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

[Cricket McBangle]

It seems we've landed at "I want a Bloodlines 2 and I want it to be good."

Urban Fantasy World of Darkness will reign supreme and we'll all be sorry we ever doubted the rich potential of a tired IP no one really wants to work on

 

[Wesp5]

John Carmack said the story in video games is like story in a porno thing while developing DOOM to Tom Hall, so he was correct insofar as DOOM was concerned.

Yes, he was. Just look at all the ridiculous background stories the new DOOM games are including which nobody needs at all !

 

[Silverfish]

It seems we've landed at "I want a Bloodlines 2 and I want it to be good."

I resent that, I wanted Bloodlines 2 to be bad enough to be funny.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

It seems we've landed at "I want a Bloodlines 2 and I want it to be good."

Urban Fantasy World of Darkness will reign supreme and we'll all be sorry we ever doubted the rich potential of a tired IP no one really wants to work on

Yes. This is basically what I’ve wanted to say all along. I’m sorry for fighting you.

I like the idea of the urban fantasy subgenre where it’s Information Age Earth, magic exists and somehow conceals itself from the muggles, the main environment is a cityscape, and the magical beings are Eurofantasy mainstays like elves, wizards and so on. If there’s a name for that subgenre, then I’d love to use that instead of the non-specific urban fantasy label that includes a broad selection of things I’m not currently looking for.

I despise World of Darkness at this point and hate using it as a point of reference for anything.

 

[Vincente]

urban fantasy subgenre where it’s Information Age Earth, magic exists and somehow conceals itself from the muggles, the main environment is a cityscape, and the magical beings are Eurofantasy mainstays like elves, wizards and so on.

Shadowrun?

 

[Cross]

As far as there being a lack of urban fantasy, I don't really see how that's the case. Persona 5 is urban fantasy. Devil May Cry 5 is urban fantasy. Neo: The World Ends With You, Ghostwire Tokyo, Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children, these are all urban fantasy titles. Some of them are quite good but if your metric is just Bloodlines/World of Darkness and "Bloodlines is the only notable urban fantasy game", I can see how someone would think that in addition to not jiving with Japanese stuff.

The examples you gave sort of prove his point. Bloodlines stands out compared to those games because of how it blends the fantasy into the real world.

I played Persona 4 and it barely feels like urban fantasy since the game goes to comical lengths to keep the real-world separate from the fantastical. In fact, they take place in separate dimensions. In the real world you go to school and do chores, while the fantasy world consists of randomly generated dungeons with monsters to kill and nothing else.
I don't even remember any instance in the game where the characters encounter something supernatural within the real world (aside from the portals to the supernatural world, obviously).

In Bloodlines you walk into a hospital and you discover a ghoul working there who has an arrangement with other vampires to smuggle out blood packs for them. You can convince him into selling you blood packs. Later on, you find out the hospital has a blood sample of a werewolf and you can go back there to steal it to preserve the Masquerade. That's what makes urban fantasy appealing as a setting, the juxtaposition of the fantastical and the mundane, and Bloodlines does that better than arguably any other game.

 

[Delterius]

In Bloodlines you walk into a hospital and you discover a ghoul working there who has an arrangement with other vampires to smuggle out blood packs for them. You can convince him into selling you blood packs. Later on, you find out the hospital has a blood sample of a werewolf and you can go back there to steal it to preserve the Masquerade. That's what makes urban fantasy appealing as a setting, the juxtaposition of the fantastical and the mundane, and Bloodlines does that better than arguably any other game.

Secret World does that blending fairly well, I'd say. Though the game revolves around particularly troubled spots, those places are conspiracy breaches for a number of reasons. They have a history to them. You go to small town USA because it's besieged by zombies, yeah and you gotta find out why and how to stop it. But besides that you also keep finding these unresolved murders and longstanding hauntings because, it turns out, while city hall was 'in the know' they were provincial petty people and not particularly good at their jobs.

It won't hit the exact same itch as Bloodlines. Secret World is grander in scope. It's also a faux MMO. But for what it's worth, it's puzzle missions are cool and the after-mission texts you receive contextualize things nicely. There's a short quest where you just find a broken magic ward protecting an evil idol from prying eyes. You take the idol and destroy it in a bonfire. That's it. But depending on your faction the handler might say 'yeah the east coast is full of those prohibition era caches and of course our people used them to hide bad stuff'. There's always an angle earthing the supernatural into the mundane world.

 

[Delterius]

urban fantasy subgenre where it’s Information Age Earth, magic exists and somehow conceals itself from the muggles, the main environment is a cityscape, and the magical beings are Eurofantasy mainstays like elves, wizards and so on.

