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Vampyr - vampire action-RPG from Life Is Strange devs

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,297
Now that I think about it, I can't recall any RPG where you can be terrible to gays or even any non-fictional race for being gay or not-white. Strange.
There aren't that many real RPGs that include gay characters to begin with, nor non-white characters that are loud, proud and won't shut the fuck up about it. It is only (relatively) recently that we get a whole bunch of SJW politics platforms masquerading as RPGs that caused the backlash that see some people wanting to genocide the buggers, but, of course, you aren't going to get the option for that in a SJW soapbox.

However, if you really want to genocide natives, the original Colonisation is pretty darned nasty in that regard. You can really profit off it, in both money and population (in fact, that is the entire Spanish hat).
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
Patron
Joined
Feb 23, 2006
Messages
28,396
Location
Not Here
Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Opening didn't hook me at all but combat is passable.
Budget constraints mayhap. I just felt the dialogues did not impress either.
 

RapineDel

Augur
Joined
Jan 11, 2017
Messages
423
Worth pointing out that Dontnod have two teams, the team who made this are not the same group who worked on Life is Strange which can only be a good thing.
 

SkiNNyBane

Liturgist
Patron
Joined
Dec 13, 2017
Messages
1,090
Location
NY
Grab the Codex by the pussy
I actually need to put you on ignore so that I don't implode from cringe.

What the fuck is wrong with you? The degree to which people make non existent connections on this forum is legit worrisome.

??? What the fuck are you on about. This forum is starting to get too weird.

Fair enough but I legit can't help but cringe after 100th time some idiot thinks its his sole mission in life to use words SJW when a game comes out. And then I have to either put half the forum on ignore or eventually inevitably have a cringe attack like I did now.

Need a safe space, newfag? Here.

No I just need low iq virgins to stop thinking they are high iq chads that's all. Gamers lack self awareness about degree to which they are bubble wrapped from reality by spending so much time gaming instead of reading or going out. I don't need safe space, I just want people who haven't read a book in their life to not give their retard opinions and stick to games. Reading the equivalent of flat earth society mixed with illuminati bullshit gets really old on a gaming forum.

__________________

Also you guys really overestimate how rare this phenomena is on internet if you think I will be surprised by a bunch of gaming nerds having history/political philosophy of an edgy teen.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
Are you trying to tell us that you are as smart as a dog? Or are you larping your forum nickname?

I'm using metaphor and allegory.

Yeah but its a shit allegory, since humans, unlike dogs, usually have the ability to reflect and thereby question their conditioned responses. So either you lack this ability, then your allegory would work, or you dont and it wouldnt. Theres a reason the pavlov experiment is only applicable to human behaviour on a very rudimentary level.

Listen, i get that one can become oversensitive to hamfisted sociopolitical messages in writing no matter the type, but theres also the story of the boy who cried wolf. Every time someone goes a hysterical rant about alleged "hidden sjw agenda" and i simply cant see it or be bothered with it since its so subtle and meaningless, i spend less attention towards this topic.


You should larp your forum avatar and drown in a jungle river. (Was Fidel the one who couldn't swim? Could have sworn he was.)

Leave me alone! Fidel busy! :rpgcodex:
 

Consul

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 28, 2014
Messages
186
Location
Europe
Characters expressing opinions on women's rights or class privilege in the times when millions of people where involved in women suffrage movemen or labour movement / communist activities must be SJW injecting their views into videogames...

Why so many alt-righters are such imbeciles? Does youtube educayshun turns a normal person into a morron, or do they watch popular alt-right youtubers because they are already braindead?

Why do leftist cretins like yourself have such huge difficulties with reading comprehension and struggle so much when trying to understand the opposite viewpoint? It's clear that I don't have a problem with those characters expressing these sort of views, I'm talking about the way they do it. Even though at the core of it, the mindset is somewhat similiar, in general, modern and industrial era leftists thought differently. They wouldn't use modern lingo and talking points like that and would try to appeal to others by using different concepts.

