None of the other VtM games get more dank with it than Bloodlines does.Meanwhile, Bloodlines mentions and focuses on Gehenna, Jyhad, Caine, Lilith, Antediluvians, all three sects, Society of Leopold, even Kuei Jin. You have Caine in the game for fuck's sake, you can't get more dank with the lore than this.
They don't do any deep diving, Pillars of Eternity-style, into any of these elements. I read the Kuei-Jin books after playing Bloodlines, and it says everything about how succinct Bloodlines is that I realized upon reading them that Bloodlines uses almost nothing about their lore in the game. Bloodlines uses all these cool elements in only the scarcest way necessary for its intruiging mysteries and story beats - it never gets bogged down in unneccesary detail.
So yes, you can get way, waaaaaay more dank with all those elements, and its to Bloodlines' credit that it never does. It picks and chooses cool elements from the lore without ever making its story beats about that lore itself.
Edit: I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that Bloodlines is pretty entrenched in the VtM setting, moreso than other VtM games. It's not VtM purism that made Bloodlines good, but it's not VtM purism that made other VtM games bad. Because they have even less VtM stuff than Bloodlines does.
Then don't we agree? My original response to Roguey was to contradict his point that Troika "didn't care". I'm just saying that it does the balancing act perfectly. The antediluvian plot beat is a great demonstration: it's essentially a Macguffin designed to highlight some of the toplevel story themes of VtM (the base level conflict between sabbat and cammarilla, the fact that your are a slave to scary elder forces etc.), but they didn't delve into any details surrounding all powerful elder gods and all that silly nonsense.
They focused on what most players can basically read in any basic VtM manual - but this surface VtM, they handled pretty much perfectly.
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