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Development Info Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Dev Diary #20: Blood Resonance

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Tags: Paradox Interactive; The Chinese Room; Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/...e-bloodlines-2/news/dev-diary-blood-resonance

Welcome, Kindred, to this Bloodlines 2 Dev Diary from the team at The Chinese Room.  Tonight, we want to talk to you about our Blood Resonance feature. For those unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade, this is blood that is emotionally charged. A valuable commodity for an experienced elder vampire like Phyre.

Our vision of Phyre as an elder is that they have accrued many clan abilities over their 400 years as a vampire, but the incident that brought them to Seattle has locked away their connection to them. By using resonant blood and drinking the blood of the Clan Contacts you can restore Phyre’s connection to the abilities that aren’t native to your chosen clan. For more on the specific clan abilities, please read our previous Clan Highlights: Brujah, Tremere, Banu Haqim and Ventrue.

- Project Creative Director Alex Skidmore

Determining what Resonance a vessel has makes feeding more than just a pit stop. Most vampires observe their victims from a distance or engage them in conversation to feel them out.
-Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition

Blood Resonance Mechanics

Blood Resonance is an important part of your journey when exploring the city. It feeds (pun intended) into how you tailor Phyre’s abilities to match your vampiric playstyle and fantasy.

When exploring Seattle you can find pedestrians with one of three potential blood resonances: Melancholic (feeling anxious or afraid), Sanguine (feeling aroused/sexual attraction), and Choleric (feeling annoyed or angry). This is something only a vampire can know so you need to use your Heightened Senses to identify these pedestrians. Once found, you need to “turn” these pedestrians fully resonated. This is done through conversations, in which you will attempt to manipulate your victim’s emotions as needed.

With this feature, it was important to us that roleplaying affected the outcomes of these conversations, so the way you act throughout the game determines what conversation options are available. Also, your appearance is an important factor in these conversations, so choose your wardrobe wisely!

If you manage to “turn” the pedestrians, they will become fully resonated and react accordingly. This means they might start a fight with you, run from you in terror, or even find you irresistibly attractive, all of which increases the resonant blood of that type gained from feeding on them.

Whilst these are great ways to gain resonated blood, they aren’t the only way! You can find events happening around the city - highlighted on the map - where NPCs are already fully resonated allowing players to skip the conversation and jump straight into the feeding.

Either way, you are attempting to accrue enough blood of different resonance types to ultimately increase the range of the abilities you can use, and this is where Clan Contacts come into the mix.

Once you are Sheriff of Seattle, Clan Contacts, such as Mrs Thorn (clan Tremere) at Wake The Dead Café, will offer to aid you in restoring your connection to the abilities of their clan by drinking their blood. A pre-requisite is collecting the required amounts of the resonant blood for the ability you wish to “re-learn”. Once collected you can drink the Clan Contact’s blood, adding the ability to the Ability Tree to unlock with Ability Points.

I'm really looking forward to seeing your reactions to the pedestrian conversations and can't wait to see what combinations of abilities you all put together! See you in the dark alleyways of Seattle.

- Lead Game Designer Gavin Hood
 

Kev Inkline

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Our vision of Phyre as an elder is that they have accrued many clan abilities over their 400 years as a vampire, but the incident that brought them to Seattle has locked away their connection to them.

Why not use 'you' in this context too, or 'you as a Phyre' etc.?

...wait, I know why.

This game does not quite resonate with me.
 

RaggleFraggle

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So let me get this straight. In order to do something simple like advance your powers, you have to engage in multiple complicated continuous minigames? That sounds like it would get annoying and tedious for players very quickly.
 

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
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That sounds like a really shit "feature" I would ignore. In the very unlikely event I actually decide to give them money.
 

luj1

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Our vision of Phyre as an elder is that they have accrued many clan abilities over their 400 years as a vampire, but the incident that brought them to Seattle has locked away their connection to them.
bleh, is that what they came up with? Extremely unoriginal
 

DannyRope

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Worse than unoriginal, it's a nothingburger. "Some hundreds of years as vampire, powerful but somewhat weakened after passing maybe half of those years in torpor" could be used to describe almost any Elder in the lore. Imagine if a dev working in a medieval fantasy RPG would say "there're elves and dwarves; elves are slender, elegant and beautiful, as adept with bow and arrow as they're with magic. Dwarves are short and stout, master artisans, honorable warriors who live underground, they love axes and beer." It's the same shit.

