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

[Wesp5]

Cricket McBangle mentioned that Hardsuit had sent them everything in randomly numbered zip files, I would hope that that was done for researching purposes and keeping whatever art they can use, and not trying to actually salvage the code for reasons outlined here.

This doesn't really make sense. Unless HSL build Bloodlines 2 completely differently to Troika, I don't see how a new team should have big issues analysing and reusing the assets! Do you think I knew anything about the game before I started patching? Most of the Bloodlines 1 assets are compressed in VPK archives and I could hardly make out any kind of order either. Also throwing all writing and characters away would mean to loose all the voice-acting which is expensive too...

 

[Roguey]

This doesn't really make sense. Unless HSL build Bloodlines 2 completely differently to Troika, I don't see how a new team should have big issues analysing and reusing the assets! Do you think I knew anything about the game before I started patching? Most of the Bloodlines 1 assets are compressed in VPK archives and I could hardly make out any kind of order either. Also throwing all writing and characters away would mean to loose all the voice-acting which is expensive too...

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release and it's accurate to say that you also sometimes break things in the process.

From Paradox's year end report of 2021 they mentioned a write-off of $24 million. One assumes a write-off of this size for this particular company was Hardsuit's Bloodlines 2, so legally, they can't even use it anymore (they already wrote it off). Other studios have completely discarded voice-over before; it happened with Mitsoda's own Alpha Protocol and Amy Hennig's Uncharted 4.

 

[whydoibother]

They should just make a Bloodlines expansion for Crusader Kings 2 already. An official, well integrated one.

 

[Grunker]

This doesn't really make sense. Unless HSL build Bloodlines 2 completely differently to Troika, I don't see how a new team should have big issues analysing and reusing the assets! Do you think I knew anything about the game before I started patching? Most of the Bloodlines 1 assets are compressed in VPK archives and I could hardly make out any kind of order either. Also throwing all writing and characters away would mean to loose all the voice-acting which is expensive too...

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

 

[whydoibother]

This doesn't really make sense. Unless HSL build Bloodlines 2 completely differently to Troika, I don't see how a new team should have big issues analysing and reusing the assets! Do you think I knew anything about the game before I started patching? Most of the Bloodlines 1 assets are compressed in VPK archives and I could hardly make out any kind of order either. Also throwing all writing and characters away would mean to loose all the voice-acting which is expensive too...

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

So did Arcanum, it was still considered a rough gem.
Bloodlines was broken AF, and everyone was mad, but also everyone thought it can be great.

 

[Grunker]

This doesn't really make sense. Unless HSL build Bloodlines 2 completely differently to Troika, I don't see how a new team should have big issues analysing and reusing the assets! Do you think I knew anything about the game before I started patching? Most of the Bloodlines 1 assets are compressed in VPK archives and I could hardly make out any kind of order either. Also throwing all writing and characters away would mean to loose all the voice-acting which is expensive too...

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

So did Arcanum, it was still considered a rough gem.
Bloodlines was broken AF, and everyone was mad, but also everyone thought it can be great.

Sure. But that wasn't what my response was about. The game absolutely wasn't release-worthy on release - you literally couldn't complete it :D

 

[Roguey]

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

Nevertheless, Activision considered it good enough to release. They could have just cancelled it, as Paradox did with their Bloodlines.

 

[whydoibother]

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

Nevertheless, Activision considered it good enough to release. They could have just cancelled it, as Paradox did with their Bloodlines.

They couldn't just cancel it, they had a deal with Valve and demos were shown to highlight the facial animations. They'd probably have to pay fines if they cancelled it.

 

[Roguey]

They couldn't just cancel it, they had a deal with Valve and demos were shown to highlight the facial animations. They'd probably have to pay fines if they cancelled it.

Valve let them license Source, but unless they had some sort of weird deal that let them use it without having to pay a fee, they would have no say in whether or not it was released.

 

[whydoibother]

They couldn't just cancel it, they had a deal with Valve and demos were shown to highlight the facial animations. They'd probably have to pay fines if they cancelled it.

Valve let them license Source, but unless they had some sort of weird deal that let them use it without having to pay a fee, they would have no say in whether or not it was released.

They had a joint marketing campaign, the face stuff was all over promos. I have no clue what deal they had, but if I was a lawyer, I would have a cause that the product we are co-promoting better get released.

 

[Roguey]

They had a joint marketing campaign, the face stuff was all over promos. I have no clue what deal they had, but if I was a lawyer, I would have a cause that the product we are co-promoting better get released.

Was anyone from Valve actually involved in this marketing or was that just Activision showing off what they could do with Source? Valve already had Half-Life 2 to show off what they could do with faces, they didn't need Bloodlines.

 

[whydoibother]

They had a joint marketing campaign, the face stuff was all over promos. I have no clue what deal they had, but if I was a lawyer, I would have a cause that the product we are co-promoting better get released.

Was anyone from Valve actually involved in this marketing or was that just Activision showing off what they could do with Source? Valve already had Half-Life 2 to show off what they could do with faces, they didn't need Bloodlines.