Shadowrun?

Exploring the world of Bloodlines is when you realize that the creepy hotel down the street has a haunting problem. Of course it has. You're a vampire now why wouldn't ghosts exist?

Exploring the world of Shadowrun is finding out that the ability to summon spirits and to see the astral plane is really useful when you are investigating a murder. In fact, police corporations have their own ESP divisions.

Conversely everyone knows ghosts exist in Shadowrun, it's no surprise it's actually a scientific fact. The more chrome, worse becomes the connection between your body and your soul. And there's no everyday ESP police in Bloodlines, but there's the shadow CIA, the Inquisition, and, when you get down to it, the unhappy ghoul or fledgling who's been forced to look after some supernatural bullshit.

I'm broadly speaking of course, but do these scratch the same itch? It depends. Personally I'd say yes, Shadowrun and Bloodlines are both urban fantasy. They are both about the coexistence of modern society with supernatural phenomena. But they explore the issue from different angles. Bloodlines is a world where magic is concealed, it infiltrates and usurps the mundane. Hence how the vampire mafia king has the SWAT on speed dial. Shadowrun is a world where magic is out in the open, it interfaces with the mundane. So the fortunes of big corporations in Hong Kong depends on good feng shui, and of course there's an entire industry all about making the shui feng goodly.

Same principles, different stories.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

urban fantasy subgenre where it’s Information Age Earth, magic exists and somehow conceals itself from the muggles, the main environment is a cityscape, and the magical beings are Eurofantasy mainstays like elves, wizards and so on.

Shadowrun?

Exploring the world of Bloodlines is when you realize that the creepy hotel down the street has a haunting problem. Of course it has. You're a vampire now why wouldn't ghosts exist?

Exploring the world of Shadowrun is finding out that the ability to summon spirits and to see the astral plane is really useful when you are investigating a murder. In fact, police corporations have their own ESP divisions.

I'm broadly speaking of course, but do these scratch the same itch? It depends. Personally I'd say yes, Shadowrun and Bloodlines are both urban fantasy. But they explore the issue from different angles. Bloodlines is a world where magic is concealed, it infiltrates and usurps the mundane. Hence how the vampire mafia king has the SWAT on speed dial. Shadowrun is a world where magic is out in the open, it interfaces with the mundane. So the fortunes of big corporations in Hong Kong depends on good feng shui, and of course there's an entire industry all about making the shui feng goodly.

Same principles, different stories.

This. Whether the magic is secret or public leads to very different stories.

In Bloodlines you walk into a hospital and you discover a ghoul working there who has an arrangement with other vampires to smuggle out blood packs for them. You can convince him into selling you blood packs. Later on, you find out the hospital has a blood sample of a werewolf and you can go back there to steal it to preserve the Masquerade. That's what makes urban fantasy appealing as a setting, the juxtaposition of the fantastical and the mundane, and Bloodlines does that better than arguably any other game.

That said Secret World does that blending fairly well, I'd say. Though the game revolves around particularly troubled spots, those places are conspiracy breaches for a number of reasons. They have a history to them. You go to small town USA because it's besieged by zombies, yeah and you gotta find out why and how to stop it. But besides that you also keep finding these unresolved murders and longstanding hauntings because, it turns out, while city hall was 'in the know' they were provincial petty people and not particularly good at their jobs.

It won't hit the exact same itch as Bloodlines. Secret World is grander in scope. It's also a faux MMO. But for what it's worth, it's puzzle missions are cool and the after-mission texts you receive contextualize things nicely. There's a short quest where you just find a broken magic ward protecting an evil idol from prying eyes. You take the idol and destroy it in a bonfire. That's it. But depending on your faction the handler might say 'yeah the east coast is full of those prohibition era caches and of course our people used them to hide bad stuff'. There's always an angle earthing the supernatural into the mundane world.

Yeah, TSW is another example. The appeal of urban fantasy is that juxtaposition.

Also, I suspect to certain extent a not-insignificant part of the appeal is projection and power fantasy. You know how many isekai have the protagonist being an Earthling but this could be cut from the story without problem? That's to make it easier for viewers to project themselves onto the protagonist. It's a transparent self-insert trope that was commonplace in fanfic long before the genre took off in professionally published media. With urban fantasy, you can have a muggle protagonist remain in the real world but suddenly discover a new layer beneath the mundane and become a magical being himself. This has the dual benefit of making audience projection easier while also making Earth actually relevant to the plot. Even in Bloodlines, the PC becomes an action movie star by the end who mows down hordes of mooks and vampire bosses to win the game. This very much goes against the intended scope and tone of the source material, but is perfectly in keeping with how video games are designed to appeal to players.

