Vampire Issues/Advice

[EvoG]

Hey all, I'm about to give VB a shot, Source Engine inducing nausea and all (tell me I'm the only one!!), and coincidentally another patch came out today so I must ask:

Are there any game stopping bugs left that I should/can avoid?(assuming this patch doesn't fix them)


Normally I wouldn't ask something like this, and go it alone, but I'm involved enough in other games, that I dont want to play this, reach a stopper and just toss it on the pile, understanding that there are at least a few redeeming qualities (or am I mistaken?)

Cheers

 

[Vault Dweller]

Well, while the game starts as a strong RPG leading you to believe that you can play a diplomatic character, at a certain point it turns into a pure action RPG where killing things and people is the only solution to all your problems. Some of those areas could be handled with special powers like invisibility, celerity, etc; some couldn't.

Guns are weak at low skills, but own everything at 8+. Highly recommend.

 

[EvoG]

Highly Recommended

The game or the guns? :D


So combat is completely mandatory later on. No problem with that, but does the narrative suffer? Its one thing to deny diplo characters, but if the story still maintains itself to the end, then all is fine.

Also, I'm assuming then that most bugs have been squashed?


Thanks bud.

 

[Vault Dweller]

The game or the guns? :D

The guns. If you decide to get the game.

So combat is completely mandatory later on. No problem with that, but does the narrative suffer? Its one thing to deny diplo characters, but if the story still maintains itself to the end, then all is fine.

The story isn't the strongest point, so, considering that, you can say that it maintains itself to the end.

Also, I'm assuming then that most bugs have been squashed?

There weren't that many to begin with.

 

[suibhne]

So combat is completely mandatory later on. No problem with that, but does the narrative suffer? Its one thing to deny diplo characters, but if the story still maintains itself to the end, then all is fine.

The central storyline in VB is fine, but it isn't that strong. As in Fallout, much of the game's strength is the dialogue and the individual quests. And yes, those suffer majorly in the hackfest final 10% of the game. Blech. But it really is only about 10% of the game, and maybe 40-50% of the game is genuinely excellent.

Also, I'm assuming then that most bugs have been squashed?

I never encountered any fatal bugs even unpatched, but many people encountered a showstopper near the end (the so-called "Society of Leopold" bug). That was fixed in a patch iirc.

 

[Ryuken]

The only showstopper was a bug in a main story-quest which didn't trigger the next area when you completed the quest. But that has been solved by the official 1.2 patch (and could have easily been solved through the console command in the game when the patch wasn't out yet).

For the rest some performance quirks/typo's and one time I saw the game crash when I tried to save it but that's really it. Had more 'real' problems (ctd's) with Oblivion to be fair.

And guns really rock yeah, killing one of the very final bosses (the hardest one, you'll know who I am talking about when you meet... it) with the Spazz shotgun and Celerity discipline was great (the tiresome levels with respawning enemies prior to that weren't, I could live with it, just don't expect that stealth will solve a lot later on). Strongest point I thought though were the NPC's and their voices, the people who did the casting for this game really nailed it.

 

[Zomg]

The loading times grow as the game goes on, and just get completely unbearable by the end, with only one gig of RAM at least. The time it takes to save your game goes up aggressively as well. We're talking many tens of seconds. It's a good idea to simply ignore all sidequests that force you to change zones as you feel yourself moving to the endgame. Keep a paperback at hand if you're not running some insane machine. Don't even consider playing it with less than a gig of RAM. The final third of the game is terrible on merits as well as load times - only momentum from the remarkable beginning can carry you through.

I can't think of any showstopping bugs. The game autosaves so much, and in different slots, that something crazy would have to happen to really break it. Also don't play a Nosferatu, at least for a first game - they're not very well implemented.

Here's a cool feature I noticed during a partial replay: You dialog is heavily influenced by your humanity score. I was playing a null humanity Nosferatu, and my dialog options were remarkably more assholish and antisocial.

 

[gromit]

Here's a cool feature I noticed during a partial replay: You dialog is heavily influenced by your humanity score. I was playing a null humanity Nosferatu, and my dialog options were remarkably more assholish and antisocial.

Time for a replay, methinks.

 

[EvoG]

Hmm, perhaps my recollection is off, so I'm glad to hear there were/are no significant bugs (I do remember people bitching enough about it, but thats just people bitching as usual eh?)

Thanks again all. Really my concern was for bugs that I 'thought' were more rampant. I expect otherwise for it to be reasonably enjoyable...that and for 8 bucks...I shouldn't be too worried. :D

EDIT: Curious...but what are all these extra 'unofficial patches' patching exactly?

 

[HotSnack]

Here's a cool feature I noticed during a partial replay: You dialog is heavily influenced by your humanity score. I was playing a null humanity Nosferatu, and my dialog options were remarkably more assholish and antisocial.

