Yes, the rest of the paragraph complemented the game, but that first part hit it dead in the centre. I enjoyed the game very much but it did seem ill-adapted to a female gamer. Is this being looked into equally, or will the dialogue be the same regardless of gender?
Hi there! Thank you for reading my work. I really appreciate it.
I am extremely aware of my responsibilities in this area, and though I joined the writing team about three years late, I have done everything I can to serve everyone who might come to the game. Primarily, we are trying to deconstruct how gender and sexuality works a little bit more in this game so that it is much more complex, however 'attraction' still works on a he/she structure currently because of the way the system has been built. So if you choose a she pronoun, for example, vampires who are usually attracted to someone who is a 'she' will have dialogue specifically written to convey that, regardless of what your body has been customized to look like. If you are a 'he', you might get completely different dialogue. Or, if the vampire you are talking to is attracted to he
and she vampires, a high enough stat to flirt with them would open up positive results. So, we write dialogue for every eventuality of character, as all our NPCs make judgements on you based on the way you customize play and how you choose to speak to them. We try to write for the plurality of the modern world - if we know people who are NB, gay, straight, bi, asexual, or if we know interesting weirdos, nerds, introverts, etc we write in vampires who reflect this reality. I personally also feel this reflects the history of the people who have kept the IP alive over the years - there are a great deal of people for whom the tabletop and original game was important and they should feel like they live in a World Of Darkness that recognizes them. But honestly, this is not so vastly different from the way Brian wrote Bloodlines 1, except it has got a lot gayer because that reflects our increased awareness of LGBT players.
With regard to the Voermanns, we know they are fan favourites, but culturally we all have a better grasp of how mental health issues affect people now and we wouldn't use such a trope again. However, though Malkavians do exhibit some aspects of what look like human mental health difficulties, they are also supernatural, and the 'voices' that Malkavians hear are other Malkavians talking to them, or flashes of the future, for example. We also know that many people with mental health difficulties appreciate Malkavians and like to play as them. So what we'd like to do is put more depth to these portrayals, and instead of the player just meeting 'wacky' Malkavian NPCs, we'd like to expand what it might feel like to be limited by your perception of the world as frightening or threatening (often with good reason), or how you might interpret things differently than other people. I think this would go a long way to respecting how mental health issues reconfigure your life, often in ways that are unpleasant or provide an obstacle. But we are still writing the Malkavian layer as it always comes last in the script, so it's all just plans right now. I hope that you will be happy with the result. Brian Mitsoda and Rachel Leiker have been instrumental in supporting and designing these better ways to accommodate the player and look at making a more immersive experience and they have always listened to my design input.
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No one said Bloodlines was brilliantly managed. I said it was rushed, and it was.
