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

[Dodo1610]

Hallowbrook Hotel is probably the worst designed area. Even the room structure makes no sense and every room is filled with copy-paste enemies with no cover to sneak through. Though I haven't seen dungeon this atrocious in ten years, the hobo area we have seen in the gameplay footage won't win any level or worlds design prices either.

 

[Sykar]

Hallowbrook Hotel is probably the worst designed area. Even the room structure makes no sense and every room is filled with copy-paste enemies with no cover to sneak through. Though I haven't seen dungeon this atrocious in ten years, the hobo area we have seen in the gameplay footage won't win any level or worlds design prices either.

There is always Obfuscate!

 

[DalekFlay]

Decline indeed. I'm not sure if you played Deus Ex Mankind Divided. That game has a horrible story, but every quest can be beaten without looking at the map or quest markers, because NPCs give you actual directions and all the streets/houses are named and numbered.

The Dishonored games as well, and most of Fallout New Vegas, play fine with the marker off. It's definitely possible, let's hope for the best.

 

[ga♥]

While the last part of the game is bad, the solution is not to cut it, but to make quality content instead?
Bloodlines1 was actually too short since the last part is just filler.

Roguey

 

[Roguey]

While the last part of the game is bad, the solution is not to cut it, but to make quality content instead?
Bloodlines1 was actually too short since the last part is just filler.

Roguey

First, while the game was held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We’d have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn’t let that happen.
...
Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.
...
And the warrens near the end of the game were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No balancing or dialogue was added at all.

Tim sure likes to complain about Activision not giving him more money here, but Troika were the ones who agreed to ship an RPG with x amount of funds by date y, and they failed to deliver a consistently quality product because they tried to do more than what they had to competence to do with what they were given. Hence, too long. I don't see how it makes too much of a difference if it's ~2 hours shorter.

 

[Zer0wing]

I wonder if Tim would be able to convince Activision to a better date-Y with better X$ funding. A both an action and an RPG pushing the tech side with flashy source engine, sounds worth investing time and money to me. They could stomp Bioware easily.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Hallowbrook Hotel is probably the worst designed area. Even the room structure makes no sense and every room is filled with copy-paste enemies with no cover to sneak through. Though I haven't seen dungeon this atrocious in ten years, the hobo area we have seen in the gameplay footage won't win any level or worlds design prices either.

There is always Obfuscate!

Last time I played, Obfuscate didn't prevent detection and I had it at five, not 2 or 3. Plus max sneak. It didn't matter. Scripted sequences force you into combat and there are quite a few. However, between these sequences, you can stealth around.

 

[Nano]

Consensus is that the Society of Leopold, Hallowbrook Hotel, Xiao's temple, and LaCroix tower are a drag and they're all in a row with brief breaks.

Meh. They were atmospheric locations and I had fun swinging my katana all over the place. One swing was enough to kill several zombies at once, which was neat.

Edit: wait, I'm thinking of the Giovanni mansion. Still, the rest of those places weren't that bad.

 

[HansDampf]

Hallowbrook Hotel is probably the worst designed area. Even the room structure makes no sense and every room is filled with copy-paste enemies with no cover to sneak through. Though I haven't seen dungeon this atrocious in ten years, the hobo area we have seen in the gameplay footage won't win any level or worlds design prices either.

There is always Obfuscate!

Last time I played, Obfuscate didn't prevent detection and I had it at five, not 2 or 3. Plus max sneak. It didn't matter. Scripted sequences force you into combat and there are quite a few. However, between these sequences, you can stealth around.

Would vampires with Auspex not see you anyway?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Hallowbrook Hotel is probably the worst designed area. Even the room structure makes no sense and every room is filled with copy-paste enemies with no cover to sneak through. Though I haven't seen dungeon this atrocious in ten years, the hobo area we have seen in the gameplay footage won't win any level or worlds design prices either.

There is always Obfuscate!

Last time I played, Obfuscate didn't prevent detection and I had it at five, not 2 or 3. Plus max sneak. It didn't matter. Scripted sequences force you into combat and there are quite a few. However, between these sequences, you can stealth around.