And speaking of isekai, that's what I consider the downfall of WoD's Mage game. Although the game's premise (like all the WoD games) is supposed to be about social justice before it was trendy, in practice most groups went off adventuring in the game's many otherworlds. This frustrated the company because it went against the "correct" playstyle (and sales were falling, so marketing demanded changes to sell more books), so in third edition in 2000 they made it dangerous to do so and this pissed off a lot of fans. These groups could've played Planescape instead because that was specifically designed for planehopping, or Rifts or Torg or any number of other ttrpgs, but WoD fans were pretentious gits who thought they were too cool for "lame kid's games". Anyway, the isekai takeover rendered the urban fantasy elements superfluous: groups didn't give a flying fuck about Earth and just wanted to escape into the isekai. This is not ideal if your goal is to sell books describing stuff happening on Earth. And this isn't an isolated problem: I've seen multiple urban fantasy ttrpgs get taken over by isekai that weren't originally about that and even after the takeover try to pretend they still aren't. Meanwhile, something like Monte Cook's Invisible Sun starts out heavily emphasizing the isekai elements and treating mundane Earth is a superfluous surface layer of reality, but AFAIK it never developed a community. Go figure.

 

[Harthwain]

I'll use a specific example that I'm very familiar with: Starcraft. The story is bad. It's not simply an excuse plot like 1995 Command & Conquer (no offense to Westwood, I love the atmosphere in their RTS games), it has ambitions of being deep but the writing team (who, I'll note, had zero prior experience writing) completely botches the execution.

The story is good. It is not deep, but it is well executed. Very well for a video game with talking heads.

Key plot details are hidden in manuals and tie-in fiction that nobody read.

Again, that's a retarded statement. Starcraft 1 came out back when the chunky manuals containing details regarding in-game lore that weren't directly in the game were still a thing and people were reading them. At the same time Starcraft 1 is also the game where you don't need to read the manual in order to understand what's going on. The game is very well self-contained when it comes to its story.

One character is played up as being a hero because he didn't regret a stupid plan where he went around incinerating the few habitable human planets when that plan clearly didn't accomplish anything besides pointless genocide, right after he previously angsted about incinerating planets being terrible and he should try a different plan.

No idea what you're talking about here. Tassadar was opposed to burning the human planets and followed orders as means to stop the Zerg, but at some point he decided against it. He is not "played up as being a hero" because of any of it. He becomes a hero, because he puts his people first and because of his sacrifice to destroy the Overmind.

The one female character is fridged to fuel the space cowboy hero's plot, then subsequently resurrected by evil space magic as a Diablo succubus with a completely different personality who happens to share the same name... simply as an emotional suckerpunch for the hero/player even though this doesn't serve her arc at all and actively sabotages the arc of the actual villains. (Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the employees were sex offenders.) That script needs tons of redline corrections, or better yet being thrown into a lit fireplace.

She gets infected and it's not that outlandish to assume that being injected into the Swarm does things to your personality. As for this "not serving her arc at all" - it does highlight the Overmind's plan to incorporate the mankind into the Swarm and gain the upper hand. Kerrigan was chosen, because of her psy abilities. This changes later, because the Overmind learns about the location of Aiur and goes straight for the kill.

Kerrigan's actions leading to death of Zasz is a good example of events not always going your way (as the player), even though you technically "win" the scenario/map. It's also OK to have imperfect/flawed characters. Her being a vicious bitch that gets easily baited into a fight is a good contrast to what she'll become when she gets full independence in Brood War. In fact, it will be mentioned as her "learning experience".

 

[Storyfag]

I'll use a specific example that I'm very familiar with: Starcraft. The story is bad. It's not simply an excuse plot like 1995 Command & Conquer (no offense to Westwood, I love the atmosphere in their RTS games), it has ambitions of being deep but the writing team (who, I'll note, had zero prior experience writing) completely botches the execution.

The story is good. It is not deep, but it is well executed. Very well for a video game with talking heads.

Key plot details are hidden in manuals and tie-in fiction that nobody read.

Again, that's a retarded statement. Starcraft 1 came out back when the chunky manuals containing details regarding in-game lore that weren't directly in the game were still a thing and people were reading them. At the same time Starcraft 1 is also the game where you don't need to read the manual in order to understand what's going on. The game is very well self-contained when it comes to its story.

One character is played up as being a hero because he didn't regret a stupid plan where he went around incinerating the few habitable human planets when that plan clearly didn't accomplish anything besides pointless genocide, right after he previously angsted about incinerating planets being terrible and he should try a different plan.