I had plenty of options to act quite the asshat even with a maxed out humanity, do you happen to remember if the dialogue were unique to low humanity, or were the "nice" dialogue options just rubber out?

 

[Zomg]

Mostly they fix things like occasional dialog infinite loops, places where you're told you're getting some reward or something and don't, swapping in some unused stuff on the disk where it makes sense (ex: using a special texture for a computer manual, etc), missing information in your questlog, misspellings in subtitles, that kind of thing; minor scripting and database errors. That's the patchy side of it. The mod side of it renames all the guns to their real-world counterparts for some reason, and moves some items around or adds lines of dialogue as the caprice of whoever makes the unofficial patches dictates.

I think on balance it's worth installing. It takes some liberties but for the most part the decisions are sound.

I had plenty of options to act quite the asshat even with a maxed out humanity, do you happen to remember if the dialogue were unique to low humanity, or were the "nice" dialogue options just rubber out?

Well, I can't say decisively, but it was certainly the impression that I got. I remember getting a non-choice dialog node (meaning only one option) where I was forced to say something like, "They're kine. Who cares?" about killing people. There's also some loading screen text in the game that says outright that dialogue choices are affected by humanity. I get the impression that, like a lot of stuff, the humanity-biased dialogue drops off towards the later areas. I'll run some experiments with the console and some old saves some time to be sure.

 

[Elwro]

To enjoy the game more I'd recommend going for a char with high non-combat skills, so that you can discover more interesting stuff, and just turning Godmode later on when fights become unbearable.

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

Don't even consider playing it with less than a gig of RAM.

At one time I thought that years in the future I might replace my old TNT2 so I could play Bloodlines, Invisible War, Deadly Shadows, Bioshock, whatever Spector & Junction Point are working on, (at one time but probably not anymore) Call of Cthulhu:DCotE and/or S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and possibly despite all the warnings I've heard here the KotORs and Morrowind. But I'll still only have 256 MB RAM and all of those except Bloodlines are also on Xbox and/or 360. I'm conflicted, because that would seem to be the much easier way to play most of them, but I'm consumed with hate for that machine for consolizing and dumbing down games that had promise and I'm a PC elitist (ironic I suppose for someone with such a crappy rig and so few non-abandonware games). It almost makes me feel like taking the final step to bitter-geekdom by switching to Linux and saying goodbye to games. After I finish/give up on my backlog of course.

 

[7th Circle]

Hmm, perhaps my recollection is off, so I'm glad to hear there were/are no significant bugs (I do remember people bitching enough about it, but thats just people bitching as usual eh?)

Thanks again all. Really my concern was for bugs that I 'thought' were more rampant. I expect otherwise for it to be reasonably enjoyable...that and for 8 bucks...I shouldn't be too worried. :D

People are only talking about showstoppers. On the official 1.2 patched version, for instance, there's several annoying bugs. For instance, I wouldn't call it a showstopper but I've never seen an application that plays so unfairly with others; as an example, I would play Bloodlines, quit out of it, go websurfing, quit out of Firefox and would be unable to play the game without rebooting my system.

 

[golgotha]

I never had any huge crashes with VtM:B, only one or two CTD's. Not bad considering I've played through it three times. It is one of my favorite games aside from the last 15% of the storyline which is a pure "throw together to get it shipped" moment. I absolutely love the setting, atmosphere and immersion. One of my favorite games of the past five years, easily.

 

[One Wolf]

i would watch out for those fanmade patches, they aren't just fixes, they are "improvements" as well. in fact they are mainly "improvements".

"improvement" is obviously a dangerous word when switchin shit up in rpgs.

this game is pretty god damn great btw.

don't play as a malk the first time through, but DEFINITELY play one the second time. its fuckin awesome.

 

[HotSnack]

don't play as a malk the first time through, but DEFINITELY play one the second time. its fuckin awesome.

Why not? I played Malk the first time. Hell, I dabbled with the other lines to see what I was missing, but quickly switched back to playing a Malk. Perhaps the main reason why I find the Malks so appealing is because their crazy-talk excuses why my character talks the way they do, while most oftentimes in crpgs I have to pick responses to conservations which just don't seem "right" to me as to what my character would say.

 

[Jason]

"It almost makes me feel like taking the final step to bitter-geekdom by switching to Linux and saying goodbye to games."

Dual boot is your friend. Have your nerd cake an eat it too etc. And Bloodlines is definitely worth buying more RAM (not to mention all the other benefits).

 

[Elwro]

As for RAM, I played the game with 768 MBs of it and the loading times were bearable - because I had a good book handy.
I remember I read the whole "Solar Lottery" by PKDick during the loading times of unpatched Fallout 2.

