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

[Life of the Party]

I'm not jealous of other women. I'm jealous of the under-qualified super-networked white dudes who have jobs that I could do way better

Isn't being super-networked more of a female thing?

 

[hexer]

WDYM? Dark Messiah of Might & Magic was fun!
Unless your reflexes got rusty then it's time to work on that

Missed this. In the immortal words of Josh Sawyer

I feel that a 1st person perspective will always handicap melee. The biggest problems are low situational awareness (due to the proximity of enemies and the limitations of FoV -- in fact the DMoMM designer admitted that enemies effectively hold back when out of view to deal with this problem), poor readability of your own character's attacks (for the same reason), and poor depth perception (a DMoMM designer admitted that their hit detection effectively "cheats" to help the player).

I sort of view first-person melee like turbine-powered motorcycles. You can make a well-executed turbine-powered motorcycle. Unfortunately, turbines are poorly suited for the sort of use that motorcycles actually see in most applications. DMoMM was the most viscerally satisfying first-person melee I've seen yet, but I found it frustrating to actually play.

Holy shit! Sawyer is like a nerd who cannot into sports, so he writes a thesis that claims all who enjoy the sports are wrong, and only he is right
Please don't let him poison your mind, if you liked DMoMM - you liked it regardless of what he says, and if you haven't, you haven't for your own subjective reasons.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

WDYM? Dark Messiah of Might & Magic was fun!
Unless your reflexes got rusty then it's time to work on that

Missed this. In the immortal words of Josh Sawyer

I feel that a 1st person perspective will always handicap melee. The biggest problems are low situational awareness (due to the proximity of enemies and the limitations of FoV -- in fact the DMoMM designer admitted that enemies effectively hold back when out of view to deal with this problem), poor readability of your own character's attacks (for the same reason), and poor depth perception (a DMoMM designer admitted that their hit detection effectively "cheats" to help the player).

I sort of view first-person melee like turbine-powered motorcycles. You can make a well-executed turbine-powered motorcycle. Unfortunately, turbines are poorly suited for the sort of use that motorcycles actually see in most applications. DMoMM was the most viscerally satisfying first-person melee I've seen yet, but I found it frustrating to actually play.

I'm not sure if I agree with him on that specific issue, but he's right with the implication that first person view is a terrible representation of what a human's vision is like.
Somewhat unintuitively, third person view is often a better approximation of a human's vision than any(non-augmented) first person view ever will be. Maybe this will change as VR becomes more popular.

Spoiler

 

[troz]

Isn't being super-networked more of a female thing?

Most certainly.

 

[DeepOcean]

One of VtMB's core qualities to me was how it was essentially a time capsule of '03. Back when the Matrix, trenchcoats, and ninjas were still cool, when dance clubs were dominated by German technogoths and occult poseurs, when internet cafés were still a thing, when people had to peruse sleazy sex shops for their needs since the Internet was still a virgin, when everyone low key bashed Bush all the time, when technology didn't encroach as much on everyone's social lives, and when everyone went through life with a fairly flippant devil-may-care attitude straight outta MTV.

That's not something recreatable today, nor should it be. If anything, Bloodlines 2 ought to be a time capsule of 2019 if they want to realize WoD's theme of vampires being a part of modern society; that inevitably includes youngsters being into politicking again, big tech having an even greater grasp on our lives than before, people trying to find their identity outside established conventions of gender and sexual preferences, alienated loners trying to find their place in the world, and all that SJW entails. Anything short of that would be stepping on eggshells and merely pretending. I mean, this shit writes itself. I can already foresee questlines about a vampire and an overly altruistic human falling in love and being ostracized by both vampire and human society, how the traditions of the Camarilla need to adapt to Fledgling wishes of being referred to the proper pronouns, how you have to decide what kind of fake news is sent into circulation, how you have to help out some asylum filled with Kindred afflicted with mental illnesses, and so on.

