World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 - VTMB sequel from The Chinese Room - coming Fall 2024

[ColaWerewolf]

Hardsuit lab's VTMB2 (Pre-alpha) gameplay, this video is an analysis (in russian) of the gameplay videos shared by Larry Vallely (which are currently private).

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
OH NO NO NO

Also the intro that I saw fit well with Bloodlines and the just leaked videos show that the atmosphere was spot on.

AAAAA HAHAHAHA
OH NO NO NO

 

[Fedora Master]

Just scrap this shit and make a proper Werewolf: The Apocalypse game. Would fit the current climate panic much better as well.

 

[J1M]

While thinbloods are dumb, the setup was great for gameplay reasons. It justified multiple vampire blood hunts and provided a a way for the player to interact with and learn about the clans before being required to pick one.

Is that a positive? That kind of general store approach to an element that should be the foundation of a number of unique narratives within the game reeks of taking the easy way out - why bother building a world where a Toreador's story plays out differently than a Nosferatu's would, when you can build a static one with a nondescript protagonist and a couple cosmetic variables.

It's the CP2077 shitty background choices, except somehow worse.

Yes, it is positive. People aren't going to play the game 6 times. The alternative is having a short paragraph of text in a menu to decide.

There is no reality where they build 6 games worth of content and you see a slice of it based on character choice.

 

[deuxhero]

While building on the theory about the original that the cabbie (who is Kain or a very old malk who thinks he is) was increasing the player character's generation with his "plot device" level powers (for whatever his reason) could be doable, there was no way the old dev could ever have handled it well.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

If

i'm sure its a coincidence that you individually feel like you don't want to play a bloodlines sequel and need to post about it on the bloodlines sequel thread

Oh no, I definitely feel schadenfreude that this IP whose fandumb I had awful experiences with the past is now being driven into the ground and alienating all but the most toxically positive fans.

But as much as I delight in imagining those bullies suffering perpetual fits of apoplexy that they brought on themselves (which isn’t much, I do have other interests in multiple old dead IPs nobody else has heard of), there still aren’t any new fun urban fantasy crpgs. I’m still waiting on AI advancing to the point where I can make a decent looking game in my free time on my skillset unrelated to game design.

Maybe you are too European to sense this, but constantly complaining about people who "bullied" your vampire fan fiction with online comments makes you sound like a fag.

He says in a thread where everyone is circlejerking to two decade old memories of Jeanette while Paradox pours gasoline on this IP then lights a match.

 

[Delterius]

While building on the theory about the original that the cabbie (who is Kain or a very old malk who thinks he is) was increasing the player character's generation with his "plot device" level powers (for whatever his reason) could be doable, there was no way the old dev could ever have handled it well.

well it wouldn't take god or cain to achieve clan status. diablerie is one option.

 

[deuxhero]

Which has a lot of problems. Even if dialberie on a captured enemy of the prince was permitted, how would one from each clan be presented for the feast and the PC be in a position to get this gift relatively early in the game?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

maybe vamps have developed a magic ritual to adopt? If thinbloods can develop new powers and magic and alchemy and shit by themselves then anything is possible, right?

 

[Delterius]

Which has a lot of problems. Even if dialberie on a captured enemy of the prince was permitted, how would one from each clan be presented for the feast and the PC be in a position to get this gift relatively early in the game?

assuming diablerie I think its down to the plotline we know nothing about. the easiest solution I can imagine is a meta-choice, where you are diablerizing your sire and you've 'chosen' to be a tremere by discovering that your sire was tremere. it wouldn't be a buffet, you'd be retaliating against whoever did the mass embrace that turned you thinblooded. that would also take care of any animosity between your new clan and you. you'd be eating someone who really went out of line. but thats a lot of speculation.

the plot has options, is all i'm saying. we don't have to bring out god. they could even decide that you have an unique opportunity to use thinblood alchemy to attain 13th generation. no one would bat an eye.