When what you're saying it's the same thing as saying nothing it's better to not say anything at all. What's bugging me is this, if the Elder protagonist is going to have their powers locked away, presumably starting the adventure like a glorified Neonate, and a disembodied voice telling them stuff about the modern era... well, at that point, one wonders why not having an actual recently embraced vampire as the protagonist? You know, like in the first one.
 

Svetovid

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Bland, and it's exactly how this game will turn out, not awful, not great, just bland and forgettable.
 

Vincente

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well, at that point, one wonders why not having an actual recently embraced vampire as the protagonist? You know, like in the first one.
Because they didn't want to make a fledgling or thin-blooded protagonist. And slowly regaining your powers back as an Elder is a smoother and easier to explain process than "Caine did it."

You know, like in the first one.
 

DannyRope

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Because they didn't want to make a fledgling or thin-blooded protagonist. And slowly regaining your powers back as an Elder is a smoother and easier to explain process than "Caine did it."

You know, like in the first one.
Oh, The Chinese Room have come to deliver us from a shitty headcanon from Reddit and TvTropes. My heroes.
Elder regaining their powers back during the game and having a disembodied voice guiding them through the modern times, smooth? As opposed to having a Fledgling who starts naturally weak as a recently Embraced vampire and who knows about the tech and other stuff from the modern times without the need of a copilot. Yeah, that's the convoluted alternative. Please. Let's be real.

There's no need of "Caine did it" in the original. The Fledgling improves faster in the game than in a pen & paper Chronicle because it's more fun that way. Likewise, the Fledgling has a higher blood pool than the 12th or 13th Gen they probably are for the same reason (fun). No need for them to be 8th Gen. Because you know what else has Vampire: The Masquerade that Bloodlines hasn't? Night and day cycle. And guess why the videogame has eternal night? That's right, fun. It'd be tedious having to return all the time to our Haven. The passing of time is abstract in Bloodlines, it's for each player to decide how much time pass. The only real narrative restriction on that account is that it has to be less than a year.
 

Vincente

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Who said anything about convoluted alternatives? They said that they didn't want to make a fledgling PC because pretty much all the VtM games show you the fledgling experience, as opposed to elder.

I'm not even going to bother talking about your "fun" ramblings because ironically, it's more of a nothingburger post than what you think of this developer diary.
 

RaggleFraggle

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Because they didn't want to make a fledgling or thin-blooded protagonist. And slowly regaining your powers back as an Elder is a smoother and easier to explain process than "Caine did it."

You know, like in the first one.
Oh, The Chinese Room have come to deliver us from a shitty headcanon from Reddit and TvTropes. My heroes.
Elder regaining their powers back during the game and having a disembodied voice guiding them through the modern times, smooth? As opposed to having a Fledgling who starts naturally weak as a recently Embraced vampire and who knows about the tech and other stuff from the modern times without the need of a copilot. Yeah, that's the convoluted alternative. Please. Let's be real.

There's no need of "Caine did it" in the original. The Fledgling improves faster in the game than in a pen & paper Chronicle because it's more fun that way. Likewise, the Fledgling has a higher blood pool than the 12th or 13th Gen they probably are for the same reason (fun). No need for them to be 8th Gen. Because you know what else has Vampire: The Masquerade that Bloodlines hasn't? Night and day cycle. And guess why the videogame has eternal night? That's right, fun. It'd be tedious having to return all the time to our Haven. The passing of time is abstract in Bloodlines, it's for each player to decide how much time pass. The only real narrative restriction on that account is that it has to be less than a year.
A lot of that convolution could have been avoided with a reboot, as controversial as that sounds. E.g. Vampire: The Requiem doesn’t have generation, the elders atrophy in hibernation, thinbloods can join clans by simply finding an older vamp to finish their turning, you can easily convert stuff from the other continuity, etc. Why jump through all these hoops when you could use that continuity that already includes easy provisions for the stuff you wanna do?

