World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt - VTM battle royale

[Infinitron]

Released:

 

[Zombra]

I'm still confused, I thought they pulled the plug on PC. I guess that was just the Early Access and now they're rereleasing for real?

 

[Adon]

Played a few rounds, it's okay for a free game, but I would never want to spend any real money on it. Never gonna be any real competition against Fortnite or Apex Legends so I have no idea why they thought this was a good idea.

 

[Belegarsson]

Honestly, I think the devs are really fond of World of Darkness/VTM instead of just getting the brand for some quick attention. There's a lot of lore that comes from codex pages and collectibles here which I'm as only a casual VTMB player can't verify if they're close to the source material, but it's an impressive amount of worldbuilding for a multiplayer only game nonetheless, and the implementation of the Masquerade into a multiplayer environment does feel authentic, even if NPCs behavior feels static and cartoonish.

Gameplay itself is pretty fun too, it has the same verticality-based traversal from Hyper Scape, but that game failed because it was fast for the sake of being fast, the arena shooter level of movement combined with absurdly high TTK made battles a one-note chase. Here in this game, guns are lethal, geometry is straightforward, climbing is smooth, movement is crisp but not too chaotically fast, and there are some decent anti-camping methods like the poison bomb. Battles are manageable, simple, but rewarding. I can already see some weapons being horrible to fight against like the grenade launcher (I think? Only got shot by it, never tried it it's a pair of crossbows lol), and the second try mechanic is utterly mind-boggling (you automatically respawn in the nearest position to where you die once, potentially to catch your killer off-guard), but as it stands, it's pretty decent. It's definitely not as well designed as Apex and the PvE aspect is fairly shallow, but the fact that it didn't come out as a complete meme is pretty commendable.

 

[Baron Dupek]

There's something funny seeing this picture when you remember old jokes about turning your favourite IP into popamole garbage... any genre chased by publishers, forced upon developers only to fail.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Watched my nephew play it on his ps5 the other day, fucking pathetic what gaming has become.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Honestly, I think the devs are really fond of World of Darkness/VTM instead of just getting the brand for some quick attention. There's a lot of lore that comes from codex pages and collectibles here which I'm as only a casual VTMB player can't verify if they're close to the source material, but it's an impressive amount of worldbuilding for a multiplayer only game nonetheless, and the implementation of the Masquerade into a multiplayer environment does feel authentic, even if NPCs behavior feels static and cartoonish.

Paradox is clearly whoring out their IP even worse than Games Workshop. They're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and nothing does. The text games each have vastly more text than Bloodlines ever did but lack any of the soul, memorability, or self-awareness. The unbound games are on the same level as cheap flash games from the early 2000s. The Epic games have been terrible and feel like unrelated games that had the brand tacked on. I am completely uninterested in this IP and I'm more interested in seeing original games that have to work on their merits rather than piggybacking on Paradox's name recognition. Not that said name recognition is worth shit now.

If I could make my own urban fantasy video game, then I would. If there are any upcoming developers in need of funding, which is something I can provide, then feel free to point me in their direction.

 

[gerey]

The text games each have vastly more text than Bloodlines ever did but lack any of the soul, memorability, or self-awareness.

Because they're written by the same kind of assclowns responsible for the nWoD, and with the same "talent" as the initial developers of Bloodlines 2. You can vomit a library's worth of content, but if it's shit no one will care.

There's been a near-complete lack of good writers in gaming for the past decade or so. And it's not even like the public is asking for anything groundbreaking, just something that isn't preaching at them at every opportunity and shoving faggots and ugly lesbians in their face.

If I could make my own urban fantasy video game, then I would.

I think the biggest issue by far, if not specifically with WoD, then in particular with VtM, is how well White Wolf did their homework on vampires and how well it resonated with the public. I remember when the Underworld movies had to change certain aspects of their lore, mainly pertaining to the fact the vampires had clans, because they got successfully sued by WW. I can't really imagine a vampire game nowadays that wouldn't, at least in part, draw inspiration from oWoD vampires because they did such a good job of distilling all the various vampire lore across the globe into a coherent whole.