 

[J1M]

Which has a lot of problems. Even if dialberie on a captured enemy of the prince was permitted, how would one from each clan be presented for the feast and the PC be in a position to get this gift relatively early in the game?

assuming diablerie I think its down to the plotline we know nothing about. the easiest solution I can imagine is a meta-choice, where you are diablerizing your sire and you've 'chosen' to be a tremere by discovering that your sire was tremere. it wouldn't be a buffet, you'd be retaliating against whoever did the mass embrace that turned you thinblooded. that would also take care of any animosity between your new clan and you. you'd be eaten someone who really went out of line. but thats a lot of speculation.

the plot has options, is all i'm saying. we don't have to bring out god. they could even decide that you have an unique opportunity to use thinblood alchemy to attain 13th generation. no one would bat an eye.

Just as in your first playthrough you could kill Roger the NPC and help him in your second playthrough, the game can canonically show that only the clan you joined has a member sentenced to diablerie.

It could even have served as a tutorial quest in a sense by the clan pairing you up with someone who demonstrated the clan powers while on a mission to end a masquerade violator. The clan of the target can change to align with your clan choice each playthrough. (There is only one vamp on the menu, not a buffet.)

Or it could be a case of each clan having a quest and the choice determines the order you do them in. (Prince only grants you one diablerie.)

 

[Delterius]

I think you are forgetting that this is a videogame. Just as in your first playthrough you could kill Roger the NPC and help him in your second playthrough, the game can canonically show that only the clan you joined has a member sentenced to diablerie.

Oh but that's sort of what I meant.

There are two things I know about the plot of Hardsuit's BL2: the game starts with a criminal mass embrace sabbat style, only instead of raising an army whoever did it breached the masquerade in the middle of the streets. At some point you're tracking all the other thinbloods that were born from it, and presumably you're investigating the overall crime for the higher ups. The game could cleverly portray that your Act 1 investigation points towards a kindred of your desired clan. That's one way to fit diablerie into the equation without turning it into a buffet. The game can also not be super clever about it and sentence a group of co-conspirators, letting you diablerize one of them at your leisure.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Or they could say that because of magic or whatever that generation is going away and thinbloods can activate clan membership. Or any number of other explanations.

Not everything needs to be forced into your vampire soul cannibalism vore porn fetish.

 

[Delterius]

Or they could say that because of magic

the plot has options, is all i'm saying. we don't have to bring out god. they could even decide that you have an unique opportunity to use thinblood alchemy to attain 13th generation. no one would bat an eye.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

maybe vamps have developed a magic ritual to adopt? If thinbloods can develop new powers and magic and alchemy and shit by themselves then anything is possible, right?

Or they could say that because of magic

the plot has options, is all i'm saying. we don't have to bring out god. they could even decide that you have an unique opportunity to use thinblood alchemy to attain 13th generation. no one would bat an eye.

 

[The President]

That one guy who said he was the sole designer for some aspect of Hardsuit isn't surprising to me. They really didn't have the technical talent in house considering the number of contractors and mercs they needed to even get what they were able to do.

As for how the player character progressed from Thin Blood to 13th. Does it really matter that much? I mean whether you diablerie someone or some magic ritual happened, I'm sure they'd have wrapped into the plot somehow and made it work. Some of you conversely claim that the rules of the IP are so so restrictive and then require those rules to be followed and bitch about it are really something. My question is always a very simple what the fuck do you want exactly, explain it to me.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Some of you conversely claim that the rules of the IP are so so restrictive and then require those rules to be followed and bitch about it are really something. My question is always a very simple what the fuck do you want exactly, explain it to me.

I don’t think the rules should be followed, since I like watching lorefags throw hissy fits. The fifth edition wars have been absolutely hilarious. But at that point it does raise the question of why you bothered to buy the IP at all if you’re just gonna turn it into a skinsuit for your original ideas as Paradox has been doing. You’ve invalidated the brand recognition by alienating the existing fans (not that the tabletop fandom has any spine to abandon you and pull a Rippaverse, they still eat up any shit you publish) and you’ve spent millions of dollars that you could’ve spent on making an original IP from the get go. Did you buy it to avoid being sued for copyright infringement? Because there’s a ton of public domain stuff you could use as a resource to approximate what ideas you liked.

Then again, all corpos have been turning IPs into skinsuits with no internal logic recently so I can only assume this is a standard business practice.

 

[normie]

RELEASE THE HARDSUIT CUT

 

[Harthwain]

Is that a positive? That kind of general store approach to an element that should be the foundation of a number of unique narratives within the game reeks of taking the easy way out - why bother building a world where a Toreador's story plays out differently than a Nosferatu's would, when you can build a static one with a nondescript protagonist and a couple cosmetic variables.