However, the supernatural blood-hungry setting inevitably comes with some edge, and that world is a hard sell if any party, including the insert minorities and disabled threatened by traditionalists, were to be treated as absolutely or comparatively innocent. Really, all I wish for is non-straight white males to be granted the right to be bastards too.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn GT-I9301I met Tapatalk

I hope they are careful with this stuff you are mentioning, the fun of World of Darkness is the alternative monster societies coexisting with human modern urban society, there is always a risk of the writers just making a story about the modern human world with characters that happen to be vampires, and this is boring as fuck as the purpose of fantasy isn't to make commentaries about social issues, the purpose of fantasy is to explore fantastical societies and to explore the "What if?" question, in this case, "What if vampires co existed with humans?", the humans are the background here and should not be the main focus.

If you could remove the fact the characters are vampires from the equation and the story still makes sense, that is a bad sign. It would be a mistake to just take stuff from the real world like social media for example and just copy paste the dilemmas that affect humanity on the vampiric society, fucking boring. We act based on our existence status, if you are immortal, your time frame will be of decades and centuries, so social media effect won't be the same for you as of a common human, if you are an immortal undead with no morality, no need to work and make a living to survive, actually being insane might be something that makes you better than something that causes suffering.

For example, talking of gender on fucking undead monstrosities or even worse, gender oppression on beings that pretty much live to kill other people, would be retarded. If you really want to add your lefty things, you must do through a lens of how that would work on beings that are immortal and pretty much are okay into killing to live, if you copy paste social issues without a thought and don't even stopping to think the context of the fantasy world you created, you will just have a story about humans that larp as vampires instead of a story about vampires.

 

[Yosharian]

Cara Ellison is writing it? Fucking hell.

 

[Alexios]

Fuck this shit.

 

[hexer]

WDYM? Dark Messiah of Might & Magic was fun!
Unless your reflexes got rusty then it's time to work on that

Missed this. In the immortal words of Josh Sawyer

I feel that a 1st person perspective will always handicap melee. The biggest problems are low situational awareness (due to the proximity of enemies and the limitations of FoV -- in fact the DMoMM designer admitted that enemies effectively hold back when out of view to deal with this problem), poor readability of your own character's attacks (for the same reason), and poor depth perception (a DMoMM designer admitted that their hit detection effectively "cheats" to help the player).

I sort of view first-person melee like turbine-powered motorcycles. You can make a well-executed turbine-powered motorcycle. Unfortunately, turbines are poorly suited for the sort of use that motorcycles actually see in most applications. DMoMM was the most viscerally satisfying first-person melee I've seen yet, but I found it frustrating to actually play.

I'm not sure if I agree with him on that specific issue, but he's right with the implication that first person view is a terrible representation of what a human's vision is like.
Somewhat unintuitively, third person view is often a better approximation of a human's vision than any(non-augmented) first person view ever will be. Maybe this will change as VR becomes more popular.

Spoiler

If we ever get a perfect solution to representing human vision on a flat surface (monitor) I'm 100% sure Sawyer would start bitching about how keyboard and mouse aren't true representatives of human hands, etc.

He's a lost cause, I just can't take him seriously at all.

 

[hexer]

Cara Ellison is writing it? Fucking hell.

On a more positive side, maybe they only gave her to write Malkavian dialogs as she's a natural at it.

 

[Life of the Party]

Lettuce bee cereal, Malkavian characters are written by the Nicolas Cage of gaming.

 

[Alexios]

Cara Ellison is writing it? Fucking hell.

On a more positive side, maybe they only gave her to write Malkavian dialogs as she's a natural at it.

According to these people Malkavians in Bloodlines are ableist. Because we wouldn't want to offend people who actually do talk to stop signs.

 

[Yosharian]

She's just a fucking games journalist. What the actual fuck.

 

[hexer]

first they won't confirm malks being in the game

when it releases, they won't confirm malks as dlc

when the last dlc drops and the realisation hits you after all that time that they're simply not playable, it will be sweet

What if you're a Malkavian for real and you're doing just fine in the great game of life?

 

[Longshanks]

If it offends nobody, it's not a VtM game.

It looks very much like Mitsoda & co are dead set on not offending anybody.

Sure about that? A lot of sensitive Codexers are already up in arms just imagining offence.

 

[d1nolore]

I'm not going to buy it if it's full of homosexual and queer stuff. Who do they think their target audience is?

 

[Saerain]

If it offends nobody, it's not a VtM game.

It looks very much like Mitsoda & co are dead set on not offending anybody.

