World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs

[Roguey]

Chris already basically did, right here on Codex discussing rape depiction in his previous work.

No one considered Myron Avellone's best work which is the distinction I'm trying to make here.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

I mean from what we've seen so far, the 'March 2020' release date shown on the Bloodlines 2 Steam page is reflected in the trailer's 'Q1 2020' date, but the lack of specificity might mean that Bloodlines 2 could need a bit more time in the coffin.

I actually hope so. March 2020 would bring the release right next to Cyberpunk 2077 and being overshadowed should not happen again to a Bloodlines game !

They've been saying Q1 2020 and March is the latest it could possibly come out if they're shooting for a Q1 release date. In their shoes, I would be busting my ass to get the game out in January or February so there's some space between it and Cyberpunk. Postponing strikes me as a very bad idea. The only thing worse than releasing your action RPG a month before CP2077 is releasing it a month after CP2077. Although obviously they'll release on the same day as the most hyped game of the year if they're really trying to recreate the feel of the original.

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

Half-Life 2

 

[Prime Junta]

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

Half-Life 2

I am proud to say that I played VtM:B first.

 

[Quillon]

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

Half-Life 2

I am proud to say that I played VtM:B first.

I was playing Far Cry 1 at the time, with all the terrain in the game being white, months later I learned how to update gfx driver to fix it. Playing it in correct terrain colors never tasted the same

True story.

Played VTMB for the first time in early 2010s sometime, tho 3-4 playthroughs since then.

 

[Grunker]

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

Half-Life 2

I am proud to say that I played VtM:B first.

I haven't even played Half-Life 2 #holierthanthou

 

[Prime Junta]

I haven't even played Half-Life 2 #holierthanthou

It's a very good corridor shooter. I still replay it occasionally. Ravenholm is great for jump scares.

 

[Harry Easter]

It's a very good corridor shooter. I still replay it occasionally. Ravenholm is great for jump scares.

And looong. When I played through this, I wasn't used to shooters having such a long playtime anymore.

 

[Grunker]

I haven't even played Half-Life 2 #holierthanthou

It's a very good corridor shooter. I still replay it occasionally. Ravenholm is great for jump scares.

I hadn't even played HL1 until a few years ago where I played Black Mesa without knowing they hadn't finished the ending segments. The plan was to play HL2 after that but because of BM being unfinished I never got around to it.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

What game released the same day as the original Bloodlines?

Half-Life 2

Oh cool, one of my favourite streamers played that game!

 

[Zer0wing]

Half-Life 2

Single-threaded game on source engine, to be precise, like Koumiss: Global Offensive. Well, at least being a technical mess is something that will be carried over to VTMB2. Urinal Engine 4 is the same old single-threaded mess that is stuck in 2007 when C2D CPUs were the mainstream.

 

[Roguey]

Oh cool, one of my favourite streamers played that game!

Were you in existence yet when it was released or still in diapers?

 

[Zombra]

It's a matter of time x 1

 

[fantadomat]

Buahahahah i just saw this shit on kiwifarms,was it posted here? Read about fascism in play .

 

[Voids]

Buahahahah i just saw this shit on kiwifarms,was it posted here? Read about fascism in play .

Didn't White Wolf get into a bit of trouble in regards to what was happening to gays in Chechnya or something?

 

[AdolfSatan]

I come back to the thread to check what's up with the game out of curiosity, stretching my right arm in friendly greeting, and am met with this.
Well, I can tell when I'm not being welcome anymore. No, don't bother, I know the way out.

 

[Butter]

I didn't know it until now, but I have some WoD tabletop groups to redpill.

 

[Ismaul]

Oh cool, one of my favourite streamers played that game!

Were you in existence yet when it was released or still in diapers?

What makes you think "she" isn't still in diapers? If attitude is any indicator...

The only thing missing is a pacifier.

 

[RNGsus]

Buahahahah i just saw this shit on kiwifarms,was it posted here? Read about fascism in play .

Didn't White Wolf get into a bit of trouble in regards to what was happening to gays in Chechnya or something?

They want us to watch VICE in order to play their goddamn games considerately.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Buahahahah i just saw this shit on kiwifarms,was it posted here? Read about fascism in play .

Replace PETA with GAME JOURNALISM. Fits like a glove.

 

[Max Edge]

I didn't know it until now, but I have some WoD tabletop groups to redpill.

Is that even possible?

