Vampire: Bloodlines

Choice of Games

I presume they mean the Visual Novel and choose your own adventure games. And to be fair they were pretty great. I dock points of Coteries for it's ending but the others are top notch.

yeah. Heart of the Forest, Shadows oF New York, Night Road, are specifically the 3 I;d recommend.

Coteries is okay..but Shadows was better

I think the most obvious answer is that the higher-ups are full of it, HSL fucked up and tried to pretend that everything is fine.

Which is rather typical, pretend until you can't pretend anymore might as well be corporate America's official motto.

Night Road should have been the RPG.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 25th 2021 at 11:02:30 AM

Upshot the author of night road has been writing new scenarios to add more clan choices and just sent them off to an editor last week

We're also getting two more games from that developer for VTM so we have that to look forward to.

The "Ask a Game Dev" blog gives an interesting (so I think, at least) opinion on the developer changeover regarding Bloodlines 2. (As well as similar events regarding Anthem.)

In short, their interpretation and surmising is that this changeover will involve an entirely new Bloodlines 2; that all code and assets produced by Hardsuit will be discarded, and the project restarted from scratch by the new developer.

I don't know the blog well, save for having seen this and other entries retweeted over on Twitter, so I'm not in a position to speak to its reliability, I'm afraid. Still, this entry made for an interesting opinion-piece at the least, I found.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 26th 2021 at 7:56:27 PM

That's interesting, while the idea of ditching Bloodline 2's current game seems odd at first glance their argument is compelling and they seem to know what they're talking about.

Maybe starting from scratch could be good, assuming they don't just announce in a few months that it's cancelled.

I feel that if they were going to cancel it then they would have done it this week. After all there was months of radio silence and then out of nowhere this announcement where they reaffirmed their commitment to releasing it and getting new devs. You don’t make that kind of public statement unless you’ve thought long and hard about what you want. Even if they do throw out HSL they’ll just get the next devs to call their project Bloodlines 2.

Plus Paradox is pushing the world of darkness hard. Excluding Bloodlines they have released 6 video games with another five on the way and they’ve released two board games with another three on the way. They have definitely gone all in on the IP compared to the last license owners.

Edited by Shaoken on Feb 27th 2021 at 7:11:53 AM

That's a convincing argument, in that case, they're probably going for the "start from scratch" option.

This isn't the worst way this is ending, at least there's a possibility that it could result in something positive.

It’d be easier to salvage the voice acting and basic concepts and narrative so a new team wouldn’t be starting completely from scratch, assuming they wanted to keep the existing narrative.

Outstar claims she played 100 hours of the game so it would be a shame if it was scrapped.

If they're starting from scratch, I feel like we *shouldn't* hear about this game for... like, two years. At least.

If they're starting from scratch, two years seems kind of optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your perspective)

That was my thought as well yeah. If it's starting from scratch it's a late 2023-2024 release window for a polished game given the dev time it needs.

Let's hope they don't then.

As pointed out that if they don't scrape everything AND don't retain any of the HSL team then it'll take years for them anyway as the new team would have to figure out everything the old team did.

If HSL is still assisting with this and supports the new team then that's a different story.

So, talking about the previous game, has anybody seen any conversation or speculation about the Protagonist’s sire? Who they were, why they Embraced you (seemingly in a “one night stand” way), Prince La Croix’s relation to them considering his last words to them, etc?

And a better question: how the fuck did they get found out so quickly? That part was always weird.

Edit: Late edit but was the protagonist ever “bound in blood”, as part of their probation?

Edited by fredhot16 on Aug 1st 2021 at 10:30:43 AM

For the first one it's largely because your sire is such a non-entity in the game I imagine nobody cares. They exist only to explain how you become a vampire, and then killed off so nobody has to write about the motivations of 14 different possible combinations of clan and gender as to why they sired you. I don't even think they were that close to La Croix given how his "forgive me" while directed at the victim is spoken at the same volume as the rest of the speech, it's more likely he's just performing for the audience to sell how he's just following the rules fairly and really, he doesn't want to kill your sire and you can trust him because he would never lie to you or anyone else.

For the latter, your sire probably did something that got the Nosferatu or Sheriff pissed off enough to follow them around and find out what they were doing.

For the last, no there is no blood bond going on, you see things go exactly as they happen. You were never meant to survive your first night, then when Nines made a scene you were sent off to a suicide mission to be dealt with that way. You were meant to die yet kept on surviving, making it difficult for the Prince to then put more restrictions on you after you've proven yourself.

Most of the speculation tended to focus on the potential lowering of the Fledgling's Generation, particularly near the end of the game.

So the sire kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

Edited by deludedmusings on Aug 2nd 2021 at 3:47:53 AM

The only clue we have is Strauss says they were an Anarch at one point if you're Tremere.

Gonna echo a post in the DA thread but with a more VTM focus.

I've been reflecting on my journey through WRP Gs the last few days. It all started end of 2014 with Dragon Age Origins and 2, and then I played Mass Effect 1-3. 2015 was busy year and the precise order is hazy but I played KOTOR 1 and 2, Fable Trilogy, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Morrowind and Skyrim. Jade Empire, maybe DA inquisition. Then there was a break for a few years before I played VTM Bloodlines and finally most recently Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2.

I love Dragon Age as much as I ever have. In fact, I might love it more now I have so many other games to compare it to. For what BW wants to do with their games, it was the peak.

My three favorite WRP Gs, and why I'm posting it in here, are - Dragon Age: Origins, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Fallout New Vegas.

No matter how it kinda all just collapses in the very endgame. I've never played anything like Bloodlines. Some people were telling me Mass Effect's success was due at least in part to it being a scifi game and how unique that is compared to basically every other WRPG I listed. I can see that but how much more unique is Bloodlines? It stands out in its tone and setting from every single one of those other games. And it isn't like the premise is all it has going for it, it has writing that excels at everything it wants to do. The plot isn't that complex but it's mostly about intrigue and the personalities involved and they are all fantastic and memorable. It has absolutely unforgettable music, both the original songs and club tracks taken from bands and artists.

Its gameplay is...not very good. but I honestly don't feel like the game as a whole crashes and burns as early as some people do. Hollywood is as awesome as Santa Monica and Downton. Chinatown has far too little to do sure but it still has some good quests and the best hub theme in the game, IMO. I really feel like only post-werewolf does the game show itself to be running on fumes and out of budget.

But it's not the worst ending I've ever seen. A good contrast is Pillars of Eternity 1 which was fairly okay or mediocre for much of it but then the ending was so great it made me love it to death. Bloodlines was phenomenal all game and then had a mediocre ending.

So I'm trying tout this The Final Nights mod. Baali are awesome, it sounds like it changed up the game to a decent degree, why not try it for my third full run.

Sadly, why not is answered by a few folks on Reddit who have played it. For one, apparently my dear Baali suck a lot in this. Also, I've done a unarmed and a firearms run, was gonna try melee. But apparently guns are absolutely the best weapon in this mod, even against vampires. Celerity and Range reign supreme.

But that's boring. I'm gonna stick to my Baali guns, or at least try to.

Jotting down some info for myself and others. I just finished Ocean House, did some other stuff like heal Heather, started looking for Lily, got a few extra XP from mod added stuff like saying "I'm onto you Gimble" and talking to this dude on a payphone. In any event, I have 17 XP right now.

-Discipline Progression takes 6XP for Lv 2 and 12XP for Lv 3. Yeesh, this is the one that is really killing me.

-Ability Progression (that I know so far) goes: Lv 1=2XP, Lv 2=3XP, Lv 3=6XP

-Attribute Progression (so far) goes: Lv 2=4XP, Lv 3=8XP

I sure hope Nines still gives that free point in Brawl. Really gonna need that. I dunno if I can justify even getting 1 Dot in any Discipline right now when I will need Barter & Inspection (which are good and almost necessary here) as well as those externally useful skills Lockpicking and Hacking.

I'm trying to save all the XP I can until I finish SM.

Any chance the minor bloodlines like Kisayd will be added now that they are doing it over from scratch?

I'd say minor bloodlines might have dlc potential, but they won't use anything but the major clans for base game.