I was playing this last week and I'm up to the 4th or 5th chapter. I'm at the point where you are cordially invited into the Ascalon Club.
The first 30 minutes of this game were the worst part. I tried going into Whitechapel to do Theresa Howlcroft's sidequest and ran into some lv 16 Priwens who were fixing to keep my kind out. I struggled through that and everything else got to be addicting.
The used scythe/bludgeon is a godsend. Once I got the hang of parrying it is extremely easy to abuse it on most enemies. Not only that but you can handle enemies 7-8 levels above you if you have patience.
I like resource-gathering gameplay loops but it does start getting monotonous around the 2nd or 3rd act. Really my biggest issue playing is that a lot of the valuable opportunities to gain XP are locked behind story progression. Wanna drink this clearly evil guy over there - sorry you have to get to know his personal life and stalk him to maximize his potential. Oh you're not 2/3 done with the game? Sorry you can't drink him yet.
Which is really weird because some of these NPC's are clearly designed to not be important to the main story. They're just options for powering up Dr. Reid, so restricting the time you can eat some of them to when your Mesmerize reaches Level 4 or 5 seems excessive. The Watsonian reason is probably that there's a big story event in the initial hub area, and you can't afford to abort the main plot by letting the player slaughter the main hospital staff all willy-nilly.
This game has an oppressive atmosphere I don't care for. I enjoy depressing, melancholic soundtracks, but to me its about evoking a feeling from me, drawing the sadness and the sympathy out of me. Vampyr reminds me of infamous where 90 percent of the game world is colored with a threatening, dull soundtrack that changes when you're entering a fight. Now, Vampyr takes place in Victorian London in the middle of a vampire pandemic, so it makes sense, but I got tired of the
- waaaaaa-naaaaah nah. naaaaaa-naaaaaa-naaaaah (hospital)
- creepy ambience/screaming/rats/wind howling (everywhere else)
Real quick. The game isn't striking me as a horror game or one meant to terrify me, but searching through abandoned buildings, walled off streets, and creepy dark alleys with no release for several minutes to hours gets repetitive really quick. Violins are powerful instruments and I've never been more irritated by them than by my 6th or 7th hour wandering around, trying to figure out where my vantage point for an a eavesdrop was.
The game world feels large to me only because Jonathan is so restricted in his movement. He can sprint briefly, longer if you increase his stamina, but there's no fast travel options (a necessary sacrifice for the game's permadeath/consequence-riddled narrative) and little in the way of shortcuts. The main area connecting a bunch of different neighborhoods is locked off until a certain point in the campaign.
Difficulty is subjective, but as I progressed through the story things got remarkably easier than they first were in Whitechapel. Boss fights are rarely a challenge. The first sewerwolf was moderately bullet spongy solely because I had the wrong damage type at the time. The big bruiser Elite Mook the game was setting up as Reid's primary threat... was taken care of a lot earlier than I expected, and he was pretty much a Heavy enemy from any beat'em up with more health.
I had to go online to check and see if I wasn't locking myself out of certain quests, or if certain quests could be advanced at all. I'm not a fan of that much uncertainty in a video game and I feel design elements could be incorporated to avoid this - a message saying that "citizen has more stuff, but you have to come back later." Narrative beats that make it clearer you'll have to catch up with somebody later.
Overall I enjoy the game, but like I said at the start I stopped playing for a week and started playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion again.
Edited by FOFD on Jan 26th 2024 at 3:39:48 PM
Forgot to mention I finally managed to finish the game.
I really got to give them points for writing Martin Nightingale, I usually find Hate Sinks to be too trite for them to provoke much of a response out of me, but he utterly infuriated me.
It's definitely a little bit silly in context that killing and/or draining everything with a red outline bears no risk of Jonathan running afoul of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity. Perhaps just a smidge of writing implying Jonathan still struggled with it every time there was an unavoidable boss fight addressing that would have fine.
From a writing perspective, it is still a little bit of a cop-out that all combat in the game can be mentally categorized as "self-defence", because like...Jonathan is still a vampire capable of moving as a high-speed shadow to dodge gunfire. It's gameplay fiat that he should not attempt to evade every single enemy to handle everything as non-lethally as possible to be morally consistent with the no Embrace ending, because he logically totally could just break through every abandoned building's windows to avoid killing - the game just doesn't make it possible.
Of course, it's not something I begrudge the developers over. Limitations are just a part of life.
Edited by VutherA on Nov 21st 2024 at 12:57:47 PM
I mean, I think the whole point is that that frankly isn't our place to judge. Everyone has a reason they are where they are, and using a person's history or economic class to justify murdering them is just rationalization.
A bit different when they actively have a weapon in their hand and are actively hunting you to kill you.
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for youAlso, the ending cutscene made me kinda disappointed that the artstyle used in it wasn't used more. I mean, it is used in that, the opening cutscene, and the skill icons for the leveling up screen, but that's still a pretty small amount of presence compared to the 3D graphics used for the vast majority of the game, a few more cutscenes in that style would have been rad.
But even without the morality angle, the underlying real reason Jonathan should not be Embracing people is the inherent danger of the temptation of drinking blood to the vampires. It's like when you see Elisabeth finishing off that terminal patient - it's never comparable to a person just feeling peckish for them. They're dangerous abominations constantly struggling against a monstrous nature beneath the surface, and it comes out every time they drink blood.
So really, Elisabeth should distrust you just as much if you answered back "Yeah, but they were all bad". It's not exactly firm proof that Jonathan has very clearly exhibited that he is able to keep his vampire nature completely in check.
I mean, you could make a game about being a vampire who loves being a vampire but Vampyr's Central Theme is all about Jonathan's struggle not to eat people. He's a doctor (but a Martial Pacifist) so his struggle against eating people is the entire character. The game is also about whether you resist doing it or don't.
You'd have to remake the entire game.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 22nd 2024 at 1:04:35 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Darned if you do and darned if you don't. Dishonored had a similar problem of providing a power fantasy then designing the game around making you resist that fantasy as much as possible.
Vampyr... as I said once before the weird thing to me is less that you are supposed to get the good ending by not killing amoral monsters in human skin, no, that parts interesting. Cause I like how by not being a murderous spirit of the night Jonathan's struggle to retain his humanity is symbolized by how much harder the game becomes.
What gets me is that you absolutely cannot eat certain people until you reach/obtain a certain point in the story that artifically increases a magic number next to their portrait that determines when Jonathan can eat them.
Like what.
Why did Jonathan need to be fighting for the fate of London to eat that doctor who was stealing from the dead, or the mute nurse; when he regularly chows down on enemy NPC's.
And by that point in the game their role, if any, in the actual plot is basically done with.
And then the slope is so slippery that eating a few without eating the rest will basically kill everyone/leave money on the table.

You can still get decent endings if you don't murder super important ppl.
Honestly though, I only leveled up from combat, only took secondary weapon upgrades, and spent all my battles stunning and drinking blood from combatants. Battles took forever but I rarely ever lost
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you