No idea what you're talking about here. Tassadar was opposed to burning the human planets and followed orders as means to stop the Zerg, but at some point he decided against it. He is not "played up as being a hero" because of any of it. He becomes a hero, because he puts his people first and because of his sacrifice to destroy the Overmind.

The one female character is fridged to fuel the space cowboy hero's plot, then subsequently resurrected by evil space magic as a Diablo succubus with a completely different personality who happens to share the same name... simply as an emotional suckerpunch for the hero/player even though this doesn't serve her arc at all and actively sabotages the arc of the actual villains. (Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the employees were sex offenders.) That script needs tons of redline corrections, or better yet being thrown into a lit fireplace.

She gets infected and it's not that outlandish to assume that being injected into the Swarm does things to your personality. As for this "not serving her arc at all" - it does highlight the Overmind's plan to incorporate the mankind into the Swarm and gain the upper hand. Kerrigan was chosen, because of her psy abilities. This changes later, because the Overmind learns about the location of Aiur and goes straight for the kill.

Kerrigan's actions leading to death of Zasz is a good example of events not always going your way (as the player), even though you technically "win" the scenario/map. It's also OK to have imperfect/flawed characters. Her being a vicious bitch that gets easily baited into a fight is a good contrast to what she'll become when she gets full independence in Brood War. In fact, it will be mentioned as her "learning experience".

Thank you. It gets tiresome to argue the same thing with Raggle again and again, so I'm glad you did it before I had to.

 

[Tyranicon]

Speaking of vampire-based urban fantasy, has anyone mentioned Redfall yet? https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...fps-from-arkane-austin-coming-may-2nd.138946/

Yes, it doesn't look good and is built to be a co-op Far Cry-esque shooter. But I'll mention it all the same.

One can only imagine what it would've been if Arkane stuck with their roots and made it a hub-based immersive sim.

 

[hello friend]

Base game story is fine and does the job. It's only with Brood War that it starts to smell.

 

[GhostCow]

Shadowrun is Cyberpunk, which is not the same as urban fantasy. Urban fantasy is not Sci-Fi. Even if you add some supernatural stuff.

 

[SlightlyRadioactive]

Shadowrun is Cyberpunk, which is not the same as urban fantasy. Urban fantasy is not Sci-Fi. Even if you add some supernatural stuff.

Shadowrun is Science Fantasy, so there is some overlap.

 

[Herumor]

Speaking of vampire-based urban fantasy, has anyone mentioned Redfall yet?

Looks bland and the gameplay they've shown so far looks like shit. Not to mention, I don't really care for the co-op aspect of the game or that you're playing as vampire hunters.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Base game story is fine and does the job. It's only with Brood War that it starts to smell.

Wait until Immortal: Gates of Pyre releases. Easily the deepest RTS lore ever written.

Speaking of vampire-based urban fantasy, has anyone mentioned Redfall yet?

Looks bland and the gameplay they've shown so far looks like shit. Not to mention, I don't really care for the co-op aspect of the game or that you're playing as vampire hunters.

How many other games let you play vampire hunters?

 

[Herumor]

How many other games let you play vampire hunters?

According to Google:

 

[RaggleFraggle]

How many other games let you play vampire hunters?

According to Google:

How many of those games have you heard of, played, or have confirmed are about playing as vampire hunters?

 

[J1M]

Don't take this as an insult but if you really don't like what you see offered, then try your hand and make something you think is good. If it's good there's a very small chance you'll get noticed and if you're bad you'll get humbled very quickly. Though I have to be honest, most of the narrative people I've worked with were hacks and haven't had an original idea in their lives, so your competition isn't exactly elite. I'm not a narrative writer, but I like to describe good writing the way Justice Potter Stewart described pornography "I know it when I see it". Most of these writers today are checking boxes and writing stories around them and are following by the books styles and dialogue writing. None of them want to take risk or try something unorthodox, they just put unorthodox identities in as a substitute. If any of them had any balls at all they might get somewhere, but ultimately all the great writers tend to have things that can't be taught.

No offense taken. I'm currently trying that, thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have skills relevant to making video games so it's coming along very slowly. I wouldn't call myself an original or good writer, either. I just have the benefit of foresight from seeing a ton of other attempts and the market itself is unexploited. I just want to put something out there, to show people that it's possible if nothing else.

The problem isn't a lack of opportunity or skilled devs. There are plenty of games like Hunt the Night where you play a vampire in a dark fantasy setting. Devs who could make urban fantasy simply aren't choosing to.

