Whetting the appetite of the non-believers.

Recently I replayed Bloodlines as a self righteous Ventrue, spreading the wisdom of the Camarilla among the anarch scum. It felt like shit, yet entertaining. Therefore, I decided to replay again as a batshit crazy fuck Malkavian. Unfortunately I've not taken pictures from other amusing dialogs (it would take a few gigs worth of screenshots for that), but still this small one should suffice.

Description for the illiterate: this is after you reach Hollywood and a woman named Samantha approaches you on the street, claiming her and your friends have been looking for you all over the place without any clues as to what happened to you since "that night" (when you were embraced). Bellow follows the dialogs with the corresponding reply choices: (unfortunately there's no way to highlight my choices ingame, so I will write them down)


Madness, believe me, I know.

•••NO, DON'T YOU REMEMBER ME? I'M YOUR PET TURTLE, FROM WHEN YOU WERE A KID. (red dialog means you use your dementation skills to mess up with people's minds)

Nah, I wasn't dead, I was just asleep.

It's a lot like being a walking house that eats lettuce.

I'd let you, but, the other turtles might start talking.

You known I'll be there. Goodbye, Samantha.


Enjoy

 

Bring back Troika.

 

lol its not a real choice

 

Ha, you should see after you leave Santa Monica and go meet Lacroix, he asks if you blew up the warehouse. Your dialogs "choices" as a Malkavian were:
1) Yes.
2) Done.
3) Boom.

 

Btw, is there some consequence after this dialog except for losing/gaining masquerade point?

 

That dialog isn't the problem, the problem is that you can't leave Santa Monica without blowing up the warehouse.

 

Bloodlines is full of ridiculous artificial barriers. Few games have as many artificial barriers as Bloodlines does.

Just like your example of a taxi suddenly materializing in Santa Monica when you blow up the warehous.

Just look at the garbage dump. The gate is a non-interactive prop. But it becomes usable once you go to Hollywood, and find the man murdered in his hotel room. Makes no sense, whatsoever.

And then, the back alley with the sewer that leads to Brother Kanker. That back alley is blocked by a car. The car disappears once you get the quest regarding the Epidemic.

Even a shooter like Deus Ex does not have such arbitrarily forced linearity. It is possible to find a particular object before someone asks you to find it. Unlike Bloodlines, it does not materialize out of thin air once you get the quest. And so many old RPGs allow you access to certain areas before you are supposed to go there. It's been done properly so many times before. If they could do it, why couldn't Troika?

 

Wait a minute....
You can actually talk somebody into believing you are a turtle?

Even if that somebody use to know you before you turned?
Thats believable

 

Vampire power, go someone to convert you to vampire and then you can do that.

 

arent you captain obvious?

 

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Tell me: how did you manage to get past Gunther in Battery Park and fly straight to Hong Kong?

Some of those facial expression animations are quite ambiguous. Anyway, I'd rather endure the railroading of VTM than most of the shitty sandboxes and story-less Action "RPGs" that are released nowadays. And I really have a space for Troika. Arcanum is not perfect, but it'll forever stay in my Top 5 of CRPGs, together with Fallout, PS:T and Betrayal at Krondor.

 

Huh?

But OMG you can't go anywhere without solving the Okku bear problem. The game's terrible.

 

It's not an artificial barrier. The spirits were surrounding the city, and sieging. It would not even be remotely possible to escape it.

No, an artificial barrier is a gate which is unusable before getting a quest, and becomes usable once you get the quest. Or an object appearing in a table right when you are supposed to find out, and was never at all there earlier.

 

I may be mistaken because it was years ago but I remember Troika hyping the nonlinearity. Supposedly it was possible to kill important NPCs in their domains and receive proper consequences. I remember a video showing of the player shotgunning the fat tattooed barman.

 

And it did not turn out to be that way, considering that you are not able raise your weapons inside a vampire's domain, unless the game changes it into a "Combat" area, on its own terms, during a particular point in a quest.

 

Bloodlines is not a hitchhiker's paradise, sure. I don't know if those scripted events could be avoided, but it is surely one of the games with most most entertaining quests in any rpg.
For some reason almost every free roaming rpg i've played had shitty fedshit shitquest. Fallout doesn't count. It's not a game. It's a fucking Holy Word descended in a form of an rpg. Arcanum had boring quests most of the time.

 

I made the comment after Bloodlines came out and I'd played it a while that the game was just too scripted. It's almost like a first person shooter in terms of game design with sidequests. You can wander around and do sidequests for a bit, but then you accept a mission and it turns in to first person shooter mode. You're locked in to a map, shooting enemies and flipping switches, until you find the way out.

 

it seems more like she is going along with the joke than actually believing you are a turtle

 

Except she really believes you are a turtle.

Consider it a Troika's Force Persuade(tm) which not only makes the other person believe and do as you say but also turns that person insane too.

 

You mean Bloodlines is not a complete world simulator with every possible series of events planned for?

 

Bloodlines is fine just the way it is. It's an Action-RPG, don't forget. And its true to this genre, because there actually is some roleplaying to the action. Unlike some others we all could name.

 

They could, they did - Arcanum. Not all games have, or need to have this goal. I do consider the level of it in Bloodlines a weakness, but the basic design of seperate non-connected hubs is an acceptable one. Deus Ex was no different in this respect. It's the odd instance of barriers within hubs that is a weakness in Bloodlines.

 

It's hardly a difficult thing to make a game without the kind of scripted and rigid progression that Bloodlines has. It not even about making a freeroaming game.

Hell, such a thing is so basic, so essential, so straightforward, I would almost take it for granted, were it not that there is a game like Bloodlines which does something like this.

Deus Ex. There is a drug dealer in the subway station. He is always there. He is there before you receive the quest to kill him. He is there after you receive the quest to kill him. If you kill him before you get the quest, you can simply tell the gang leader, "I already took him down". That's how simple it is.

Ultima Underworld. There is a Chaos Knight who lives in a pit with lots of spiders, slugs, and other insects. Killing him is a part of a quest with a knight-errant. If in your exploration of this huge world, you end up encountering the Chaos Knight before you meet that knight-errant, you can just tell the knight-errant then and there after you meet him, that this thing has been taken care of.

Why am I bothering to even find examples, when even the simplest quests in many games are designed in a way that locations and objects are not seperately triggered after receiving sidequests?

 

Oblivion sounds like HEAVAN to most people here.