 

[Data4]

Everyone else seems to have the technical stuff covered here, so I'll offer you a little gameplay tip. Play the Ocean House area at night, with all the lights off and no one around (or awake). Keep all ambient noise down, and turn up the volume as loud as your living arrangement will let you, or use headphones.

It's no Thief 3 Shalebridge Cradle, and if you've recently played F.E.A.R., you may be desensitized to side-show scare tactics, but the Ocean House has a moment or two that'll make you jump.

Enjoy! Overall, it's a great game.

-D4

 

[Mantiis]

it almost makes me feel like taking the final step to bitter-geekdom by switching to Linux and saying goodbye to games.

Or you could bite the bullet and spend $25-50 for a 2nd hand geforce 4.

 

[Johannes Teugen]

I'm pleasantly surprised how often Bloodlines threads come up here, considering the lambasting the game got upon release. All told, it's a high quality RPG. Does the final 10% descend into combat-heavy suckiness? Yes, but it's hardly alone in that regard, and as for bugs, there are far less than, say, Fallout 2 upon release.

Just did the Ocean House again for the third time recently. Wow.

Had the game not been delayed, and released in direct competition with other FPSs, and and and... ah, well.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Are there any game stopping bugs left that I should/can avoid?(assuming this patch doesn't fix them)

No, all the major game stoppers were patched by Troika. There are a few "odd" bugs at the end with regards to how you may play out the story in Chinatown at the end (specifically with a certain newspaper appearing with a story about someone's death when said person is actually still alive and can be talked to) but it's nthing that stops your game. There are also some bugs which may prevent you from completing one or two of the side quests (specifically a sneaky one involving web camers). Not sure if the fan patches have fixed those, I think they have.

EDIT: Curious...but what are all these extra 'unofficial patches' patching exactly?

Beyond story fixes and adding in some previously unreachable lines of dialogue, there's the ability to sleep with Janette (regardless of storyline you choose) and the location of one of the swords which has moved so many times only God knows where they've put it now. In short: Not much at all really but probably worth it for the quest patches.

The loading times grow as the game goes on, and just get completely unbearable by the end, with only one gig of RAM at least. The time it takes to save your game goes up aggressively as well. We're talking many tens of seconds.

I played Bloodlines on a P4 2.4 Ghz with 1 Gig RAM and didn't have any of the loading issues. Zomg is right that the 1 Gig of ram is pretty much a min requirement though. Also be aware of your "Windows Swap File" size. If you let Windows set it and you have lots of HDD space left, you should be fine. If you've set it to a small amount or don't have a any HDD space left, you'll have the loading issues.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Melee with celerity. Screw guns.

 

[EvoG]

Everyone else seems to have the technical stuff covered here, so I'll offer you a little gameplay tip. Play the Ocean House area at night, with all the lights off and no one around (or awake). Keep all ambient noise down, and turn up the volume as loud as your living arrangement will let you, or use headphones.

It's no Thief 3 Shalebridge Cradle, and if you've recently played F.E.A.R., you may be desensitized to side-show scare tactics, but the Ocean House has a moment or two that'll make you jump.

Enjoy! Overall, it's a great game.

-D4

Well I'm absolutely thrilled to hear this, considering how much I love both the Cradle and FEAR; awesome.

Well so far, I just brought back the Astrolite to Mercurio and two things stood out...the voice acting is actually VERY good, and they even managed to do a decent (if not perfect) job with the dialog anims, so I actually look forward to even mundane dialog, and second, the games music for SOME reason is reminding me of Tex Murphy, which is a great thing.

Combat is interesting as you have to get the whole button-mash-dodge mentality out of your head, and play for precisely timed attacks. Not great but not bad and I can see with the vampire powers this could be pretty cool.

I also like the fact that you can actually wander around and explore, such as my inadvertant traipsing through the clinic to find some morphine, a bit o'humanity and some blackmail money from a black male (sorry couldn't help it). I honestly expected it to be a tad more resitrictive and to be pushed along the story, so big big plus here.

Me personally not caring about general vampire 'lore' as much as some people, I'm actually enjoying being one, what with the presence (I'm a Ventrue) and the personaliites thus far. I feel like a bad ass, much like how I am in real life.

Thanks guys, oh and btw, the santamonica hub is fucking slow on my rig (3.4 ghz, 6800GT, 2 gigs ram). I'm at 1024x and dropped shadows to simple(though I REALLY shouldn't have to with this machine), and its still sub 20's out there, yet super silky smooth in enclosed areas...never a problem with HL2 with max settings so go figure *shrugs*. Sin Emergence seems to be suffering the exact same performance problems, so perhaps it isn't entirely Source's fault.


Cheers