I may have worked myself into something that didn't actually happen, because even though I "remember" it, I can't find copromotion presentations online. I thought they had a joint show and reveal, and a Valve guy coming out on stage for Activision, but I may have made that up.

 

[Wesp5]

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release and it's accurate to say that you also sometimes break things in the process.

Of course, but then I am a complete layman compared to the new studio. So if the game was actually finished, as one of your sources claim, the new studio should manage to analyse what they got. Unless modding Unreal is even worse that I thought .

 

[Wesp5]

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

 

[Roguey]

You were patching a game that was considered good enough to release and it's accurate to say that you also sometimes break things in the process.

Of course, but then I am a complete layman compared to the new studio. So if the game was actually finished, as one of your sources claim, the new studio should manage to analyse what they got. Unless modding Unreal is even worse that I thought .

As Josh Sawyer noted during the New Vegas days, it's a mess to have other people fix bugs even within the studio:

Bugs are prioritized by severity, meaning crash bugs first, then crit path quest bugs, then major quest bugs/gameplay bugs, then minor quest bugs and tuning. From the consumer's perspective, there's just a large mass of people working on bugs, but in reality, individual members either should not fix, or are not capable of fixing, any given bug that's in the list.

For example, a programming bug would not be assigned to a designer, and a design bug would not be assigned to an artist. Even within a discipline, certain people are suited to fixing certain bugs. I do all weapon tuning because I did almost all of the weapon implementation. Quest designers fix their own quest bugs because they have the most intimate familiarity with how the quest is structured.

Assigning a critical quest bug to any warm body who happens to be occupying a chair can result in a lot of inefficiency -- and often new bugs created by the attempt at a "fix". Similarly, there are idiosyncrasies to how some sections of game code work that really demand the attention of one or two programmers. Throwing new programmers at the problem would likely result in them spending twice as long orienting themselves and possibly making some poor engineering decisions.

We can see this kind of thing happening right now with Wrath of the Righteous. They put the A-team on Rogue Trader, leaving a B-team to handle the enhanced edition and patching, and they're introducing and re-introducing bugs (including gamestoppers) all over the place, including the first act (which was relatively polished on release).

Game literally had a game-ending bug during the Main Q for 99% of the userbase on release that didn't get fixed until 1.2, lol

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

From the 1.2 patch notes:

• Fixed crash to desktop when the player returns to the boat after rescuing Johansen from the Society of Leopold.

All the way near the end, one can understand how it wasn't caught.

 

[Grunker]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. There was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

 

[rusty_shackleford]

They also copy pasted the fix for it from the community patch.

 

[whydoibother]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. Their was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

I think when I first finished the game I used console commands to change the level. Maybe that was with some patch, I don't remember if console was even enabled in the original game.
Funnily enough, I did the same when I first finished Skyrim. The Blades guy in Riften who has to open a door for the main quest got stuck near his bed and couldn't let me in, had to use console commands to go through the door and change the quest phase.

 

[Wesp5]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. There was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

Exactly. But according to Tim Cain this only affected the Nosferatu: "Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character."

 

[Grunker]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. There was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

Exactly. But according to Tim Cain this only affected the Nosferatu: "Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character."

Well that’s just not true. Because I played a Brujah on first playthrough and had the CTD in that cave.

Whereas Nosferatu was the last of the clans I ever played.

 

[Demo.Graph]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. There was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

The bug could've been bypassed with a single console command without losing any game progress or altering mechanics.
Also, there was a bug with Mandarin obstacle course that had to be bypassed via noclip (one of the doors didn't trigger).

Both bugs don't characterize the general state of the game.

 

[Roguey]

Exactly. But according to Tim Cain this only affected the Nosferatu: "Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character."

Tim's misremembering. https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=106 includes console command instructions for getting past that area for nos-and non-nos characters.

 

[Grunker]

As far as I know this is not true. If I remember correctly the game was only unfinishable if you played a Nosferatu...

No. There was a CTD when taking the boat out of the cave that was fixed in 1.2

The bug could've been bypassed with a single console command without losing any game progress or altering mechanics.

I had no idea how to use console commands for that kind of stuff at the time since I was a snot-nosed teenager (which is probably lack of knowledge shared by majority of the playbase). The internet was also less effective at presenting those options at the time.

But console command or not - it's a) not true that the bug only affected nosf, b) was a bug affecting all playthroughs during main q at release.

 

[Caim]

I forgot about Rudi, Jesus Fucking Christ, I would have bet anything that was fake, but a real writer actually made that, wow. I hope the rest of v5 is better.

You tell me.

 

[Wesp5]

Tim's misremembering. https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=106 includes console command instructions for getting past that area for nos-and non-nos characters.

I just looked at the map entities and he is indeed wrong, the bad map name "taxi" was set for all clans. Which means that Activivion QA never finished the game at all while testing!
This was before I took over, but it seems that Dan needed four versions to fix this and the Nosferatu were send to the wrong location as well, which is what Tim might remember.