This article claims:

Another possible reason could be the lack of an easy to reference template for less creative products. As previously mentioned, anyone who wants to phone in the story of a high fantasy game can easily crib notes from Tolkien, Warcraft and numerous others. Similarly, if writing a sci-fi game, Star Trek, Neuromancer and others provide straightforward baselines for each given branch of sci-fi. Urban fantasy, while a prolific genre, does not have what you might call an archetypical example of the genre that serves as a sort of ‘generic’ template for anyone wishing to do a story in that genre.

In truth, this might actually be a boon for any future urban fantasy games, insofar as said games are more likely to be individually creative, as opposed to simply taking elements from pre-existing properties to make an easily marketable game. Of course, by the same token, it may take until such a property impacts on the collective consciousness for urban fantasy to get its due in gaming.

Perhaps if that ever happened, urban fantasy might even suffer the same fate of other genres of becoming largely homogeneous near-identical releases with the occasional spark of uniqueness in the rough. But even so, at least there’d be even more types of identical games to choose from, making the game industry as a whole that little bit more varied.

This speculation isn't what I would call accurate. Urban fantasy is actually very easy to write (it's oversaturated in prose fiction) and has several templates to choose from. Harry Potter and Bloodlines, for example. HP inspired numerous clones on the YA scene. After Bloodlines almost all the few vampire crpgs that were made, like DARK or Vampyr, used the plot outline of "you become a newbie vamp, abandoned by your creator, manipulated by dark forces to cause the apocalypse, etc". At least one visual novel I tried was a shameless ripoff that copied several plot points verbatim, like "blowing up an enemy coven's warehouse full of weapons" or "a whole clique of vampires who are arbitrarily crazy because Bloodlines did it." The DARK manual includes a shoutout to Bloodlines by saying the minor NPCs April and June are sisters to Therese and Jeanette Voerman who run The Asylum in Santa Monica (this is completely irrelevant to the plot and isn't mentioned in the game itself).

I admit that my outlines included a general tone and some plot points inspired by Bloodlines, mostly because imitation is flattery and attracts fans of that game. But even then I want to do my own spin on the clichés and tropes.

Just off the top of my head, one way to change up is to give the vampire PC a relationship with his creator that persists throughout the game. The creator acts as an exposition fairy who teaches the PC about the magical world and orders him on various errands. Let's add some depth to the creator: what's the creator's reason for vampirizing the PC in the first place? Hmm... maybe it's been hibernating for a while due to immortal angst and isn't acquainted with the modern world, so it vampirizes the PC to learn about the modern world and offload some of its emotional baggage by transferring unneeded memories to the PC. Vampires magically feed on life via blood, so it stands to reason that they absorb the soul/memory of victims. You could use this as the basis for a PST-esque flashback mechanic where the PC can remember things about the master's past victims that can come in handy or add to the atmosphere.

Maybe take some cues from BloodRayne or Castlevania and make the PC some kind of half-vampire who doesn't suffer stereotypical weaknesses like sunlight, fire or running water as acutely as full-fledged vampires. Maybe add some lore where the magical people are racist against halfies and see them as slaves/pets barely above mere mortals on the totem pole, which colors interactions with different covens. The decadent high society coven sees the PC as simply an extension of his master's will, while the downtrodden social justice coven treats the PC as a peer.

Add some magicians and shapeshifters and whatever to the milieu of characters to make it look less like a clone of Bloodlines. Go wild and add characters like fallen angels, tall sexy leprechauns, dragons, demon clowns, elves, animated mummies, possessed puppets, etc.

Urban fantasy is not a genre lacking in inspiration.

Half vampires are always stupid. Pretty sure I made a thread that explains this in detail.

 

[J1M]

It's not easy to write anything good. Stating otherwise is naive at best. Really doesn't matter what the genre or niche is, there's a reason 99 percent of any medium trying to tell a story is forgotten by the wayside even if most of it can be boiled down to hacks who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a narrative department in the first place.

Anyone, I mean anyone, can make sweeping broad ideas about how to make a good story but unwritten stories are always good if they remain in your head. There's a reason writers consider"re-writing" the actual part of their work. The first ideas they come up with are always shitty or never work out the way they expected to in their head.

Execution is all that matters. Literally, it's all that matters. Good execution is what justifies the ideas. Insisting that high-concept ideas are in the same place of actually writing out a script that you expect people to experience will never turn you into a good writer. At best, you can expect to become just another shlock peddler who spends too much time on TV Tropes instead of analyzing good writing and why it works.

