Yeah, I got the impression that most people in this thread haven’t actually read those books written thirty years ago. Fortunately, I’ve done a fair amount of dumpster diving in my time.
In the tabletop scene at the time in the 90s, WoD was seen as pretentious self-important garbage by gamers outside of its own cultish and fanatical mall goth fandom. The lore is pretty short (99% was developed and solidified from 1991-1995 or so and everything since was just repackaging that repeatedly because they cargo cult nostalgia) and ridiculous/terrible (the books have stuff like gay furry sex rituals, depicting Hiroshima as being a perpetually radioactive wasteland, Bangladesh being literally wiped off the map by multiple nukes and an orbital laser canon being dismissed as “saber rattling by Pakistan”, a cult of serial killers is presented as heroic, the Christian God is actually a false god named “The Patriarch” that serves a cosmic spider, Captain Planet-style pollution villains, etc) and doesn’t have anything worth buying the company for if you want to make urban fantasy video games. They’re in no position to sue you if you rip them off, like Nations of Darkness is doing right now. But Bloodlines is a cult classic so CCP and Paradox both thought they could make it work.
The text games and visual novels were supposedly written by diehard lorefags and they’re shovelware quality. I don’t think you can write anything with a mass market appeal using this IP unless you use an irreverent tone like Mitsoda did, and he wrote it that way because he wasn’t a fan of the IP before he was hired to write the game.
All this talk of “lore” is a waste of time. No matter how many lorefags tell you otherwise, lore is worth shit. We’ve seen that time and time again. Any competent writer can write a good story on its own merits, with or without lore. Any wannabe writer can come up with pages and pages of lore on a wiki, but it’s always irrelevant trivia. CRPGs live and die by their stories and gameplay, not irrelevant trivia that has nothing to do with that.
Nobody would give a flying fuck about lore if it didn’t piggyback off an engaging story. Nobody would give a fuck about Arda or Westeros if we weren’t already invested in Sean Bean and co. Failing to understand that basic fact of storytelling is why all these would-be franchises spectacularly abort.
Bloodlines is a cult classic because it had a story with characters that was good. You could strip away the lore and replace it with something original (as Troika intended before Activision told them to use the license), and Mitsoda’s skill as a writer would still show through.
This deranged obsession with “lore” by nerds and companies alike misses the forest for the leaves and contributes to the general degradation of modern media. Stop thinking in terms of “how can we exploit this list of irrelevant trivia?” and start thinking in terms of “how can I tell a good story on its own merits?”
I think an established setting does have the advantage of giving the game a wealth of ideas accumulated over years to draw from or discard. It doesn't matter if the original material isn't high literature on its own, you can cut much of it out and put your slant on what you do keep like Mitsoda did with Bloodlines.
With Bloodlines the sense of a larger, fleshed out mystery in the world was essential to the atmosphere. At every turn, with each faction, historical reference, the end times paranoia, there's the feeling that things run deep and old beyond the fledgling's story since the setting does have a big interwoven past and present mythology for the game to point to. I think in Bloodlines in particular, this and the audiovisual atmosphere were almost as important to the experience as the actual story. It might not have been the same with a surface-level original setting scratched together for the game.
Like you say though, it's the writer making good use of a setting that matters, not whatever license on its own.
I think a competent writer could pull off the illusion of a deeper original setting without actually writing several books’ worth off trivia. The WoD setting is not actually all that deep. Verbose, sure, but that’s not the same as depth.
Bloodlines didn’t explore the lore in any appreciable detail, but just threw in a bunch of throwaway references.
When you get into the “zone,” it becomes easy to end up unintentionally writing pages and pages of unnecessary backstory for what starts as a throwaway concept. Quite frankly, fantasy fiction has a bigger problem with inexperienced writers wasting exposition dumps on irrelevant lore rather than writing the actual stories.
Planescape: Torment is a good example. There’s tons of throwaway references in that game to concepts that didn’t exist in the source material. Items, people, places, etc. It gives the illusion of a much larger world in the background, without actually writing about those unseen worlds.
A competent writer doesn’t actually need to write excessively detailed worldbuilding. They just need to convince their audience to believe the world has hidden depths. The easy way to do that is through throwaway references. Have weird stuff showup for one scene that never gets explained. Have characters reference topics they seem to understand without explaining the wider context to the player. But you have to write this vaguely enough that it doesn’t make the player wish the game was about that instead.
With urban fantasy this is very easy to do because you can draw on a wealth of existing folklore and fiction for inspiration. Explicit references to myths, folklore and occultism can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
The problem with an IP like WoD is that it’s lore is actually divorced from real life cultural myth, folklore and occultism. Their research is absolutely terrible. (Mage in particular is especially bad about this because it starts by saying all belief systems are actually fake but in the same breath expects you to take
their made-up belief systems completely seriously as political ideologies. As opposed to, idk, a Platoist interpretation where all belief systems are shadows of a truth that can only be understood by achieving enlightenment through transcendance and revelation. The 2004 reboot
did use a Platoist/Gnostic interpretation, but then discarded any connections to real world beliefs and offered zero explanation why because they’re trying too hard to be different. But I digress.)
!