Would vampires with Auspex not see you anyway?

I assume so, yes. But I don't know who has auspex and who doesn't and if they're using it or not.
The point is that even with Obfuscate you can't 100% avoid those sequences, unless you can somehow distract the enemies or exploit/glitch the AI into turning around or something. I don't know what would work.

 

[Delterius]

Consensus is that the Society of Leopold, Hallowbrook Hotel, Xiao's temple, and LaCroix tower are a drag and they're all in a row with brief breaks.

p sure people mostly complain about the warrens

its nicer to drink people to death in the society of comedic germans

 

[Roguey]

p sure people mostly complain about the warrens

its nicer to drink people to death in the society of comedic germans

Because that's the first time you run into a long combat crawl. These areas are also long combat crawls (and when put together, longer than the warrens though no individual area is as long iirc).

 

[Infinitron]

Spoiler

 

[Infinitron]

Whoops, almost missed this: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-4-writing-bloodlines-2.1236078/

Dev Diary #4 - Writing Bloodlines 2

Hey there #vamily.

My name is Cara Ellison, and I’m the senior narrative designer on Bloodlines 2. I’m responsible for co-designing how the minute-to-minute story and characters in the game feel, what the player’s relationship is to characters, and specifically what you can say and do to characters. The awful jokes that radiate from the narrative department sometimes make Ka’ai suddenly choke and splutter at his desk, and I’m sure that at some point Luke Dodge, our Art Director, is going to have to call the police. Or maybe the CDC.

Today I want to write a little bit about what I've learned about building and writing a World Of Darkness Seattle to be a sequel to the first Bloodlines.

1. You are locked in the game with them

What is compelling about the original Bloodlines is that it is very interested in power relations encroaching on your ‘territory’ in a way that most RPGs are not. Most RPGs try to present you with systems that soup you up like a tanked-up space marine and expel you out into space to explode things and mess with civilizations and make your spaceship very shiny. Like a kind of settler model.

Bloodlines 1 and 2 are games that are much more interested in how its NPCs might fuck with you than how you might fuck with them. It is claustrophobic. As Watchmen’s Rorschach might say, you are locked in the game with them. You start the game already a political pawn in other people’s chess. Vampire relations in Santa Monica in Bloodlines 1, for example, were already a tense and volatile political mess before you started the game.

In Bloodlines 1 as well as in Bloodlines 2, every vampire you encounter in the game has been a vampire for longer than you. You are in their realm. You are not the hero of the tale, and neither are they. You are merely trying to make a mark on a world that got fucked up without you. And for characters that are weaker than you – mortals, for example – you have the ability to rope them into your nightmare, but what is certain is that there will be very little good outcome for anyone involved with a monster. Try to be ‘nice’, and it will backfire. Try to be ‘kind’, and you might have to be cruel. Try to help out, and you might help out the worst of the World Of Darkness. But what is certain is that this neo-noir set of characters is not going to give you a bunch of vampire powers and then let you do whatever you like. Someone created you for a reason; The Masquerade is all-encompassing. The characters in this neo-noir world are there to be a big, entertaining pain in your ass at every step. The original game - Bloodlines 1 – was the same way.

2. Choose Who You Hurt

In Bloodlines 1, and therefore Bloodlines 2, you cannot achieve anything without hurting people or making them angry. You can only choose who you hurt. You can choose between one vampire political reality, or another. Everything is seen through vampire eyes – when you’re immortal, you do not work on mortal time. The politics is long-term. You have to stay undead and stay powerful. And in order to do that, you have to start manipulating.

For example, if humans are dying out en masse, how will you feed? If the humans stop free movement from happening, where will you live, will your reality become more difficult? How do vampires use technology to manipulate their food supply? What’s the lowest effort way you can stay alive as a vampire? How can you stop humans from knowing that you exist… and yet keep them sweet on you so that you can feed on them easily? How do mortal politics interfere with your unlife? When the city bans sex work… is that good or bad for you and those you know? Does perpetuating mortal trauma make an undead existence easier… or harder to deal with? If you suck blood at a particular bloodshop, what happens when another vampire takes it over? Does what you were doing before the Embrace impact how people react to you now? Is there anything that…scares you as a vampire? And …can you make mortals more likely to turn up when you want by getting really good in bed?

3. Navigating the World of Darkness

We ask ourselves a lot of questions while writing and we try to give you a reactive world where you can figure out some of the answers to these questions. This means that whatever difficult choices we force you to make, the world will give you consequences that are always as equally interesting as each other. We try to open up every conversation so that you have a number of ways you can get through it – by negotiating, coercing, or seducing, for example. We also make bribery an option – even starting a fight or finding a way to avoid people is a viable way to get by. If you are a Malkavian, perhaps your options are more terrifying than usual. Or, you can merely ask a bunch of questions until you are forced to choose what to do.

A lot of our characters are assholes. A lot of people who exist in the real world are assholes. But just like in the real world, the way that characters in Bloodlines 2 talk about others provides a social fabric that gives you a better context and understanding of what that does to the world, what the consequences are, and how characters are affected by those attitudes and actions. No one character will be ‘just’ a category of person. If you laugh at a joke an asshole makes, it doesn’t make them any less an asshole who will screw you over at a moment’s notice. For example, in HBO’s Veep, we know that the characters are all some of the worst people we’ve ever seen. But what makes you understand that they are doing or saying something bad is that other people react to them in the way that they do. In our game, if you keep one asshole alive, maybe some other assholes will be really mad about it. I mean in the first Bloodlines, did you really, completely like Damsel? Or was there something naive about her? Was she just necessary for the fireworks to happen? Depending on who you hung out with, maybe you’d have a different perspective on her. Or maybe you’d be more impressed with what she does than what she says.

4. Unsanctioned Vampires

At the forefront of my mind in Bloodlines 2 is the crossover from being mortal to being a vampire. Around the time your character was created in an event called the Mass Embrace, a small number of other vampires were also created. Unlike you, they were abandoned and they did not get to choose who they were when they were Embraced. There was no character creator for them. Their lives were interrupted and they were made immortal, and all their relationships with the world were frozen in time. They are your brothers and sisters, in a way. And perhaps they are not having as privileged a time as you are. They had no guidance on the crossover. They had no support as to what was happening to them. They have to deal with their unlives as is. If you suddenly got thirsty for human blood and couldn’t stand sunlight, what exactly would you tell the people you know? How would you get through vampire puberty? And uh… what are the rules?

We let you figure out what to do with the messiest vampires. But I am not going to make it easy on you.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

I mean in the first Bloodlines, did you really, completely like Damsel?

Yes!

 

[Roguey]

I mean in the first Bloodlines, did you really, completely like Damsel?

Yes!

Even with this kind of language?

 

[Delterius]

^Fierce

 

[karoliner]

They still haven't fixed that NPC with the long neck.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

I mean in the first Bloodlines, did you really, completely like Damsel?

Yes!

Even with this kind of language?

I mainly listen to rap soo yes, sis

(Also Brockhampton just released their new album GINGER this week and it is so amazing, this song is my current favourite from it: )

 

[fantadomat]

rap

 

[Zer0wing]

Even with this kind of language?

Do you have a problem here? You know who else have problems with "language"? Egocentric snowflakes.
Or moms but it's their primary objective to not let their children play Bloodlines before reaching age of consent. You don't look like a mom.

 

[Roguey]

Even with this kind of language?

Do you have a problem here? You know who else have problems with "language"? Egocentric snowflakes. Or moms but it's their primary objective to not let their children play Bloodlines before reaching age of consent.

If the dialogue option were available and I were roleplaying myself, I'd politely tell her there's no need to use that kind of language.

 

[Jason Liang]

I hope the new game has a new Chiasm track

 

[Zer0wing]

If the dialogue option were available and I were roleplaying myself, I'd politely tell her there's no need to use that kind of language.

Camarilla sympathetic lines are your best bet then. Emphasis on your.

 

[jungl]

Games FPS combat is the worst FPS combat I seen to date. I have a strong feeling this game going to be remembered as THE blunder of 2020. The next TORtanic.