It's the CP2077 shitty background choices, except somehow worse.

I think J1M has a point: it's good to have some sort of introduction, rather than force people to make blind choices. The blood hunts would also be a good opportunity to learn about the laws (before or after breaking them) and it'd keep you on the edge. CP77 background choices are shitty, but they are the reverse of this idea and you literally can't get anymore shitty than that (other than, maybe, having your background not matter at all).

Consider that Bloodlines has functionally the same story regardless of your clan. You only get to approach it from a different angle. Which generally means being praised by LaCroix, or getting the Tremere Chantry, or walking the sewers as a Nosferatu, or hallucinating the script as a Malkavian. This is not a knock down on Bloodlines itself, that change of perspective is important and does factor into the player's experience - and their final choice. It is similar to how DA:O did things. The brunt of the reactivity is your choice of background. Everything else is a matter of flavor or perspective, which can change how the player approaches NPCs and their choices throught.

This sounds good in theory, but in reality I never had a strong connection with Bloodlines, because the differences were too few and too shallow to make me feel like they mattered. It was, in short, too cosmetic. Dragon Age: Origins was a little bit better thanks to more detailed background introduction, which helped get you "in character" (and you got to have special say when you reached the content you "started" in).

Yes, it is positive. People aren't going to play the game 6 times. The alternative is having a short paragraph of text in a menu to decide.

There is no reality where they build 6 games worth of content and you see a slice of it based on character choice.

Depends on what you mean by "6 games worth of content". Arcanum has a plenty of reactions depending on your character. You will be treated differently based on your race and stats. You'll have extra options when you're a necromancer capable of summoning spirits of the dead. I would be hard pressed to find another game offering as much as Arcanum does in this regard, but this is precisely what a true RPG ought to offer, in my opinion.

Calling anything less than that "a positive" is blasphemy. CP77 is exactly the type of betrayal of the genre (on all levels) that we don't need nor want. Fuck CDPR for fucking up such a great opportunity to make a great cRPG (because CP2020 was a solid base for that), because they wanted to make another GTA.

 

[J1M]

I am just being realistic about what Paradox will approve given the situation. Changing clan may not even be an option in the version they are working on now as a way of limiting scope.

Or the differences may be limited to combat, etc.

 

[Wesp5]

The game can also not be super clever about it and sentence a group of co-conspirators, letting you diablerize one of them at your leisure.

First of all, you would only need to have 5 clans available as we know. Second, in one of the leaked video you fight a group of enemies and it looks as if they could be from these 5 clans. At least the Malkavian and Brujah are obvious and there is a lot of blood around as well (Tremere?). Imagine the prince with his goons barging in at the end and offering you to diablerize one of them! What I didn't like about the whole thinblood idea though was that their disciplines were very strong right from the start. Which was made worse when HSL announced that you would get all three of them, because adding the different traversal options to all maps obviously was a nightmare. This and the combat-with-throwing-weapons-away were bad design decicisions!

 

[Jenkem]

RELEASE THE HARDSUIT CUT

it should be THE MITSODA CUT if we are keeping with themes

RELEASE THE MITSODA CUT, YOU COWARDS!!!!

 

[Wesp5]

Also the intro that I saw fit well with Bloodlines and the just leaked videos show that the atmosphere was spot on.

AAAAA HAHAHAHA
OH NO NO NO

Sorry, but compared to Swansong or the werewolf game they surely were much closer to the Bloodlines feeling...

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Man I am so glad the hardsuit game was scrapped now. That shite was a travesty.

 

[Wesp5]

Wesp, I get that these guys were nice to you but between the two parties, Hardsuit were almost certainly more "politically correct" than Paradox...

My main contacts were with Paradox and not HSL, so I can't really know. But the dance trailer was really cruel and wasn't everybody fired soon after?

 

[Harthwain]

My main contacts were with Paradox and not HSL, so I can't really know. But the dance trailer was really cruel and wasn't everybody fired soon after?

I found that trailer to be perhaps the only thing that showed what kind of monsters vampires can be and their response what to fire everyone? Figures.