Well, not that it matters now. Deck chairs on the titanic and all that.
 

DannyRope

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Who said anything about convoluted alternatives? They said that they didn't want to make a fledgling PC because pretty much all the VtM games show you the fledgling experience, as opposed to elder.

I'm not even going to bother talking about your "fun" ramblings because ironically, it's more of a nothingburger post than what you think of this developer diary.
I guess everything can be a nothingburguer when you don't bother to read and comprehend what's being said in a text. Should you have bothered to actually read, then you'd know that my point was that they make the protagonist an Elder just to modify everything that makes an Elder, well, an Elder. Fish out of temporal water, nope, because you have the disembodied voice guiding you. More powerful than a Fledgling? Nope, because your powers are "locked away". The protagonist is a Fledgling with an Elder coatpaint. And don't think I haven't notice you trying to be sarcastic using my own words (to hurt my feelings? Ha, ha) which would be more effective if you were, you know, literate.

A lot of that convolution could have been avoided with a reboot, as controversial as that sounds. E.g. Vampire: The Requiem doesn’t have generation, the elders atrophy in hibernation, thinbloods can join clans by simply finding an older vamp to finish their turning, you can easily convert stuff from the other continuity, etc. Why jump through all these hoops when you could use that continuity that already includes easy provisions for the stuff you wanna do?

The problem with that is that Requiem is discontinued, isn't it? And regardless, I'm guessing that Paradox only has the rights to Vampire the Masquerade, not Requiem. Not that they would want them because it's The Masquerade what's in vogue, Requiem is not as mainstream (as mainstream as a p&p rpg which is not Dungeons & Dragons can get).
 

RaggleFraggle

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The problem with that is that Requiem is discontinued, isn't it? And regardless, I'm guessing that Paradox only has the rights to Vampire the Masquerade, not Requiem. Not that they would want them because it's The Masquerade what's in vogue, Requiem is not as mainstream (as mainstream as a p&p rpg which is not Dungeons & Dragons can get).
Because Paradox discontinued it. Paradox owns Requiem because they bought the company that made it, and chose to cancel it in the late 2010s to avoid competing with V5 (supposedly it was outselling V5?). Masquerade is only “in vogue” because Paradox has been forcing it into the spotlight ever since the new edition in 2017, V5, but even then they’re failing miserably. They’ve been dragging the IP through the mud ever since they bought it.

After 2004 the IP was basically dead. It wasn’t selling anymore after the 90s bubble burst, so the owner at the time decided to make a reboot, Requiem. It was basically the same game with some reorganization to make it more playable and friendlier to new players who hadn’t been following since the early 90s.

From 2004 to 2017, Requiem was the game officially supported by the owner. It was as “in vogue” as well as it could possibly be. Got multiple editions, custom dice, a board game and everything.

Then Paradox bought the IP and released V5 in 2017. They canceled Requiem around the same time, even though the writers still wanted to make books. Now those writers are making a new game called Curseborne.



Anyway, short of doing another reboot from scratch for video games, Requiem’s design was very video game friendly, way more than Masquerade. The clans and covens readily provide a similar experience to what you find in Bloodlines and even BL2, without jumping through hoops. You can play as an ancient vampire who slept so long that they’re now a thinblood who can join a new clan by finding a sponsor to re-turn them, while relearning forgotten powers. The 5 clans cover your passionate, savage, dark, haunting, and lordly archetypes, with the option for prestige classes (around 100 were published). The 5 playable covenants cover your popular social groups like preps, rebels, neopagans, jesus freaks, and mad scientists. 2 npc covenants cover demon worshipers and bogiemen for vampires. To say nothing of more obscure stuff from the later books or just making stuff up for the video games. One of the books introduces a multiverse, so you can even have crossovers with other continuities like Bloodlines 1 if you want, or have AU doppelgängers of famous characters like Jeanette.

Not that it really matters now. Paradox has thoroughly destroyed the IP. After years of low quality shovelware, the brand name is poison now. It doesn’t appeal to returning fans and doesn’t attract new ones. They’re fucked.
 

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