I like how the fact that the alt-right colonised and now dominates youtube fills you with insane levels of butthurt and rage. There are books and studies presenting the same points in a more traditional manner that are widely popular within the dissident right. Yet you specifically focus on video format and by doing so attempt to discredit your opponents in some way. It's not like you can't provide data nad facts through this format and unless you are a moron who takes everything that somebody else says as true and can't verify things on your own you can learn a lot, even on youtube. It's much better than getting your believes from Hollywood movies, Harry Potter books and pop culture like young leftists do these days.

So your big problem isn't the existence of these conversations or perspectives, it's that the exact language used is anachronistic?

The conversations and perspectives aren't the issue, but the mindset taken out of modernity is. It's not like I have a huge problem with it though, but those sentences stick out to me as something that doesn't belong there.
 
Last edited:

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
I actually need to put you on ignore so that I don't implode from cringe.

What the fuck is wrong with you? The degree to which people make non existent connections on this forum is legit worrisome.

??? What the fuck are you on about. This forum is starting to get too weird.

Fair enough but I legit can't help but cringe after 100th time some idiot thinks its his sole mission in life to use words SJW when a game comes out. And then I have to either put half the forum on ignore or eventually inevitably have a cringe attack like I did now.

Need a safe space, newfag? Here.

No I just need low iq virgins to stop thinking they are high iq chads that's all. Gamers lack self awareness about degree to which they are bubble wrapped from reality by spending so much time gaming instead of reading or going out. I don't need safe space, I just want people who haven't read a book in their life to not give their retard opinions and stick to games. Reading the equivalent of flat earth society mixed with illuminati bullshit gets really old on a gaming forum.

__________________

Also you guys really overestimate how rare this phenomena is on internet if you think I will be surprised by a bunch of gaming nerds having history/political philosophy of an edgy teen.
I take it you mean this when you talk about "books".
images
 

Suicidal

Arcane
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
2,208
If someone ever made a game about some native african tribe or something I swear you faggots would complain that there are not enough whites in it and thus the game is SJW.
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
Why do leftist cretins like yourself have such huge difficulties with reading comprehension and struggle so much when trying to understand the opposite viewpoint? It's clear that I don't have a problem with those characters expressing these sort of views, I'm talking about the way they do it. Even though at the core of it, the mindset is somewhat similiar, in general, modern and industrial era leftists thought differently. They wouldn't use modern lingo and talking points like that and would try to appeal to others by using different concepts.
What's wrong with the way characters expressed themselves? What modern lingo do they use?
 

Barbarian

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2015
Messages
7,307
Now that I think about it, I can't recall any RPG where you can be terrible to gays or even any non-fictional race for being gay or not-white. Strange.

Expeditions: Conquistador. You can recruit exclusively racist catholic zealots and exterminate the amerindians without mercy. There is even a racist nun you can recruit. And yes, "racist" is a character trait in the game and many of the recruitable characters have it.

One of the best games released in the decade so far. I like it more than expeditions viking.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
Joined
Jan 25, 2016
Messages
3,640
Location
Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
If someone ever made a game about some native african tribe or something I swear you faggots would complain that there are not enough whites in it and thus the game is SJW.

From my perspective there is a sort of counter-counter-sjw signalling that goes on, where people obnoxiously exclaim with great enthusiasm how much they do not care about something and how everyone needs to shut up about it, because of how much they do not care. It's tiresome.

I will admit at this point pointing out socjus tropes in modern games is becoming like a broken record. If you don't care about it, feel free to ignore such comments.

As per your example however, I don't see any problems with this:

1474931017-4079064477.jpg
 

GrainWetski

Arcane
Joined
Oct 17, 2012
Messages
5,082
If someone ever made a game about some native african tribe or something I swear you faggots would complain that there are not enough whites in it and thus the game is SJW.
Clearly.

Just like how all the ebul racists cry about all the Japanese people in Persona or Yakuza.
 

Consul

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 28, 2014
Messages
186
Location
Europe
What's wrong with the way characters expressed themselves? What modern lingo do they use?
The talking points are taken straight out of the present day. At that time words like intolerance and privilege didn't mean quite as much as they do today and the concepts underlaying these words weren't as important to people back then.
 

Barbarian

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2015
Messages
7,307
What's wrong with the way characters expressed themselves? What modern lingo do they use?