Also, I imagine it's far easier to build a game around such a solid core than try to create something new and, more importantly, something different enough from the World of Darkness not to get sued by WW.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The text games each have vastly more text than Bloodlines ever did but lack any of the soul, memorability, or self-awareness.

Because they're written by the same kind of assclowns responsible for the nWoD, and with the same "talent" as the initial developers of Bloodlines 2. You can vomit a library's worth of content, but if it's shit no one will care.

There's been a near-complete lack of good writers in gaming for the past decade or so. And it's not even like the public is asking for anything groundbreaking, just something that isn't preaching at them at every opportunity and shoving faggots and ugly lesbians in their face.

If I could make my own urban fantasy video game, then I would.

I think the biggest issue by far, if not specifically with WoD, then in particular with VtM, is how well White Wolf did their homework on vampires and how well it resonated with the public. I remember when the Underworld movies had to change certain aspects of their lore, mainly pertaining to the fact the vampires had clans, because they got successfully sued by WW. I can't really imagine a vampire game nowadays that wouldn't, at least in part, draw inspiration from oWoD vampires because they did such a good job of distilling all the various vampire lore across the globe into a coherent whole.

Also, I imagine it's far easier to build a game around such a solid core than try to create something new and, more importantly, something different enough from the World of Darkness not to get sued by WW.

I’m sorry to inform you, but your research is wrong.

The text games are written by diehard fans of vtm who despise nwod (which is more or less the same thing with different window dressing but some the stupider stuff removed I guess, I haven’t followed it in over a decade after I became disgusted/disillusioned w/ WW’s IPs and toxic fandom). It’s always been pretentious emo goth shit since its inception like 30 years ago. They’ve always been an object of derision in the wider tabletop community. Troika brought something new because they weren’t fans and knew how ridiculous the IP was, so they leaned into black comedy and campiness. That’s why Bloodlines is a cult hit, and it has zero to do with any inherent strength of the IP. World building should serve the story, not the other way around. Too many writers and fans forget this and think “more lore (i.e. reciting factoids) = automatically better.” But I digress.

The lawsuit against Underworld was thrown out/settled out of court because WW was making shit up. Sony provided a rebuttal rebutting all of their supposed “80 points of similarity.” Underworld didn’t change anything and they never had clans. Meanwhile, there are several games that do have clans and were never sued: Soul Reaver, Warhammer Fantasy, Bloodlust Shadowhunter, Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars, Red Embrace: Hollywood, Shadowbane, etc. There’s also comics and books with similar ideas like Anita Blake, American Vampire and Certain Dark Things. WW doesn’t own these ideas and they have no legal ground to sue anyone for writing about multiple different vampiric species.

WW’s homework was terrible. They just copied some vampires books and movies that were around at the same, e.g. Lost Boys, Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Nosferatu, The Lair of the White Worm, Necroscope, as well as some non-vampire works like Sazan Eyes, forced those into a Ricean-derived template of high school cliques, and got lucky because they appealed to a demographic of goth teens in the 90s. Not only that, they made up invented jargon by recycling completely unrelated dictionary and foreign words, as was the style at the time. They took no direct inspiration from folklore I could find, much less global folklore, and they’re nowhere near as popular now as they were in the 90s so they definitely don’t still resonate. Troika’s Bloodlines is the most popular entry in the IP and that’s because of Troika’s writing rather than the bloated irrelevant lore.

If you want a vampire rpg that took inspiration from actual folklore and myths, then that would be Everlasting: Book of the Unliving from 1997, which was written by a former WW freelancer. It used a similar premise and didn’t get sued. Its dozen featured bloodlines included references to folklore like obayifo and lamias, deities like ayapec and kali, historical figures like vlad the impaler and elizabeth bathory, etc.