 

[Sailor Woedica]

There’s a new interview about bloodlines 2 and how it’s different from the book rpg



sorry I’m on my iPhone so can’t quote

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/08/09/bloodlines-2-vampire-masquerade-tabletop-rules

Bloodlines 2's Tabletop Origins Reveals What Makes the Vampire RPG Unique
Getting ready for undeath by rolling dice.

Even though Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 is still several months off, it's one of the many upcoming RPGs that’s had its claws in me since it was announced during GDC 2019. To get a better sense of the world and mechanics we’ll be dealing with when Bloodlines 2 releases early next year, we invited Rachel Leiker, the Lead UI/UX Designer from VtMB2 developer Hardsuit Labs and Jason Carl, host of the Vampire streaming series L.A. By Night and Brand Manager for White Wolf’s World of Darkness, to run a session of the Vampire tabletop RPG for us so we could get a sense of what it’s like to spend some time in Vampire’s World of Darkness.

There’s a bunch that you can learn about Bloodlines 2 from the Vampire tabletop RPG if you’ve never played it before. Rachel and Jason even devised specific rules to make the game more like Bloodlines, which you can find to use yourself down below. Check out the video above for a quick overview of what happened during our play session, or watch the whole thing right here:

Feeding the Beast
Hunger & Humanity

A massive part of the Vampire experience is how you reconcile the idea that killing people and/or drinking their blood is wrong with the fact that you are a vampire and must do so to survive. While wrestling with the morality of this may be easier for some than others, all vampires need to sate their thirst, or else their hunger can cause them to become feral, bestial creatures with little of their former humanity remaining. It’s a concept that was present in the original Bloodlines from 2004, but that has been refined both digitally and in the tabletop for the latest versions.

“The original Bloodlines tried really hard to be a 1:1 port of Vampire: The Masquerade and its tabletop format into the digital gaming format,” Jason explains. “Some things worked great. The clans, the lore, the idea that you are part of the hidden world... Feeding and the masquerade work pretty well, but some things didn't work so well. I think that it's fair to say that the blood meter didn't really make you feel so much like a vampire as it did a creature of the night with a gas tank filled with blood strapped to your back…. So in the tabletop V5, we took out the blood pool. Instead, we measure hunger.”

Even though Bloodlines 2 won’t directly replicate the way that the Vampire tabletop game opts to abstract this concept - with dice that can be added to a players rolls to represent how hungry they are - it's still something that will play a large roll in your characters struggle.

“We don't have dice in our game, obviously, because it's an electronic thing,” explains Rachel Leiker. “But the hunger system that we have in Bloodlines 2 is something that you constantly have to be aware of. Any time you feed, any time you take damage, anytime you use an ability, your hunger meter will oscillate up and down. It's something that you just have to constantly be aware of and that is something that we took direct inspiration from the tabletop version because it is something that you are doing in pretty much all of your dice rolls. It's something that you have to maintain. It's something that you have to be constantly aware of, lest you fall to the beast.”

Spoiler

Resonance

When you do manage to drink your fill, you may end up experiencing some unique side effects based on the person who “donated” their blood. What’s known as Resonance is a big part of both the tabletop game as well as Bloodlines 2, and has been a part of both throughout the development of each.

“We actually kind of co-developed this system in conjunction with White Wolf and the World of Darkness team,” Leiker says, “To make it something that we could bring it across.”

“I don't know that it would be possible to pinpoint the exact moment where it came into existence,” says Jason Carl. “But as soon as it did, it was obvious that it would work really well for both expressions of this world.”

Resonances in the tabletop version of Vampire: The Masquerade manifest in multiple ways and offer a plethora of occasional buffs and effects. In Bloodlines, the Resonance system is slightly simplified but will appear more consistently throughout the game.

“In the video game, Resonance is a cornerstone of play,” Carl explains. “It is always with the vampire. It's necessary to account for Resonance whenever the vampire feeds, and it's a little bit easier to discover what the particular Resonances are and where to find them. In the tabletop version, there's a little bit more legwork and investigation that goes into finding the Resonances of mortals and figuring out how they fit into the play.”

The story of our play session centered largely around the concept of certain humans having a unique, special resonance to their blood - it will be interesting to see if this is a narrative aspect that makes an appearance in Bloodlines 2.

The World Around You
While you may have a hard enough time simply surviving life under the Masquerade, you’ll also find it hard to stay out of whatever political infighting happens to be going on between your local vampire factions.