That is the thing, those two screenshots are nitpicks I think. What the game mostly has is a very period correct brittish english, with the educated characters using very formal speech. Someone complained that Jonathan doesn't have the option of telling some characters to "fuck off", they seem to forget that he is an early 20th century physician, highly educated and raised in a time where it was expected of men to be gentlemen, specially one who works as a physician. Remember those were the days were men who studied any scientific subject still had to know Latin by proxy. It was still the age of the monocle. It would be out of character for him to behave any other way.

I'm also quite sure "prejudice" and "privilege" were words often used in the context of racism and universal suffrage back then.

This game really isn't a sjw shitfest at all, specially considering all the other rpgs it is up against this year(with the exception of Kingdom Come Deliverance)
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,949
Pathfinder: Wrath
Yes, he does come off as a gentleman, if a bit bland and nondescript.
 

Suicidal

Arcane
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
2,208
If someone ever made a game about some native african tribe or something I swear you faggots would complain that there are not enough whites in it and thus the game is SJW.

From my perspective there is a sort of counter-counter-sjw signalling that goes on, where people obnoxiously exclaim with great enthusiasm how much they do not care about something and how everyone needs to shut up about it, because of how much they do not care. It's tiresome.

I will admit at this point pointing out socjus tropes in modern games is becoming like a broken record. If you don't care about it, feel free to ignore such comments.

As per your example however, I don't see any problems with this:

1474931017-4079064477.jpg

It's becoming increasingly hard to avoid this shit when whenever there is a new game announcement or something every other post starts discussing the number of niggers they saw in the gameplay video instead of how the game looks/plays/sounds/feels. Sometimes it seems like instead of the Codex I went to /pol/ or some alt-right reddit by mistake. I just want to talk about the game and not gays, cucks or Trump or whatever.

Also I have a feeling you would see a problem with the poster above if the wemen on it looked like this instead:

e173488cad26afefbbb7c259aa5f9abc.jpg
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Grampy_Bone,it is pointless to try talk rationally with such people. He is clearly just able to read only political shit and then complain that people are talking about political shit,while ignoring all the shit people have written about the other aspects of the game.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,949
Pathfinder: Wrath
Maybe they should've consulted a linguist or a historian specializing in social movements to get their input about language used then.
 

zaper

Yes.
Developer
Joined
Nov 7, 2015
Messages
404
Game is supposed to be about hard choices. For me, the hardest choice was whether or not to continue playing after being forced to kill people just to open a fucking door that would get me out of the first area. There was no way to navigate around that; it just magically opens if you kill all the humans on the room.


Then I went to the tavern and spoke with “Drunk Customer”, “Guy Behind Counter” and “Cleaning Lady”. All of those interactions are no better than what you would expect from talking to an NPC in an MMO, the main difference here is that they are all dubbed, which I suppose serves the egalitarian notions of having blind people suffer this game’s dialogue as much as we do.


Afterwards I went to talk with “Mysterious Doctor Upstairs”(who knows about vampires and everything that is happening), where my character participated in one of the cringiest exchanges of dialogue I ever witnessed. Blatant lies that cannot be contest as well as dismissive and vague answers that lead nowhere all with the apparent purpose of appearing mysterious.


I have no problem with NPCs upholding information, and I really don’t think the player should be given all the answers in first 20 minutes, or that every NPC should tell you the truth, but you are given no option to contest this.


Usually when there’s a character who knows too much, the people behind the story find a way to remove him from sight at least temporarily: He gives some piece of the puzzle, some important information or some cryptic dialogue, and then leaves to let the player figure out what it means.


It isn’t the case here. “Mysterious Doctor Upstairs” just remain seated, not talking to you anymore, not wanting anything from you, probably waiting for you to continue investigating on your own so he can tell you he already knew about it all beforehand.

Now, I admit this is just shitpost based on the first impressions, but it does appear(as some people have said) as there are two games badly glued together into one, and that the combat aspects don't resonate with the rest of the game.
 

Sentinel

Arcane
Joined
Nov 18, 2015
Messages
6,633
Location
Ommadawn
Then I went to the tavern and spoke with “Drunk Customer”, “Guy Behind Counter” and “Cleaning Lady”. All of those interactions are no better than what you would expect from talking to an NPC in an MMO, the main difference here is that they are all dubbed, which I suppose serves the egalitarian notions of having blind people suffer this game’s dialogue as much as we do.
This is why you don't post first impressions based on the first 20 minutes.
 