I'm sure offending religious prudes and tradcons is still in the cards, because they actually haven't kept up since 2004. Well, except:

I hate this go-to retort we've seen ever since V5 that "WoD has always been progressive." Because I seem to remember when "progressive" was a liberal label, and not so goddamn illiberal and postmodernist. It wasn't just my imagination, right?

WoD was never "progressive" in the way naysayers want it to be. WoD was very clearly punk and anti establishment. Sometimes for the sake of it and most times with an ironic air to it. It was never self serious BLACK GAY MOOSELEM VAMPY MAN and BASH THE FASH!

Vampire: The Overton Window

 

[Fedora Master]

It depended on the particular line and particular book but oWoD had some pretty fucking retarded/fetishistic stuff from the start.
For example, Changing Breeds and of course pretty much ALL OF FUCKING OLD CHANGELING.

 

[hexer]

It depended on the particular line and particular book but oWoD had some pretty fucking retarded/fetishistic stuff from the start.
For example, Changing Breeds and of course pretty much ALL OF FUCKING OLD CHANGELING.

I live in a part of Europe rife with vampire legends/history. WoD stuff is pretty tame compared to stuff you see on a Friday/Saturday night in a goth club here.

 

[Prime Junta]

According to these people Malkavians in Bloodlines are ableist. Because we wouldn't want to offend people who actually do talk to stop signs.

They already p much said that. The quote is buried ITT somewhere. Something about treating whatever the proper word for insanity is with consideration and respect.

They are fiercely determined not to offend anyone (except you lot ofc, but you don’t count and never did).

 

[conan_edw]

 

[Agame]

true in a deracinated, universalist, judaised sense, but nonsense in the existential sense where it matters - it's actually open season on them since their natural protector, their only protector, that being the men of their race, their fathers, their brothers and significant others, are disempowered from actually asserting themselves in that role, and resultantly women are more insecure, more unhappy, more neurotic and dysfunctional than ever

holding it against white women that they're being catered to as an interest group (what you see is as being "coddled" but what's actually been the process of turning them into labour units under the guise of empowerment) is to buy into the gender warfare and division being pushed on society by rootless hunchbacked cosmopolitans

Fess up, whose alt?

 

[Zombra]

You're the whining usual suspects he was talking about.

Boo hoo, call me when it's the Codex that campaigns for banning of video games.

You mean like no one we're talking about does?

 

[Space Satan]

You are a Thin-Blood. In a social vampire hierarchy you are lower than indian street shit collector.
This:

*snip*

Based on tabletop, that fared THAT bad that caused White Wolf to be closed
"Political Agenda" "pronouns"

It is less than a day and my hype already withered A LOT

FFS that is NOT what caused the firestorm, you anti-SJW are just as bad on the one extreme where body shaming is ok (as was done above in this thread) vs the ultra-warrior who finds offense in everything.

Pronouns had NOTHING to do with with Paradox stepping in, poor wording of the first printing implying support to play as a white supremacist vampire and making comments about the atrocities in real life Chechnya that was easily taken out of context to the point Russian media quoted the book to 'prove' said atrocities didn't happen it was just rumors started with a game is what caused Nu-White Wolf to be reigned in. Let's use facts not your political agenda when discussing the topic.

>Joined:Wednesday
>Admin of World of Darkness News https://worldofdarkness.news/
>you anti-SJW are just as bad on the one extreme where body shaming is ok

 

[santino27]

She's just a fucking games journalist. What the actual fuck.

I mean... I'm not a fan, but it's not like most game writers seem to have extensive credentials these days. She consulted on Dishonored 2, wrote her own text-based game, and kickstarted some other one. By today's standards, where simply having a twitter account is seemingly all it takes to write for games, I think she more than qualifies.

That doesn't mean the output will be good, of course, but there are plenty of crappy game writers. Her RPS articles were imo pretty awful, but the audience there seemed to like it.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

As long as all fear about it being some mmorpg crap is settled and after info bout creators of Bloodlines involved plus decent dev team with rather solid tabletop background included it will be for sure another gem in crpg collection.
It was worth to watch it live at 4am , and hear interview with devs . Just waiting for release and Blood Moon edit already in my Steam collection. What gives me small amount of fear is the fact about Mitsoda being author of crappy Torment Numenora background story, but im sure he will put more effort into B2.