Vampire: Bloodlines

Anyone here have a preffered play style, I usaully play as Chaotic Good Malvakian.

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

I actually enjoy being a rebel Ventrue. I do Malkavian for laughs.

Jonah Falcon

I've completed playthroughs as a loyal Tremere, a Ventrue, and a Malkavian. Malkavian is lots of fun, of course, not the least because obfuscate is so overpowered.

My latest liveblog.

Loyal tremere is fun, Malkavian was honestly underwhelming. You get the same experience, just a little reskinned, but at least using obfuscate to stealth kill left and right with a katana a-là Tenchu was fun.

I've played through the game six times, all but two I played a obfuscate-centric malkavian focused on melee weapons and lockpick/hck/persuade as main skills. My other two were tremere blood mage with guns and stealth, and nosferatu with the exact same thing as malkavian. It's not that I like the malk dialog, I actually hated it first time I saw it because I ended up pissing people off without knowing what I said, but I've grown used to it as part of the game's style. I just really like obfuscate.

I am extremely glad the game doesn't use good/evil and law/chaos (well, I guess it does, but it's not a 1:1 match) but I usually went for whatever gets me the best stuff, except when I went through without quickloading as a malk (except when I died a cheap death) and when I played tremere, with whom I was intentionally an asshole. Usually I end up with few masquerade violations and 6-7 humanity.

Someone somewhere mentioned that you have to the play it through three times to experience all the different kinds of play, As Tremere(unique power/normal dialogue), as Nosferatu(forced stealth/normal dialogue) and as Malkavian(normal gameplay/unique dialogue). Unfortuantely I only finished it once(Damn the sewers) so I can't verify if it's true but it seem reasonable. Vt M:B is truly a Troika game, Buggy as hell ,Awesome for most of it and then a section that's so horribly designed it might stop you from finishing.

In the quiet of the night, the Neocount of Merentha mused: How long does evolution take, among the damned?

I really wish the other clans had their own dialouge style.

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

That's why the Good Lord invented "god mode".

Jonah Falcon

If you have a properly designed character the endgame isn't really *that* difficult. Ugly? Yeah. Poorly designed? Yeah. But difficult? I've managed to end it with a Tremere that focused almost all his points on the social skills, and it was a cakewalk with my combat-savvy Malkavian. I can only see people using a Toreador having problems, really.

It's not the endgame as much as the HIDEOUSLY LONG TREK THROUGH THE GODDAMN SEWERS.

That said, finished it as Toreador (very badly picked skills) Malkavian (obfuscate+melee FTW) and Tremere (Magic+guns)

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

^ The real difficult part of the sewers is the beginning with those head-thingies. Those things detect you if you try to sneak, and they also gave me some really bad scares.

Obfuscate makes the sewer section totally trivial. Also trivial: every section of the god damn game, with the exception of La Croix' endgame.

My latest liveblog.

I played my first game as a Malkavian. I didn't really have any problems understanding what I was saying, but it wasn't until later I picked up on all the hints I kept revealing to myself.

I'm not taking off my pants for a forum meme. -Nornagest

^The tmizche head creatures can see through obfuscate as well, can't they? At least in the patched version I played.

I played the unofficial patch, and as far as I can recall they can't. If they can, they're still pretty damn easy - obfuscate lets you avoid the real baddies still. Maybe you just need higher levels of obfuscate.

My latest liveblog.

Played through it with Toreador (the best clan if you want to use ranged weapons), Tremere and Malkavian. And yes, the sewers are the ultimate Scrappy Level. It may not be hard but it's just so long and tedious.

^^I always maxed out my obfuscate before leaving Santa Monica.

The warrens are too long, and too difficult/annoying for a non-combat specialist, but I think they're salvageable. The fact that you don't have to do the whole thing at once is one people usually forget.

Toreador for my first run years ago. It wasn't until late in the game that I learned that the Celerity let me tap into The Matrix at high levels, but thankfully I had enough EXP to max it out, making the endgame a breeze.

"If you're out here why do I miss you so much?"

Because this game is just like Deus Ex◊

In the quiet of the night, the Neocount of Merentha mused: How long does evolution take, among the damned?