Maybe you missed it, but I just wrote a post saying that ideas are cheap and execution is what matters.

I never said it was easy to write anything good. Urban fantasy is oversaturated in prose fiction, but most of it is repetitive crap. What surprises me is that we don't see many attempts period in video games, much less ones that are good. I already expect that most of what we get will be bad due to Sturgeon's Law. I've tried out several that have turned out terrible.

I fully understand that any given story will need to be revised several times to get good and that TV tropes gives shit advice. As the adage goes: those who can, write; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, criticize.

Writing is one of the most important elements in anything. If you treat it like a low priority, your shit is going to suffer. if you don't pay attention to the quality of writer you hire or cheap out, your writing is going to be bad.

p. much

Video games as a multimedia creation require good work in all departments, whether it's gameplay, visual design, music & sound (including VA where it applies) more broadly or writing. Whichever elements are to be emphasized depends on the game in question and the sort of experience it aims to provide to the player, but narrative design matters regardless of how storyfaggy a game is supposed to be.

Yeah. There's no shortage of games with shit writing that were wildly successful due to good gameplay. As that one dev said, "story in video games is like story in a porno."

I've had so many frustrating arguments with delusional idiots online who think badly written drek is amazing and that I'm a hater for not seeing the genius. I learned the hard way to avoid those sorts of people.

Anyway... Even if they'd be mostly crappy, I'm surprised there aren't more urban fantasy video games period. If nothing else, then it would be mildly entertaining to mock bad writing.

John Carmack said the story in video games is like story in a porno thing while developing DOOM to Tom Hall, so he was correct insofar as DOOM was concerned.

As far as there being a lack of urban fantasy, I don't really see how that's the case. Persona 5 is urban fantasy. Devil May Cry 5 is urban fantasy. Neo: The World Ends With You, Ghostwire Tokyo, Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children, these are all urban fantasy titles. Some of them are quite good but if your metric is just Bloodlines/World of Darkness and "Bloodlines is the only notable urban fantasy game", I can see how someone would think that in addition to not jiving with Japanese stuff.

Do you have any examples that aren't japanese? The East's dismissal of consistency and cause/effect in their storytelling makes their verbose entries invisible to Western audiences.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Don't take this as an insult but if you really don't like what you see offered, then try your hand and make something you think is good. If it's good there's a very small chance you'll get noticed and if you're bad you'll get humbled very quickly. Though I have to be honest, most of the narrative people I've worked with were hacks and haven't had an original idea in their lives, so your competition isn't exactly elite. I'm not a narrative writer, but I like to describe good writing the way Justice Potter Stewart described pornography "I know it when I see it". Most of these writers today are checking boxes and writing stories around them and are following by the books styles and dialogue writing. None of them want to take risk or try something unorthodox, they just put unorthodox identities in as a substitute. If any of them had any balls at all they might get somewhere, but ultimately all the great writers tend to have things that can't be taught.

No offense taken. I'm currently trying that, thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have skills relevant to making video games so it's coming along very slowly. I wouldn't call myself an original or good writer, either. I just have the benefit of foresight from seeing a ton of other attempts and the market itself is unexploited. I just want to put something out there, to show people that it's possible if nothing else.

The problem isn't a lack of opportunity or skilled devs. There are plenty of games like Hunt the Night where you play a vampire in a dark fantasy setting. Devs who could make urban fantasy simply aren't choosing to.

This article claims:

Another possible reason could be the lack of an easy to reference template for less creative products. As previously mentioned, anyone who wants to phone in the story of a high fantasy game can easily crib notes from Tolkien, Warcraft and numerous others. Similarly, if writing a sci-fi game, Star Trek, Neuromancer and others provide straightforward baselines for each given branch of sci-fi. Urban fantasy, while a prolific genre, does not have what you might call an archetypical example of the genre that serves as a sort of ‘generic’ template for anyone wishing to do a story in that genre.

In truth, this might actually be a boon for any future urban fantasy games, insofar as said games are more likely to be individually creative, as opposed to simply taking elements from pre-existing properties to make an easily marketable game. Of course, by the same token, it may take until such a property impacts on the collective consciousness for urban fantasy to get its due in gaming.

Perhaps if that ever happened, urban fantasy might even suffer the same fate of other genres of becoming largely homogeneous near-identical releases with the occasional spark of uniqueness in the rough. But even so, at least there’d be even more types of identical games to choose from, making the game industry as a whole that little bit more varied.

