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

Prime Junta

Guest
Yeah, a game that has some of the most expressive facial animations ever is jank.

Your standards seem to be on a whole other level.

Facial animations were for the most part suberb (but uneven, there are some not so great ones there too). Body/action animations were a lot rougher and more uneven.
 

Wesp5

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Joined
Apr 18, 2007
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every time someone mentions bloodlines facial animations i feel the need to go watch the first jeanette monologue.

When I think about it the first time you meet Jeanette was the last time a game really blew me away. It was so well done.

For me the critial part that made me fall in love with Bloodlines was when I discovered the truth about her and Therese!

As for the animations, I guess they mean third person stuff, like the gliding in B1 and the stupid saltos in the B2 demo...
 
Joined
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If you people say so, I guess.

I fucking love Bloodlines, but the main thing I remember about the animations is tweening between canned animations, some of them being used rather conspicuously, as their eyes roll around like a ventriloquist's dummy or something.

Granted, some of the good facial animations I tried to think on were both more linear, and benefit from better technology. I won't say getting really good, reactive animations is easy, but the animations in bloodlines never really stood out to me.

every time someone mentions bloodlines facial animations i feel the need to go watch the first jeanette monologue.

When I think about it the first time you meet Jeanette was the last time a game really blew me away. It was so well done.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyLST9HdjUg
I thought I'd take a fresh gander. The animations made specifically for her look good, sure. Then she snaps between those and the sort of rigid "canned" ones. The attempt at more realistic movement, since people don't really have locked eye contact when you talk to them, work when they're part of a larger movement, but otherwise look like facial spasms to me.

There was an attempt, and I certainly appreciate it, but it's just not quite working for me.


On the other hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtpWxkQUCB0

If people aren't seeing what I'm seeing, I don't really know what to say, but this bit speaks for itself well enough.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I thought I'd take a fresh gander. The animations made specifically for her look good, sure. Then she snaps between those and the sort of rigid "canned" ones. The attempt at more realistic movement, since people don't really have locked eye contact when you talk to them, work when they're part of a larger movement, but otherwise look like facial spasms to me.

There was an attempt, and I certainly appreciate it, but it's just not quite working for me.

Also I played this before I played Half Life 2 so it stole a lot of thunder.

Still think it's a great character perfectly executed with the tech they had available. A real class act.

Brings me back to university, studying software and dreaming of one day working at Troika...
 

Hirato

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The animations were pretty janky - heck, a LOT of things in bloodlines were.

I'm not sure how much of it was just a lack of polish, but keep in mind they were experimenting with a lot of very new and very cool tech.
Valve also hadn't stabilised a lot of it yet, as can be plainly noted in how much better some of those things are in Half-Life 2 compared to bloodlines

Two of particular note to myself:
Physics simulation - Troika enabled physics on a lot of random shit in the world including the hair and clothes of every single character.
You can clearly see this in how characters' dresses and hair sort of spaz out when they turn about, and there's bugs like how you get stuck on the panels you knock out in the Hospital that weren't present in Half-Life 2.
If you look at games made a decade after the fact, none of them do any physics simulation to that level, even with these PhysX gimmicks, and the huge advancements softbody physics have made over the years.
It's just something I find really cool, as modern games are only just once again starting to mess around with using physics for animating hair and clothes naturally. ;)


Skeletal Animation - the use of Skeletons and Bones in animation was very new at the time.
IdTech kind of sets a lot of the standards for these, and their first format that supports skeletal animation was MD5, which was available August 2004, which should give you a good idea of when skeletal animation became widely adopted.
Source uses Valve's own SMD format, so I imagine they were implementing their own variant around the same time frame...

I imagine there were a lot of quirks that had had to be worked out (especially in the early bloodlines fork of the engine), so there were probably limitations in the animations, and small limits on how many could be blended together at a time.
Assuming it's blending animations at all... there are a lot of scenes (e.g. the opening scene with La Croix) where the polygons of people's faces wobble about like they escaped from a PlayStation 1 game. It's like it wants to play 2 or even 3 animations at once, but they each just override their affected polygons.
 

HansDampf

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Dec 15, 2015
Messages
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I remember, when I played this 3 years ago I was really impressed with the facial animations. They aren't realistic, and there is jank. But the characters look somehow more alive than in most other modern games, excluding mocapped animations.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I remember, when I played this 3 years ago I was really impressed with the facial animations. They aren't realistic, and there is jank. But the characters look somehow more alive than in most other modern games, excluding mocapped animations.

Yeah for me it was also the dialogue (very hard to do that style without being utterly cringe and I think they pulled it off) and the voice actress being bang on.

The animations were really vivid and brought it all together in a really impactful way. If there were imperfections my brain refused to see them.

EDIT: The music was also great. Damn what a game. It was worth learning IRC XDCC for...

You people were looking at Jeanette's face?

Most of my playthroughs stop after her quest. She should have been in it way more.
 
Last edited:

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/you-can-play-bloodlines-2-like-its-untitled-vampire-game/

You can play Bloodlines 2 like it’s Untitled Vampire Game
What’s eternal life if you can’t use it to annoy people?

With the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 release date pushed back until later in 2020, there wasn’t anything new shown off at publisher Paradox’s recent annual convention. Even so, I caught up with senior narrative designer Cara Ellison to chat about why vampires are still cool, what makes a good vampire story in 2019, and how fun it can be to embrace your undead avatar’s mischievous side.