Political (Un)Death

Much of our play session revolved not only around hunting for survival, but figuring out how we fit into the world of San Francisco By Night. Similar to Bloodlines 2, our characters were “fledgling” vampires, who had only recently been turned. Almost immediately, we were set upon by older, more experienced and powerful members of the undead community who were all too ready to embroil us in the political conflicts between the vampiric factions. This echoed what we saw in Bloodlines 2 when we saw the first half-hour of the game and again at E3 2019.

Navigating this balance of power, whether it was hitching our wagon to someone with more experience, or offering our services to the highest bidder, is a core tenant of the World of Darkness — not only who owes you, but also who you owe and who they owe is of the utmost importance.

“I think the most important thing to remember about the World of Darkness,” Carl says, “Is that everybody in it is an unreliable narrator. Just because a vampire tells you this is how it is in the world of darkness, doesn't make it true.”

In our latest Bloodlines 2 gameplay demo, we were asked to track someone down and recover some information we had. Throughout the mission, we were approached and offered aid, power, influence by no less than three different parties to backstab or betray the others. It’s easy to see why there’s such a sense of paranoia among the vampire community, and how that paranoia will come into play as you attempt to navigate the clans and factions of Bloodlines 2. In short: trust no one.

Clan Warfare

Players of Vampire - be it the tabletop game or a video game like Bloodlines - don’t choose a “class” as you might expect in a traditional RPG. Rather, you select a “Clan” to belong to and establish your place in it in your backstory. Our characters belonged to three of these clans - the anarchic Brujah, the artistic Toreador, and the occult Tremere - but in Bloodlines, you’ll begin life as what’s known as a Thinblood, a weaker vampire who has no clan to call family.

You’ll eventually choose one of five clans to join in Bloodlines 2 - there are the three we mentioned earlier, as well as the politically-motivated Ventrue and the prescient (and possibly mad) Malkavians. But there are plenty more clans we might be able to play as, too.

We know that Bloodlines 2 will be offering new clans as free DLC. Pulling data from the tabletop rulebook, we can assume that there will be at least three additional clans to replay the game as:

• Gangrel: Warriors more in tune with their inner Beast than any other clan. Gangrel clan members are not only able to interact with animals, even summoning them to aid, but also gain bestial traits during combat like claws or improved strength.
  
  
• Nosferatu: Cursed to bear hideous visage, similar to their cinematic namesake, the Nosferatu clan dwells primarily in urban sewer systems or homeless camps.
  
  
• The Caitiff: A clan of vampires without a clan, the Caitiff is a collective of "pure" vampires who have been exiled or disavowed from the other clans.

Bloodlines 2: Tabletop Edition
To make our session even more relevant to Bloodlines than the default rules, Rachel and Jason went above and beyond and home-brewed up some rules for us to integrate mechanics from Bloodlines 2 into our tabletop game.

If you’re thinking of running a Bloodlines-inspired tabletop game, you can find those rules in our Bloodlines 2 wiki, along with a full guide to Bloodlines 2 when it releases next year.

What else do you want to see from the Vampire tabletop RPG in Bloodlines 2, or vice versa? Let us know in the comments!

 

[Max Edge]

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/08/09/bloodlines-2-vampire-masquerade-tabletop-rules

Looks gay.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

I saw on discord there was a new dev diary!

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-the-masquerade-v5-and-bloodlines-2.1231919/

Hi folks!

Rachel Leiker from Hardsuit Labs here to bring you some tasty treats about the development of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2! Today I’d like to speak to something we get asked quite frequently – How do you translate a tabletop RPG into a first-person video game? Well, it takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly blood. Actually, it’s pretty much all blood.

When we first began work on Bloodlines 2, Vampire: the Masquerade Edition 5th (V5), the latest tabletop version of the game, was also in development. We were able to work closely with the V5 team to co-develop a lot of the systems you see in both games. The process was very interesting from a developer perspective because we wanted to maintain the tone and freeform nature of the TTRPG (tabletop RPG), but there were many challenges to get it to work on a digital platform.

The first Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was a very true and accurate representation of the pen and paper version at that time. Many of the systems and designs were direct translations pulled from the core rulebook. For Bloodlines 2 we were less interested in a one-to-one implementation of systems in the tabletop version and more interested in what lies at the core of those mechanics – Being a Vampire.

