I am playing Bloodlines now (for the first time) and loving it. If you have a decent computer with 1+ GB RAM and a medium-level graphic card, it is very worth it. With just the last official patch I haven't seen any bugs apart from very occasional clipping errors and once when a section of a dialogue wasn't voiced.
Of course, this is with the caveats that I :
1. Like 1st/3rd person 3D CRPGs with action/adventure element (my entry into CRPGs was Ultima Underworld). Adventure element in Bloodlines is ubiquitious but very, very light though - it will never slow you down, but it does offer a nice change of pace and contributes to the atmosphere. Oh, and no jumping puzzles! Whenever jumping could be beneficial, even a klutz like me can do it at the first attempt.
2. Never have played any survival/horror games, so certain conventions of the genre may have found a completely fresh audience in me, strengthening my enjoyment.
3. Generally suck at action combat (though like to play action games like Half-Life 1 and JKs from time to time), yet I have no problems with melee combat in BL. In fact, I kind of like this much maligned feature. It looks cool, is easy to use, is quite stat-dependant, and the game forces you to alternate various attacks (if you use the same one repeatedly, enemies just start blocking it completely) - which is a very nice feature, IMHO. I liked the combat implementation much more than in MW or Gothics 1+2.
Now, as to consequences in quests, they seem mostly along the lines of be nice/suck up to people and reap the boni
. But there are a few instances where you can make some quite evil choices for benefits and sometimes how you say things in dialogue can make a difference, too - there is less looping than usual. Dialogue itself is stellar, BTW. Losing humanity/maskerade also has obvious consequences. Every few points you add to stats/abilities change your character noticeably and the Disciplines set various clans apart and perceptibly affect the gameplay. Beyond that, I have heard that Malkavian maddness is very well implemented (both dialogue-wise and " hearing voices") and Tremere and Nosferatu get different appartments than the rest. Whether it is enough for good replay value is difficult for me to say, as I seldom replay games and never fully replayed one more than once. I will try again with a male Malkavian at some point in the future, though.
Now to enjoy Bloodlines fully from the start one needs to know a couple of things:
1. Increase attributes before you increase skills. Yes, it may look more expensive at first, but there is a lot of skill-increasing manuals to be bought/found and skill-boni as quest rewards as well. Until you start needing more than 6 or so Research to read the manuals you'd be saving a decent amount of Exp.
2. A decent social feat is essential for enjoyment. Of those, Persuade rules and Seduction is worthless, but Initmidate combined with Malkavian's Dementation or Ventrue's Domination may be an equal and more amusing alternative to Persuade.
3. You need a good combat skill. I don't know if it is possible to make through with just unarmed, because supernatural foes seem to shake off a lot of blunt damage. I'd say that you need to decide between melee and firearms. Speaking of which - a 38-er is completely useless, even against humans, but the shotgun, which you find quite early in the MQ is another matter. Even with my chars non-existent firearms skill it seemed to work well against humans. Supposedly, firearms become quite powerful once you put enough points into them and superior to everything else towards the end of the game, once you get the really good pieces. OTOH, in the beginning a firearms character would have to rely on BloodBuffed brawling and keep away from those sidequests that are combat-heavy. In case of MQ, it is possible to sneak through all/most of early quests.
4. Hacking rules, Haggle is worthless and Sneak is bugged. It is possible to sneak through a lot with just the starting 1 point in Dex and 1 skill point in Stealth. Not everything - if you want a really stealthy character it makes sense to invest more, but it is ridiculously effective at such a low level. Also, I have heard that it is impossible to sneak through the last combat-heavy areas of the game without getting into toe-to-toe fights with the bosses, although stealth killing the fodder enemies does make the things easier.
The one thing that really hurts this otherwise very enjoyable (so far) game for me is the relative absence of useful items. There is very little to be found of bought, equipping a character is a no-brainer because there is always one superior weapon, one superior outfit, etc. For some it may be liberating, but IMHO it really hurts the CRPG feel of Bloodlines.
