GAME: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfK8vLFCIWo. I know the game has posistive points and I agree that the overall sum of the good and the bad still results in a game worth playing. I've said that several times already, but you don't seem to be getting it. My point is that this an awesome game in spite of it being an unpolished mess.

Really? Point out ONE core gamplay fix in the unofficial patches. As I already said, everything in those patches is cosmetic, quest or dialog scripting issues, or stat changes like damage modifications or buff duration changes. You keep saying "try the latest patch" but I already know that the unofficial patches don't fix the issues I'm talking about. Show me where an unofficial patch addresses the crap aiming, the jerky 3rd person camera, the horrible collision detection, etc. I already know the answer: they don't. The game is a buggy wreck, as is evidenced by the fact that nearly a decade later the community is still releasing bug-fix patches.

-Byshop

It is a great and memorable game, though I've only played it once as an Ventrue i believe.

Has anyone played as Nosferatu? I was surprised that was an option because I thought it would be really limited in what you could do.

Yes, do NOT play it without the patch, since the game is unbeatable for anyone who spends the majority of the game playing stealthily. I found out the hard way and had to console-cheat in skills and a flamethrower for a late-game boss fight.

Malkavian and Nosferatu are both classes that one should only try on a replay because they present additional challenge. For the Nosferatu, there's an Obfuscate discipline that you can use that makes you appear human to balance it out.

-Byshop

Okay, you're right.

It's not about being right, it's abourt discussing the game. My opinions are just opinions, but I try to qualify them with specific examples and comparisons whenever possible. The game having bugs is a factual statement because I can point to specific behaviors in the game that are pretty clearly not intentional. Whether these bugs or lack of polish outweigh the positive elements of the game is a matter of opinion so there is no right answer because this will differ for different people. I -wish- this game had the same level of polish as other Source games like HL2 because it would have been one of the most amazing games ever made, but as is it's still pretty decent.

-Byshop