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dkirschner's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PC)
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| [July 8, 2016 07:51:43 PM]
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Played this a long time today, but am going to retire it. I think I bought it like 4 years ago, but I could never get it to work on Windows 7, even with patches and community support, on my old machine. Installed it on a whim the other week, and it works fine on this machine with Windows 8.1. Definitely glad to have played it. A beautifully flawed game.
The game's version of Los Angeles is super grim. Story NPCs are great characters, from Smiling Jack to the split personalities of the night club owner in the first hub (I didn't realize she was a split personality until 1 second before it was revealed; I thought the game was glitching and/or one of the characters was being silly and dressing the same as her sister) to the college-educated anarch in Downtown. The story is engrossing as well, enjoyed the quests, tracking people down, planting some explosives, learning about different vampire clans, etc. There is a ton of potential to explore vampire fiction in games and not have it be like Twilight.
The game is soooo reminiscent of Deus Ex, it's crazy. It looks similar, the atmosphere is the same, the movement and combat feel similar, similar sinister story, etc. As I thought about Deus Ex though when I replayed it years later, Vampire is showing its age. The graphics are still okay, and the art is good so it's nice to look at, but the combat suuuuucks. I mean, the ideas are cool. You get melee weapons, guns, and vampire powers. I can throw a swarm of bats at people, go invisible, and call on super strength, all very handy. But getting into fights is just a clickfest hoping you drain their life before they drain yours. Also interacting with objects in the environment is finicky. Sometimes the interact icon just doesn't show up, other times you can't click on it. Irritating.
It would be cooler if there were more of a traditional action RPG or adventure game skill tree. They sorta mapped D&D rules onto character creation and stat management. You get some starting feats, points to put into various attributes, which raises the value of skills. If you have played D&D, it's nothing you haven't seen. But I think it works to the game's disadvantage because your character doesn't noticeably improve much. The D&D system for CRPGs works so well because it's usually with squad-based games. You have four or five characters you're managing, and you're learning more spells and doing more micromanaging, seeing improvement in how skills and abilities interrelate as new enemies and situations are tossed at you. In this game, combat is just always me running around clicking left mouse to attack until someone dies. I can stealth in the beginning and get some stealth kills, sure, and I can toss some bats or use my super strength, but I'm still just clicking madly. It's lost its charm quickly, which is too bad.
Another way it's showing age is that, although the NPCs are neat and the dialogue is excellent, they don't feel very interactive. They're information dispensers. Vampire came out in 2004, so we hadn't seen any Mass Effects or Dragon Ages. More interactive NPCs were just around the corner for the most part, NPCs who seemed to KNOW you and your character and seemed to really be invested in what happened, or in what you said to them among the various dialogue options, or who frequently did things with you.
So anyway, I did enjoy this for the most part, but I get the gist of it, and I think I will use Vampire as the excuse to play a string of older games I have lying around on Steam.
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dkirschner's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated
GameLog started on: Monday 4 July, 2016
GameLog closed on: Friday 8 July, 2016 |
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