Playing a vampire obviously brings with it elements of power fantasy. You’re undead. You’re smooth as hell (unless you’re a Nosferatu or a Brujah). You have all sorts of superpowers. Yet the World of Darkness is a horror setting, and it's always had to contend with the problem of letting people play as terrifying monsters while still needing to scare them. The original Bloodlines pulled this off with the infamous Ocean House quest, and Ellison says the writing team is trying to dial up the horror wherever they can in the sequel.

"Actually having ultimate power is not that interesting," she says. "That’s why people don’t play through Doom on God Mode. Horror keeps it interesting."

At the core of this push for fear is the idea of the Masquerade itself: an undead social contract designed to prevent the discovery of vampires by the mortal community at large. Violators tend to face harsh punishments for transgressions like attacking someone for a drink of plasma in the middle of a populated street, and the Bloodlines 2 writers plan to use paranoia about this retribution to keep the power fantasy in check.

"We try to make your vampire existence seem precarious all the time," Ellison says. "That you could do one thing and screw it all up. Accidentally kill someone, and then forces bigger than you will come for you. And that actually ties into the basis of [Bloodlines 2], which is neo-noir fiction. The neo-noir protagonist is always co-opted into an existing world that’s already hostile. I feel like Phillip Marlowe always gets beaten up in a back alley. You’re always vulnerable to something that’s more powerful or a narrative that you get swept up in. Violence that isn’t your fault. So what we tried to do with [Bloodlines 2] is make you feel like you’re always looking out for something, and there are horrors beyond your imagination."

At the same time, neo-noir protagonists often have a habit of making trouble for these larger forces around them. Ellison loves to include these types of options, and even compares their presence in Bloodlines 2 to a recent game about pesky waterfowl.

"I like the quests in which you’re making someone miserable," she says. "I’m currently playing Untitled Goose Game. We made some jokes about this, like, it would be very easy to turn our game into Goose Game in a way. With the vampire goose that’s annoying people. And that’s basically what you do as a vampire. You’re this Thin-blood who goes around irritating people and screwing up their day, making situations worse all the time."

When it comes to mischievous vampires, the first thing that comes to my mind is the demented Malkavian clan. Their portrayal has changed a lot over the years, with the first Bloodlines and some of the earliest Vampire supplements in the '90s playing up their unpredictable and abnormal behavior for humorous effect. Scenes that involved things like having conversations with inanimate objects were clearly written to amuse, rather than revealing the problems that arise from having their particular brand of vampiric powers. In writing Bloodlines 2, modernizing the Malkavians was a clear challenge, but Ellison believes the team has made positive steps by acknowledging the issues mental illness poses in a more tangible way.

"We want to get more into how having mental health issues actually are a barrier to your enjoyment of the world," she says. "They make things difficult. They provide more obstacles. And they change your perception of events and situations. I suffer from depression, and it’s actually quite hard to write about depression, because it’s a difficult thing to experience. But I think it’s important to do."

At the same time, the writers don’t want to stray from allowing humor into their portrayal of the clan. "The humor is still there in the Malkavian content," Ellison explains. "But it comes more from how weird the situation is, instead of it being a joke at the expense of the Malkavian. You’re in a weird situation and your clan weakness makes it weirder."

Ellison relates that the key to ensuring these quests can be interesting and deal with heavy subjects, but still sensitive to players’ lived realities, is often just listening.

"I have written a mission that has to do with body issues,” she recalls. “And I’m interested in them because I have issues with my own appearance. So I have a little bit of body horror sometimes, or a feeling that I don’t quite fit in my body… so I thought it would be interesting to approach that. I think I had the character say something like, ‘Oh, I’m not ugly anymore!’ And someone really considerate at the studio was implementing that [mission], and they got back to me and said, 'This line here? That’s really painful.'"

But sensitivity doesn’t have to mean avoiding these subjects altogether, Ellison says. After discussing the text further, there turned out to be a simple solution that everyone found acceptable.

"The solution was to put 'ugly' in quotation marks," she says. "And then, the meaning of it gets across better. She’s using it ironically. It’s about so-called ugliness. A societal idea of ugliness. Because today we’re aware that this is going to go out to an audience that, you know, they have a number of these issues and are maybe aware of them more, I think that’s an amazing challenge to writers to give that level of quality. So I love feedback like that, because it means I can try to serve people more effectively."

Doing extra work to serve players more effectively has also manifested in it being delayed out of its original release window. We don’t know exactly when we might get our fangs on it now, but you can read more about why this decision was made in Fraser's interview with Brian Mitsoda.
 

HansDampf

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2015
Messages
1,471
At the same time, the writers don’t want to stray from allowing humor into their portrayal of the clan. "The humor is still there in the Malkavian content," Ellison explains. "But it comes more from how weird the situation is, instead of it being a joke at the expense of the Malkavian. ..."
Is it though?
 

grimace

Arcane
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Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
"I think I had the character say something like, ‘Oh, I’m not ugly anymore!’ And someone really considerate at the studio was implementing that [mission], and they got back to me and said, 'This line here? That’s really painful.'"
This game is going to be a disaster

Art can help heal pain.

Untitled Vampire Game can be cathartic.
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
I have issues with my own appearance.

The solution was to put 'ugly' in quotation marks,

It’s about so-called ugliness. A societal idea of ugliness.

giphy.gif
 

Terenty

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 29, 2018
Messages
1,367
Best case scenario they realise they can't release the game even in the most castrated form without offending someone and decide to cancel it altogether.

Fingers crossed this will come to pass
 

AdamReith

Magister
Patron
Joined
Oct 21, 2019
Messages
2,109
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
How did these people end up working on a CRPG. They clearly feel the original was some kind of crime against humanity.

Why does the echo of such greatness sound like a testosterone deficient twink whimpering under the gravity of mere existence.
 

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