WW is not even the first to do something like this. That honor goes to Captain Kronos from the 70s. It mentioned that “there are many species of vampire as birds of prey” and featured vampires that consume youth instead of blood. (I think Tomb of Dracula did something similar featuring vampire myths from around the world but I haven’t read it so I can’t confirm.) Then you got the Nightlife rpg in 1990, which had an identical premise with various “kin” that predated on humans. There’s also the Lost Girl tv show from the early 2010s which is basically about emotional vampires but they’re called “fey.” They didn’t get sued.

As far as video games are concerned, this is just a vampiric implementation of the age-old concept of fantasy races and classes. That’s not sufficient grounds to be sued and I have difficulty imagining anyone doing something “new” that isn’t the same thing by another name or just recycling good old fashioned Dracula. We don’t need anything “new” in this context because Paradox has no grounds to sue people for using the idea of multiple vampire species. You can’t copyright ideas.

If I sound angry, then I apologize. Bad research and misinformation about topics I’m very familiar with is a notorious pet peeve for me. I hope this has been informative for you.

 

[gerey]

If I sound angry, then I apologize. Bad research and misinformation about topics I’m very familiar with is a notorious pet peeve for me. I hope this has been informative for you.

You can't disagree with me because I'm black.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

But back on topic… BH never needed to use Paradox’s brand name. As a free to play battle royale it was basically guaranteed an audience if it wasn’t completely horrible. I’m guessing that, like most of the licensed games, it started out as an unrelated game/pitch before the dev asked Paradox for the license and then shoehorned in the IP. It doesn’t benefit from brand recognition because most of the players have probably never heard of the IP and the tastes of the demographics probably don’t overlap. It’s akin to making a battle royale using the brand name from Interview with the Vampire or Twilight.

Also, I’m guessing most fans of the tabletop (and the Bloodlines game, I guess) are probably seething that this is the most successful entry in Paradox’s licensing experiments. Which is another reason I’m glad I left the fandom over a decade ago. The rights holders for the IP, whoever they are at the time, have a history of pissing off the lore junkies by making lore changes. It’s one of the reasons, along with Blizzard lore, that I’ve become critical of the entire concept of lore.

Oh, and this is probably the most irrelevant bit, they use the Spanish word for “witch” (as in a Halloween witch) to refer to a fighter class. Along with “bullfighter” when the game doesn’t feature bullfighting. You gotta love it when gringo writers use gratuitous foreign words in nonsensical contexts.

All of which proves that monopolies (in this case, on vampires and urban fantasy) are bad for consumers. We need more IPs to compete with this.

 

[Sunri]

flattest vampire ever

 

[Demo.Graph]

flattest vampire ever

His name is Elon. He's a crossdresser.

 

[throwaway69420]

This game only makes me want to get off my ass and finally DM a CoD/nWoD/whatever the fuck you call it now campaign.

Edit: also in the game you are getting blood hunted and committing diablerie multiple times per minute in between getting into open shootouts on the street, it's hilarious and just as over the top as you'd expect of a Vampire BR.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

This game only makes me want to get off my ass and finally DM a CoD/nWoD/whatever the fuck you call it now campaign.

Yeah, I like what the 2004 AU reboot tried to do even if the execution was iffy. Hindsight is 20/20 after all. A lot of haters like to claim it's terrible because it has no lore (as if reciting a bazillion factoids is relevant to playing an elf-game where the point is to use your imagination rather than passively consume an existing story like traditional media), but I've read dozens of the books and it has tons of lore scattered across them. There's no single overarching metaplot, but why would you need one? It has tons of bloodlines, factions, whatever and there's also tons of fanbooks converting cWoD stuff as well as introducing new stuff. In retrospect it's a bloated mess at least as much as its parent/sibling IP and I've decided that if I ever run a vampire-themed tabletop game then I'll use a completely different system. Like this one, which has the benefit of being 100% free so there's no reason not at least check it out if you're remotely interested.