This speculation isn't what I would call accurate. Urban fantasy is actually very easy to write (it's oversaturated in prose fiction) and has several templates to choose from. Harry Potter and Bloodlines, for example. HP inspired numerous clones on the YA scene. After Bloodlines almost all the few vampire crpgs that were made, like DARK or Vampyr, used the plot outline of "you become a newbie vamp, abandoned by your creator, manipulated by dark forces to cause the apocalypse, etc". At least one visual novel I tried was a shameless ripoff that copied several plot points verbatim, like "blowing up an enemy coven's warehouse full of weapons" or "a whole clique of vampires who are arbitrarily crazy because Bloodlines did it." The DARK manual includes a shoutout to Bloodlines by saying the minor NPCs April and June are sisters to Therese and Jeanette Voerman who run The Asylum in Santa Monica (this is completely irrelevant to the plot and isn't mentioned in the game itself).

I admit that my outlines included a general tone and some plot points inspired by Bloodlines, mostly because imitation is flattery and attracts fans of that game. But even then I want to do my own spin on the clichés and tropes.

Just off the top of my head, one way to change up is to give the vampire PC a relationship with his creator that persists throughout the game. The creator acts as an exposition fairy who teaches the PC about the magical world and orders him on various errands. Let's add some depth to the creator: what's the creator's reason for vampirizing the PC in the first place? Hmm... maybe it's been hibernating for a while due to immortal angst and isn't acquainted with the modern world, so it vampirizes the PC to learn about the modern world and offload some of its emotional baggage by transferring unneeded memories to the PC. Vampires magically feed on life via blood, so it stands to reason that they absorb the soul/memory of victims. You could use this as the basis for a PST-esque flashback mechanic where the PC can remember things about the master's past victims that can come in handy or add to the atmosphere.

Maybe take some cues from BloodRayne or Castlevania and make the PC some kind of half-vampire who doesn't suffer stereotypical weaknesses like sunlight, fire or running water as acutely as full-fledged vampires. Maybe add some lore where the magical people are racist against halfies and see them as slaves/pets barely above mere mortals on the totem pole, which colors interactions with different covens. The decadent high society coven sees the PC as simply an extension of his master's will, while the downtrodden social justice coven treats the PC as a peer.

Add some magicians and shapeshifters and whatever to the milieu of characters to make it look less like a clone of Bloodlines. Go wild and add characters like fallen angels, tall sexy leprechauns, dragons, demon clowns, elves, animated mummies, possessed puppets, etc.

Urban fantasy is not a genre lacking in inspiration.

Half vampires are always stupid. Pretty sure I made a thread that explains this in detail.

An interesting opinion. Do you have a link? They’re just as fictional as vampires so their traits are just as variable, so I don’t understand why anyone would think the idea is inherently stupid. In some stories, half-vampires have all the traits that would qualify them as vampires in other stories (e.g. drinking blood, superpowers, transmitting vampirism). What is your reasoning for this?

 

[J1M]

The point is there are urban fantasy games. I don't see how that's that difficult to comprehend. There's a difference between "I don't like this" vs "this is not urban fantasy because I dont like it."

Ok. Those are urban fantasy. I cannot dispute that.

The only point you're actually making is that these games aren't Bloodlines because your only metric for "urban fantasy" is just World of Darkness and even then, it seems be Bloodlines. I'll give you that the other WoD games haven't been that good though I liked Night Road, I'm sure you have a problem with that because it's not Bloodlines. Not even Hogwarts Legacy is being brought up as an Urban Fantasy example so I imagine you don't care for that.

Ok. I’m looking for games like Bloodlines and I don’t give a flying fuck about anything else. Yes, Paradox’s official WoD games are shovelware that don’t interest me. No, if I was interested in Hogwarts then I would’ve played it already.

As a starving man you may find the recent Werewolf WoD game of some sustenance. It's best viewed as a 90's game found in a time capsule.

 

[J1M]

How many other games let you play vampire hunters?

According to Google:

Embarrassingly flawed list.

 

[J1M]

Don't take this as an insult but if you really don't like what you see offered, then try your hand and make something you think is good. If it's good there's a very small chance you'll get noticed and if you're bad you'll get humbled very quickly. Though I have to be honest, most of the narrative people I've worked with were hacks and haven't had an original idea in their lives, so your competition isn't exactly elite. I'm not a narrative writer, but I like to describe good writing the way Justice Potter Stewart described pornography "I know it when I see it". Most of these writers today are checking boxes and writing stories around them and are following by the books styles and dialogue writing. None of them want to take risk or try something unorthodox, they just put unorthodox identities in as a substitute. If any of them had any balls at all they might get somewhere, but ultimately all the great writers tend to have things that can't be taught.