Ka’ai outlined it perfectly in his previous post about the design pillars - there should always be a sense of supernatural power. How this is expressed mechanically is up for interpretation. We worked on really getting down to the nitty gritty of what that means and then set out to build it in a digital format.

One of the first things we worked on with the V5 team was Resonance, created to emphasize the “you are what you eat” part of feeding. Blood is great as a resource, but Resonance incentivizes feeding as more than just Hunger management and makes it more strategic.

Certain types of Resonance give certain benefits and buffs in both games and is a huge part of the hunting and feeding cycle. But finding and feeding on specific Resonances in V5 is a fundamentally different experience than in Bloodlines 2, and for very good reasons.

In the tabletop game, Resonance type can be determined by a skill check against a character Advantage or by physically tasting the blood. There are 4 types of Resonance (for humans...) and 3 levels of strength depending on the victim’s emotional state (Temperament). An amount of Resonance may be gained via feeding, in the cases where there is an extreme amount of Resonance, a Dyscrasia, or clot, is formed. This Dyscrasia acts as an immediate buff to the Vampire and is determined by the storyteller to serve specific needs (I’m simplifying a lot here, if you’d like more information, check out p.227 in the V5 corebook). There is a lot of flexibility and on-the-fly numbers rolling for the tabletop version, which works well for that format, but can be cumbersome when applied to a video game.

In Bloodlines 2, our Resonance system is expanded to 5 types and several different levels of strength. Delirium, Desire, Fear, Pain, and Rage are all emotions that can be discovered and devoured in the game and act as a secondary XP to unlock and activate Resonance-specific buffs, or Merits. The Resonance and Merits in Bloodlines 2 are more rigid in their implementation, but they allow players to quickly hunt for and manage the resource throughout the game.

Another example of applying tabletop systems in a video game world are the Thinblood disciplines developed for Bloodlines 2. We chose the playable Clans in the game because they most closely resembled typical player archetypes – Brujah = Fighter, Tremere = Warlock, Malkavian = Paladin (just kidding, Bard) - they are familiar enough that most players will immediately identify with one Clan based on their playstyle even if they are not familiar with Vampire: The Masquerade. Thinbloods were something of a challenge because at the beginning of the game players don’t choose to become a Thinblood, it is foisted upon them and discovering why is the crux of the story. We had to somehow give players some say in their situation in the form of Thinblood Disciplines.

The three Thinblood Disciplines – Chiropteran (Affinity to Bats), Nebulation (Mist Form), and Mentalism (Telekinesis) have mostly traversal and defensive applications. Thinblood Alchemy in V5 is much the same way – Thinbloods are at the very very bottom of the food chain, so survival is the number one priority. We maintain the core feeling of what it means to be a Thinblood and use those powers but make it more video game friendly by expressing it in familiar ways. Who doesn’t want to glide across the Seattle skyline, travel as mist with the wind, and move objects without touching them?

There are more things in common between V5 and Bloodlines 2 than we can talk about here, but perhaps the biggest component we wanted to maintain throughout development was players’ choice. In tabletop games, freeform gameplay is the secret sauce to making it work. Anything can happen, any choice is valid, and the players are in full control of their actions. In Bloodlines 2, you make choices, and the game reacts to reflect those choices. Whether you choose to end a conversation violently, break the Masquerade by feeding in a public space, kill everyone on sight or attempt to not kill anyone, you get to decide what kind of monster you want to be, and the game will react accordingly.

For Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop fans, Bloodlines 2 offers a new story, a new setting, and the same Vampire shenanigans. The things they enjoy about the tabletop version are present in the video game – choice, reactivity, consequences – brought to life by an amazing voice cast. The core of Vampire: The Masquerade is also about allowing players to explore the World of Darkness and themselves in profound and interesting ways, and Bloodlines 2 keeps that legacy going.

Making games isn’t easy. Especially interpreting a beloved IP from an analog platform to a digital platform. With new expressions of an experience come challenges but focusing on the core components – what is at the heart (beating or otherwise) of the system will help keep it familiar and fun for players. Whether it’s tabletop or digital or anything in between, creating something that is meaningful to players is often difficult, but always extremely rewarding.

Thanks for letting me talk shop for a while, as always, if you have any questions let us know!

Rachel Leiker
Lead UI/UX Designer

P.S. If you'd like to see some of the Bloodlines 2 mechanics applied to the tabletop version, check out the play session we did with IGN!

Also on their twitter there was this completely totally amazingly fierce art for Elif that I just have to post here!