MicoSelva

backlog digger
Patron
Joined
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Vigil's Keep
Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Review by ARS Technica:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/06/vampyr-review-dead-in-the-daylight/

Vampyr review: Dead in the daylight
Action-RPG hybrid only makes half of the combination work.

STEVEN STROM - 6/6/2018, 5:24 PM

Vampyre-3-800x450.jpg

Enlarge / My vampire sense tells me something happened here.
Steam | Official website

Just when I would think I had completely given up on Vampyr, it would surprise me. I’d slam my head into one clumsy, frustrating boss fight for an entire hour, then be rewarded with a lapsed anarchist’s fascinating life story. Then, just when I'd think I could peel back the layers of Vampyr’s captivating cast all day, I'd get frustrated all over again by the unpolished presentation or slipshod action.

Vampyr takes some thick adventure game influences from Life Is Strange developer Dontnod’s previous project. Vampyr is indisputably at its best when it follows that series’ focus on conversations with well-constructed, interconnected non-player characters. The game only really starts to fall apart when it leans into combat, and there's far too much of that bad action to go around.

All chewed up
Believe me, I understand the desire to play with the power of vampirism with some bloody action scenes. Dr. Jonathan Reid, our protagonist vampire (despite the game’s title, the subtitles spell it without the “Y”) has all kinds of fancy-pants supernatural abilities. He can see people through walls, sculpt weapons out of blood, and mutate into a neck-munching monster.

There’s a lot of action-game potential in those kinds of supernatural abilities. It’s just absolutely miserable in practice.

Battles amount to third-person swing-fests with only the most superficial resemblance to Bloodborne. I probably wouldn’t even sully Bloodborne with that comparison, except that Vampyr takes place in an early 20th century London full of torch-waving mobs.

You can lock onto the goons and bat them with melee weapons that carry all the audiovisual impact of a pool noodle. If the camera manages to keep up, you’ll see them flail back at you with clumsy attack animations that nevertheless do way too much damage. You can try to dodge these (while managing your stamina bar, of course) but it’s exceedingly tough to gauge the attackers' range in Vampyr’s perpetually dark environments.

Complementing combat with spells and firearms is a must. You’re limited by mana and ammo, of course, but you’ll need the extra range to stay away from bosses’ one-hit-kill-area attacks.

Something to sink your teeth into
Even if you can ignore the problems in the abysmal combat half of the game, it’s harder to ignore (or skip) the humdrum opening hour of exposition. Reid gets vamped some time just before the game starts, during the 1918 flu epidemic, and almost immediately murders his sister in a fit of paranormal thirst. What immediately follows seems like the blandest of revenge mysteries—the search for whoever set up Jon to kill a woman we get literally zero time to care about.

That thread mercifully dissolves into a much more appealing soup of local politics, scientific investigation, and intrigue among London’s vampire elite. It’s not long before Reid runs into people who understand his new condition. An immortal aristocrat introduces our hero to the supernatural, while the doctor’s fanboy hospital administrator hooks him up with a night shift.

Both sidekicks are branching-off points for the fun part of Vampyr: getting to know every speaking NPC in the tangled open world. Everybody—from one of Jon’s mentally-ill patients to the shopkeeper who sells you crafting materials to an agoraphobic teen in the slums—has a story. You just have to be willing to listen.

At first I thought the Londoners were fairly one-dimensional sketches. But teasing out snippets of those stories unlocks hints about other citizens. Unlocking the secrets of how each character feels about their coworkers and relatives can feel like a grind at times, though. That’s in part because Jon tends to break the ice with the same three basic questions: how are you feeling, what’s this district like, and what do you think about this whole flu thing? The repetitive flow of every early conversation can be a bit grating.

But, much like Life Is Strange, half the joy is in discovering that these caricatures of a particular time and place aren’t that at all. Sure, that old man is a grump, but did you know he’s only that terse because he’s part of an underground hospital and terrified the cops will shut down the operation and arrest him for communism? Did you know he left his family in Romania to fight for England’s poor? If you don’t know, you can quickly find out.