 

[Rahdulan]

Imagine my shock.
https://bloodhunt.com/en-us/news/the-future-of-bloodhunt

THE FUTURE OF BLOODHUNT
Hello Bloodhunt Community!

Bloodhunt is a game that we developed as a standout title in the popular Battle Royale genre, where we focused on creating an immersive and unique experience for players that enjoy games that are easy to learn but difficult to master.

Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.

With that said, Bloodhunt servers will stay up and the game will remain available to play. Our aim is to keep the servers going for as long as we have an active player base and community. For those who enjoy the game and want to continue playing, we have worked on some solutions to ensure that the game continues to be interesting. An in-game player voting system will be deployed to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh. We will share more granular details about how this system works when we get closer to releasing our next update, which will be the last planned patch for Bloodhunt. Beyond that update, patches will only be related to maintenance.

We are also looking at turning off real currency purchasing on September 26th. Before this happens, we will implement a way to earn in-game tokens more easily so players can continue to play and unlock cosmetics beyond this date.

While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end, please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.

We hope you will still have many enjoyable experiences in Bloodhunt, and we look forward to seeing you on the streets of Prague!

 

[lycanwarrior]

Imagine my shock.
https://bloodhunt.com/en-us/news/the-future-of-bloodhunt

THE FUTURE OF BLOODHUNT
Hello Bloodhunt Community!

Bloodhunt is a game that we developed as a standout title in the popular Battle Royale genre, where we focused on creating an immersive and unique experience for players that enjoy games that are easy to learn but difficult to master.

Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.

With that said, Bloodhunt servers will stay up and the game will remain available to play. Our aim is to keep the servers going for as long as we have an active player base and community. For those who enjoy the game and want to continue playing, we have worked on some solutions to ensure that the game continues to be interesting. An in-game player voting system will be deployed to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh. We will share more granular details about how this system works when we get closer to releasing our next update, which will be the last planned patch for Bloodhunt. Beyond that update, patches will only be related to maintenance.

We are also looking at turning off real currency purchasing on September 26th. Before this happens, we will implement a way to earn in-game tokens more easily so players can continue to play and unlock cosmetics beyond this date.

While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end, please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.

We hope you will still have many enjoyable experiences in Bloodhunt, and we look forward to seeing you on the streets of Prague!

The whole Battle Royal genre largely has no more room to grow; it is completely saturated.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

Does it have big boobies?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Imagine my shock.
https://bloodhunt.com/en-us/news/the-future-of-bloodhunt

THE FUTURE OF BLOODHUNT
Hello Bloodhunt Community!

Bloodhunt is a game that we developed as a standout title in the popular Battle Royale genre, where we focused on creating an immersive and unique experience for players that enjoy games that are easy to learn but difficult to master.

Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.

With that said, Bloodhunt servers will stay up and the game will remain available to play. Our aim is to keep the servers going for as long as we have an active player base and community. For those who enjoy the game and want to continue playing, we have worked on some solutions to ensure that the game continues to be interesting. An in-game player voting system will be deployed to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh. We will share more granular details about how this system works when we get closer to releasing our next update, which will be the last planned patch for Bloodhunt. Beyond that update, patches will only be related to maintenance.

We are also looking at turning off real currency purchasing on September 26th. Before this happens, we will implement a way to earn in-game tokens more easily so players can continue to play and unlock cosmetics beyond this date.

While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end, please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.

We hope you will still have many enjoyable experiences in Bloodhunt, and we look forward to seeing you on the streets of Prague!

Oh no, what happened? Let's try a Planescape Torment battle royale next, this one's a winner.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Of course. The most profitable and popular game produced for the IP so far, and it's a failure. More proof to support my wild conspiracy theory that this IP is cursed.

 

[deuxhero]

There's one crime nobody mentions about this shit: Prague may as well been chosen out of a hat with a bunch of European cities. Nothing about this says any of it was done knowing Prague was the setting. People mention the rainbow casting, but there's also issues like having only a single Czech gun, used only by an explicitly foreign group, in a country with a rich history in small arms and common civilian ownership.