Don't you dare insult a good game like Deus Ex. Bloodlines is more like Deus Ex: Invisible War. Underwhelming, largely crappy, with barely any sense and it's better to pretend it never existed.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Have you never seen the DX De Mots with that slogan? It's just a game people are nostalgic for, and Vt M:B is also one of the few games that is in the same "genre" as DX. ( and from comments when it's mentioned the slogan is true for both games.)

Also IIRC your complaints against this game from various other threads are that the plot would fall apart if it was played be your gaming group and/or if some of the powers worked as in the tabletop game(high level Auspex on the Dane, right?). While I don't know your group, that is negated by the fact that you play a single character and thus don't have access to "group dynamics". On the subject of powers I'm not qualified to speak since I haven't read the rulebook/ played the Tabltop game, but can you even have exp enough for the required level of Auspex when you arrive at the Dane? I assume I missed a lot but those are the things that stuck out.

Edit: I remember what I thought the last time I read your complaints about Vt M:B , that your complaints only made sense if you thought of it as a Tabletop game and not as a Computer game since they have different expectations and Tropes/Stuff/Whatever.

edited 25th Jul '10 8:12:59 AM by mahel042

In the quiet of the night, the Neocount of Merentha mused: How long does evolution take, among the damned?

You need Auspex at 3 to read an item. Is that really so hard? I doubt it (you rack a fuckload of experience before). Anyway, Bloodlines is horrible as an adaptation of a tabletop RPG, especially considering how other games (like Neverwinter Nights) do it better in the "crunch" layer. Disciplines Do Not Work That Way, using stuff from obscure splatbooks (like the Nagaraja, the Wereshark and the Sheriff) was completely unnecessary and the game is painfully linear and unflexible (so fucking what you can do every mission that is forced on you in three different ways if it DOESN'T CHANGE JACK SHIT?).

edited 25th Jul '10 8:30:41 AM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Sorry mixed up the order of the Dane and the blow up sabbat(sp?) mission, got to give that to you, but you also have IMO faulty expectations for a PCRPG, I assume the main plot has at best par writing and all the good stuff comes in the side quests and stuff like that or characters.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the "style"of NWN more like Dn D(in that you move a character on a grid and fight in turns) than VTM:B is to Vt M(Haven't played don't know, doubt it is FPS-like.) some of the differences might arise from the fact that it has a different typ of gameplay.

In the quiet of the night, the Neocount of Merentha mused: How long does evolution take, among the damned?

You still fight in turns (IF you fight), but still it's All There in the Manual and deviating from it just like so (ie. using Perception instead of Dexterity to calculate how hard it is for you to shoot - guess how the chief mayhem-makers of the Masquerade, the Brujah clan, get shafted by it) is a completely unnecessary Ass Pull. What would (surprisingly) work better as a World Of Darkness video game would be more like an action-adventure game than a straight RPG with level-grinding (ie. "you get experience and new powers only when you REALLY advance the plot instead of punching bums in back alleys").

Excuse me, but you are clearly taking the piss here. The plot is heavily based on contrived stupidity - Lacroix could easily kill the player character in the intro sequence and order all the bullshit things that happen next to any vampire he liked least if he wanted to kill them or any vampire best suited for the job if he wanted to get it done. Also, it's BORING. I didn't quit the game because it was hard (it wasn't) or badly coded and unstable (it was). I quit it because of loads of Plot Induced Stupidity and general boredom. And then I started reading the walkthrough, finding out more Wallbangers than you could shake a stake at... And then, there's Caine. This is so ridiculous it became sort of a meme among the WOD players (ie. The Obligatory Caine Joke in my group).

Bloodlines is a BAD game. Boring, with flimsy plot, badly coded (the fucking loading times, GAH!) and piss-poor when it comes to how it looks. I could understand one plot-essential Wall Banger in Neverwinter Nights ( Fenthick's death, which is Aribeth's Despair Event Horizon and just allows the plot to go on) but not the Gilligan Roulette going on in Bloodlines.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

I must admit, I can't get the first Dues Ex to play, but I LIKED invisible war, Vamp and Alpha protocol, they were all flawed, but I just loved them just as much as Mass effect and other, more polished, games.