Tuesday, February 9, 2021

A yammerjammer about Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines

Vampire: The Masquerade is a role-playing game wherein you are a vampire (surprise) and must maintain the masquerade (surprise) so that all the idiot bloodbags don't get wise to your existence.

They turned it into a video game circa Half-Life 2, which is set in four small slivers of Los Angeles, and is getting a sequel.

Said sequel is delayed, presumably because they realized that setting it in Seattle means that they're going to have to come up with some explanation for why the Ventrue can drink blood with so much soy in it.

Meanwhile, here is my review of the original game.

After an illicit one-night stand, the PC gets vampirized and thrown into a web of political bullshit. Yeah, it turns out vampires have their own internal political squabbles, meaning that the difference between a vampire and a politician is that one is a damned bloodsucking monster and the other is vulnerable to sunlight.

Anyway, after a brief tutorial, you're sent off to Santa Monica to do intrigue stuff. And at this point I realized that my character was basically just a secret agent with no tan. Okay, I can roll with that. Only, there are seven different flavors of vampire you can be. You have the Brujah, who punch everyone to death; you have the Gangrel, who are melee-focused furries; you have the Malkavians, who are cray-cray; you have the Nosferatu, who are ugly but sneaky; you have the Toreador, who are poncy hedonists; the Tremere, who are magic; and the Ventrue, who are the aristocratic fucks who run everything. I played as a Brujah and named him Lemartes, after a false start as a Toreador showed me how utterly fucked the game's shooting mechanics are.

Actually I lie. First I took the game's built-in "answer these questions and we'll tell you what vampire you are" test, and I got Malkavian. But you're not supposed to play your first game as a Malkavian because either you'll have no idea what your character is talking about or your character will completely spoil the game. Like I said, cray-cray.

One thing I like about the game is that it doesn't hold your hand. You really have to poke around to find computer passwords and the like. That can be frustrating, but it's so much better than the modern "here is a minimap showing you exactly where you need to go" nonsense that infests every game today.

The biggest annoyance in the first half of the game is the fact that some characters, when you turn in a side-quest, have another side-quest for you to do, but won't tell you about it until after you stop talking to them and then say hello again.

The biggest annoyance in the second half of the game is the fact that it discarded all the RPG elements and became a rail-shooter. So if you didn't put points into guns (and god the shooting mechanics suck horse dick) or offensive magic powers, you are fucked. 

The good news is that all the good content is in the first half - things go to shit pretty quickly once you get to Hollywood, so if you have alt-itis like I do, it's not that punishing.

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