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

[Zombra]

Looking forward to the Malkavian DLC pack

haha jokes on you and your extreme optimism
this is my first in a series of depression posts

That feeling when you realize you're rereading 3 year old texts from her. She's not coming back dude

 

[Nano]

As that one dev said, "story in video games is like story in a porno."

And nostalgic Codexers over at General Gaming seemingly agree with him and act like the success of his braindead shooters was a good thing.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

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."

Sure, but that's in spite of their shit writing and not due to it. And narrative design extends beyond just writing the plot and characters. It's what ties the aesthetics of the game together, akin to a blueprint for the audiovisual design. So a game with a serviceable underemphasized story, but with cool factions and environments I'd label as having a good narrative design (that was translated into good audiovisual design). Same as in an action flick whose story only serves as a pretext for going from scene A to scene B. The quality of the action itself matters, but it can be all that much cooler depending on the various sets and props being employed.

It depends on the genre and the execution of the story. A lot of games are just pure gameplay and the story is just a thin veneer, like a number of Nintendo titles. There are so many excuse plots or just plain bad plots that I just mentally skip over them.

What really gets my goat is when a story is actively terrible through things like blatant inconsistencies, lack of planning, etc and when the fandom consists of morons who think it's un-ironically amazing.

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. Key plot details are hidden in manuals and tie-in fiction that nobody read. The writers admit to making up the story as they went in interviews, forgetting what they wrote, and boy does it show! Character "arcs" are haphazard and inconsistent. 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. 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.

I could excuse the company's incompetence in that respect. I still despise it, but I can excuse it simply existing. There's too much stupid out there to spend so much effort on this one example. What I cannot excuse is the writers being arrogant morons who think they're perfect and the fans being idiotic sycophants who seriously think this drivel is amazing and attack anyone who criticizes it. That's just fucking insulting.

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.

Sorry to tell you but weeb shit doesn't count as true games.

These examples are a 2016 jrpg about astral combat in Tokyo, a 2019 action game about a half-demon pretty boy fighting demons in a "Red Grave City", a 2021 jrpg about Tokyo high schoolers fighting for their lives in a battle royale, a 2022 action game about a guy fighting the evil dead in Tokyo, a 2020 turn-based tactics game about police in a free trade city called Valhalla... what is the point being made here? I already linked two articles saying that in Japan there are more urban fantasy games than the West.

When I think "urban fantasy," I think of Harry Potter, Anne Rice, True Blood, Lost Girl, Buffy/Angel, Charmed, and those bazillion interchangeable paranormal romance books where the heroine falls in love with a sexy vampire/werewolf/wizard/mummy/leprechaun/fallen angel/unicorn/dragon/genie/pagan deity/whatever. I think of elves, dwarves, vampires, wizards, dragons, and other fantasy races living in the modern day. Usually secret from muggles, otherwise we'd cross into Dungeonpunk.

If those games are your best examples, then you're proving my point for me.

 

[Cricket McBangle]

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."

Sure, but that's in spite of their shit writing and not due to it. And narrative design extends beyond just writing the plot and characters. It's what ties the aesthetics of the game together, akin to a blueprint for the audiovisual design. So a game with a serviceable underemphasized story, but with cool factions and environments I'd label as having a good narrative design (that was translated into good audiovisual design). Same as in an action flick whose story only serves as a pretext for going from scene A to scene B. The quality of the action itself matters, but it can be all that much cooler depending on the various sets and props being employed.

It depends on the genre and the execution of the story. A lot of games are just pure gameplay and the story is just a thin veneer, like a number of Nintendo titles. There are so many excuse plots or just plain bad plots that I just mentally skip over them.

What really gets my goat is when a story is actively terrible through things like blatant inconsistencies, lack of planning, etc and when the fandom consists of morons who think it's un-ironically amazing.

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. Key plot details are hidden in manuals and tie-in fiction that nobody read. The writers admit to making up the story as they went in interviews, forgetting what they wrote, and boy does it show! Character "arcs" are haphazard and inconsistent. 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. 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.

I could excuse the company's incompetence in that respect. I still despise it, but I can excuse it simply existing. There's too much stupid out there to spend so much effort on this one example. What I cannot excuse is the writers being arrogant morons who think they're perfect and the fans being idiotic sycophants who seriously think this drivel is amazing and attack anyone who criticizes it. That's just fucking insulting.

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.

Sorry to tell you but weeb shit doesn't count as true games.

These examples are a 2016 jrpg about astral combat in Tokyo, a 2019 action game about a half-demon pretty boy fighting demons in a "Red Grave City", a 2021 jrpg about Tokyo high schoolers fighting for their lives in a battle royale, a 2022 action game about a guy fighting the evil dead in Tokyo, a 2020 turn-based tactics game about police in a free trade city called Valhalla... what is the point being made here? I already linked two articles saying that in Japan there are more urban fantasy games than the West.

When I think "urban fantasy," I think of Harry Potter, Anne Rice, True Blood, Lost Girl, Buffy/Angel, Charmed, and those bazillion interchangeable paranormal romance books where the heroine falls in love with a sexy vampire/werewolf/wizard/mummy/leprechaun/fallen angel/unicorn/dragon/genie/pagan deity/whatever. I think of elves, dwarves, vampires, wizards, dragons, and other fantasy races living in the modern day. Usually secret from muggles, otherwise we'd cross into Dungeonpunk.

If those games are your best examples, then you're proving my point for me.

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."

You can make anything sound shitty if you're being intentionally reductive. "Bloodlines is just a glorified fetch quest with broken combat."

Even then your reductions, all those games still qualify as urban fantasy whether you want to admit it or not. Genres and niches aren't merit-based.

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.

 

[Delterius]

Looking forward to the Malkavian DLC pack

haha jokes on you and your extreme optimism
this is my first in a series of depression posts

That feeling when you realize you're rereading 3 year old texts from her. She's not coming back dude

see you in the secret world thread zombra~

 

[RaggleFraggle]

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.

 

[Zombra]

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

 

[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: