#oneaday, Day 181: Vampire: Bloodlines

Body clock buggered up today. After getting to bed late last night, I slept solidly until about lunchtime. Nice, but ultimately unproductive, as it means here I am at 3AM in the morning.

Actually, there’s another reason I stayed up so late, and that is Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

This is a game I’ve been meaning to play for absolutely ages. I’m a big fan of the White Wolf interpretation of vampirism and, to be honest, vampires in general. Just not the Twilight variety. Granted, I have never read or seen Twilight beyond reading a two-chapter preview on iBooks on my phone, but already both Bella and Edward seemed to be some of the most unsympathetic arseholes I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across in a book.

But that’s beside the point.

White Wolf’s interpretation of vampirism focuses much more on clan-based political intrigue, with each clan having its own unique outlook on life, special abilities and, in some cases, quirks. Part of the reason for this is for gameplay balancing in the pen-and-paper RPG. Instead of picking a character class, you pick a clan, and that determines your specialisms. But the pen-and-paper Vampire RPG is heavily focused on the RP bit as opposed to the G bit, meaning that these character backgrounds are hugely important from the perspective of actually playing your character in a realistic manner.

Bloodlines was the second Vampire game to hit the PC. The first, Redemption, was a mixed bag. It was notable for having a pretty good script, solid voice acting and (at the time) quite nice graphics. But the Diablo-style clicky-clicky combat really didn’t work from the close-up over-the-shoulder camera view adopted. The AI of party members was beyond “dumbass”. And there were lots of monumentally irritating bits where you had to sneak a four-person party through areas of sunlight. I never finished it as it got a bit frustrating, though I would like to return to it one day.

Bloodlines took a different approach. Based on an early version of the Source engine, it plays more like Deus Ex than anything else. You walk around LA from a first- or third-person perspective, meet people, talk to them, possibly suck their blood, fight them, complete quests in a variety of different ways and get involved in all the point-toothed intrigue you could shake a stake at.

The game was renowned for being hugely buggy on its original release. I haven’t noticed any showstopping bugs since I’ve been playing this evening—one or two minor graphical glitches, sure, but that’s more the old Source engine than the game itself I think. What I have noticed, though, is that it’s an utterly fantastic game. While it appears that the overarching narrative takes a while to get going—I played several hours tonight and couldn’t tell you what the “main” plot thread was—one of the best things the game does, much like Deus Ex, is immerse you in the game world. There are people in this world going about their business, and they are genuine characters whom you get to know and recognise.

One of the most compelling, immersive things about playing as a White Wolf vampire is the idea of the “Masquerade”, where vampires must hide their true nature from humans. In game terms, this means that you mustn’t let people see you feeding, using any obviously supernatural abilities or doing anything “vampirey”. There are get-out clauses to this, though; seduce a human using your vampiric seduction skills and they won’t mind you biting them, for example. But if anyone sees you doing that, you’re in trouble.

So far I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played. The balance between the RPG stat-building and the action-based combat is good, and some of the dialogue is genuinely well-written. The World of Darkness is introduced gradually in such a way that isn’t daunting to new players but isn’t patronising to those who know the lore.

In short, then, I can highly recommend the game from what I’ve seen so far. It’s currently available on Steam and via Direct2Drive. Good luck finding a physical copy if that’s your thing.