I did it for the XP

The theoretical hook here is that developing relationships with NPCs strengthens their blood… or something. In addition to learning about every member of the cast, Jonathan can suck them dry nearly any time. Killing these deeply known cast members is the number one source of experience points in Vampyr; killing nameless fodder enemies and even completing quests deliver a pittance by comparison. And because the game’s skill upgrades get very expensive very quickly, the best way to power through combat is with at least a little bit of premeditated murder.

That level of in-game cruelty was so tricky for me that I barely killed anybody. The appeal of Vampyr is learning that its people are people. They have faults and strengths and typically people who care about them—with those relationships neatly arranged in reminder menu graphs. Even if I didn’t like someone, odds are they’re related to someone I do. Taking the time to ripen Jon’s prey only makes pulling the trigger on his bloodlust increasingly difficult. That said, I didn’t mind taking out one racist dude who blamed the flu epidemic on “savages,” popping him like a tasty juice box. Sometimes vampirin’ is thirsty work.


It’s also, unfortunately, sloppy work. I don’t just mean the combat. Vampyr is rough around nearly all its edges. As much as I love the digital conversations, the gossipers themselves look bad. Their models animate like drunkards and have a habit of looking over Jon’s right shoulder at all times. It’s funny when it’s not slightly creepy.

More egregious issues include a bug that caused an NPC to simply stare at me silently. I couldn’t progress the conversation and only escaped the dialogue by mashing every button on my controller until it canceled out. Enemy AI is consistently even worse. Lure a vampire hunter to the edge of its invisible “territory” and it simply shuts down—calmly walking away as you wail on it from behind.

Say what now?

But my least favorite foible is the game’s dialogue wheel. Vampyr uses a system similar to Mass Effect or Fallout 4, where dialogue options are summarized as just a few words before you say them. It also suffers the same overarching issue as those other games: it’s simply not always clear what Jon will say or do based on your options.

At one point, this confusion led to a character’s unintended death. It happened because I thought Jon could use his vampiric powers to erase someone’s memories of the supernatural. What the choice actually did was magically lobotomize them, sending them wandering the streets. When this poor, brain-damaged figure caught some vampirism of their own, I felt a moral need to put them out of their misery.

The stakes (pun embarrassingly intended) aren’t always that high. Usually these misinterpretations just mean Jonathan says something sarcastically that I had meant to say sincerely. Other times, it can completely close off conversational options. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for unexpected consequences in choice-driven games like this. But that shouldn’t mean making the wrong, irreversible decision based on muddy language.

For all my horror at damaging the brain of a character I genuinely liked, it was fascinating to watch Vampyr’s communities be impacted by this deadly decision. As illness started spreading without this character around, I had to pick up the slack by crafting medicine or risk letting a district fall into violent ruin. A later boss even admonished me for the act. Being held mechanically responsible for my mistake felt powerful and scary at the same time. In its best moments the game made me remember that I screwed up, big time.

The problem is that fully half the game isn’t composed of those moments. The other half is made of outright messy combat that ranges from bearable (during random street fights) to excruciating (during the too frequent, too similar, and too long boss battles). The lack of polish throughout the game doesn’t do it any favors, either.

Put it together, and I don’t know if I can recommend Vampyr. I think it’s fascinating. I want to see more games that handle this plurality of communities—communists, anarchists, street gangs, disaster tourists, and soup kitchens—dealing with the same problems in the same space. I love peeling away at the story. I just don’t enjoy everything in between. Maybe I’ll be less conflicted about the sequel…

The good
  • Tons of interesting characters to cozy up to (and maybe murder).
  • Interesting blend of scientific mystery and supernatural drama.
  • Some fun vampire powers to play with.
The bad
  • Bugs, bad A.I., and unclear dialogue choices add up to a frustrating lack of polish.
  • Combat is miserable; bosses in particular.
  • Some characters and plot beats feel hollow without time to build up.
The ugly
  • Accidentally lobotomizing a comrade.
Verdict: A bundle of great ideas and characters, shackled by some abysmal mechanics. Try it, or buy it on sale.
 

Ivory Samoan

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 14, 2011
Messages
214
Location
Aotearoa
This game is a blast, 10 hours in and my biggest gripe is the lack of Y inversion in dialogue scenes, fuck yeah.
 

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