No offense taken. I'm currently trying that, thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have skills relevant to making video games so it's coming along very slowly. I wouldn't call myself an original or good writer, either. I just have the benefit of foresight from seeing a ton of other attempts and the market itself is unexploited. I just want to put something out there, to show people that it's possible if nothing else.

The problem isn't a lack of opportunity or skilled devs. There are plenty of games like Hunt the Night where you play a vampire in a dark fantasy setting. Devs who could make urban fantasy simply aren't choosing to.

This article claims:

Another possible reason could be the lack of an easy to reference template for less creative products. As previously mentioned, anyone who wants to phone in the story of a high fantasy game can easily crib notes from Tolkien, Warcraft and numerous others. Similarly, if writing a sci-fi game, Star Trek, Neuromancer and others provide straightforward baselines for each given branch of sci-fi. Urban fantasy, while a prolific genre, does not have what you might call an archetypical example of the genre that serves as a sort of ‘generic’ template for anyone wishing to do a story in that genre.

In truth, this might actually be a boon for any future urban fantasy games, insofar as said games are more likely to be individually creative, as opposed to simply taking elements from pre-existing properties to make an easily marketable game. Of course, by the same token, it may take until such a property impacts on the collective consciousness for urban fantasy to get its due in gaming.

Perhaps if that ever happened, urban fantasy might even suffer the same fate of other genres of becoming largely homogeneous near-identical releases with the occasional spark of uniqueness in the rough. But even so, at least there’d be even more types of identical games to choose from, making the game industry as a whole that little bit more varied.

This speculation isn't what I would call accurate. Urban fantasy is actually very easy to write (it's oversaturated in prose fiction) and has several templates to choose from. Harry Potter and Bloodlines, for example. HP inspired numerous clones on the YA scene. After Bloodlines almost all the few vampire crpgs that were made, like DARK or Vampyr, used the plot outline of "you become a newbie vamp, abandoned by your creator, manipulated by dark forces to cause the apocalypse, etc". At least one visual novel I tried was a shameless ripoff that copied several plot points verbatim, like "blowing up an enemy coven's warehouse full of weapons" or "a whole clique of vampires who are arbitrarily crazy because Bloodlines did it." The DARK manual includes a shoutout to Bloodlines by saying the minor NPCs April and June are sisters to Therese and Jeanette Voerman who run The Asylum in Santa Monica (this is completely irrelevant to the plot and isn't mentioned in the game itself).

I admit that my outlines included a general tone and some plot points inspired by Bloodlines, mostly because imitation is flattery and attracts fans of that game. But even then I want to do my own spin on the clichés and tropes.

Just off the top of my head, one way to change up is to give the vampire PC a relationship with his creator that persists throughout the game. The creator acts as an exposition fairy who teaches the PC about the magical world and orders him on various errands. Let's add some depth to the creator: what's the creator's reason for vampirizing the PC in the first place? Hmm... maybe it's been hibernating for a while due to immortal angst and isn't acquainted with the modern world, so it vampirizes the PC to learn about the modern world and offload some of its emotional baggage by transferring unneeded memories to the PC. Vampires magically feed on life via blood, so it stands to reason that they absorb the soul/memory of victims. You could use this as the basis for a PST-esque flashback mechanic where the PC can remember things about the master's past victims that can come in handy or add to the atmosphere.

Maybe take some cues from BloodRayne or Castlevania and make the PC some kind of half-vampire who doesn't suffer stereotypical weaknesses like sunlight, fire or running water as acutely as full-fledged vampires. Maybe add some lore where the magical people are racist against halfies and see them as slaves/pets barely above mere mortals on the totem pole, which colors interactions with different covens. The decadent high society coven sees the PC as simply an extension of his master's will, while the downtrodden social justice coven treats the PC as a peer.

Add some magicians and shapeshifters and whatever to the milieu of characters to make it look less like a clone of Bloodlines. Go wild and add characters like fallen angels, tall sexy leprechauns, dragons, demon clowns, elves, animated mummies, possessed puppets, etc.

Urban fantasy is not a genre lacking in inspiration.

Half vampires are always stupid. Pretty sure I made a thread that explains this in detail.

An interesting opinion. Do you have a link? They’re just as fictional as vampires so their traits are just as variable, so I don’t understand why anyone would think the idea is inherently stupid. In some stories, half-vampires have all the traits that would qualify them as vampires in other stories (e.g. drinking blood, superpowers, transmitting vampirism). What is your reasoning for this?

Aside from opening the door to the retardation of 1/4 vamps and 3/16th vamps, here you go:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/vtm-thin-bloods-are-stupid.140859/