Lujo
Augur
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2014
- Messages
- 242
I'm replaying it currently, and I'm all over the place with what Wesp did with it.
For example this isn't true. There's music in the game I don't remember being there which changes the mood quite a bit in a direction that really doesn't fit. I would very much enjoy a version of his mod which doesn't alter the music anywhere, that didn't end up in the game for a reason.
THEN there's the question of messing up the game flow in places in various ways.
The Vandal quest. That quest was originally questionable in many ways and I don't mind it being modded, as cutting yourself off from the blood bank is too harsh, and what Vandal asks of you to do is pretty horrifying. Being able to do it to Patty, and being able to not mess yourself up about it as a Nosferatu is fine and dandy in my book, but..
The problem is that being able to send Gimble to him is indefensible. It's crazy because at the moment you send Gimble to Vandal he leaves you in his office where he was about to imprison you to immediately go across town to check out something he could have checked out whenever. Not to mention that it takes substance out of the Gimble quest. That fight is part of VtmB, and is semi-unaviodable, what the change did was make avoiding it be the most convenient and desirable universal way to solve the Vandal demand AND get XP for it. If my child had done this we would have had a long discussion about game design.
But this is even more of a problem in moving Fat Larry back into the alley at the tail end of the downtown map from where you enter. You're kinda supposed to meet him and deal with him right away, which is why he was likely moved to where he was originally.
The restored maze in Grouts mansion is not consistent in tone with the rest of the mansion, too, that was completely unnecessary. From a level design standpoint, it's completely silly, because the textures in the mansion are very consistent otherwise and the ones in the maze aren't consistent with that. Not just that, but it's function as a "shortcut" is undermined by the fact that it's longer and more convoluted and puzzly than what it's supposed to be a shortcut for. Yes, you avoid some combat, but you already had a way to do that.
Blood Heal makes a lot of the game's challenges kinda trivial. Really.
A REALLY useful thing would have been to have spent quest items actually dissapear once they have no more use (keycards and such), my inventory is loaded with crap I'm kinda sure I won't need but have no idea where to stash.
etc etc
--- Some likes for wesp
I do like that selling stuff to the guy on the beach got turned into a quest, same with heather.
I wish you could find Heather in a fixed place after you save her as a Nosferatu, because her jumping you in the sewer is just silly.
The sewer level shortcut I didn't mind. The sewers weren't so bad, honestly, it's just that they're long AF and it breaks immersion. It feels like it's out of some other game.
And if I had a proper, understandable change log of all that was changed I could probably say more.
--- Some thoughts on system implementation
The game still has the same elementary problem that the humanity and masquerade stats are meaningless. Humanity starts too high, is easy to rack up, and difficult to lose, and it virtually impossible to have more than one or two masquerade violation ticks at the same time, so it doesn't feel like a game about Vampires as much a neo-noir with magic powers or superhero's. There's also no pressure to feed. I've heard of a mod which makes your blood actually tick down, I'd love to try it one time if it were somehow available as a standalone tack-on to a stable bugfix patch.
Although, it feels like you could kinda-remake it without the licence easily.
Then the XP and skills game is heavily messed up. Obfuscate is hugely rewarding, because the Nosferatu needs his sneak XP he should be missing on social interactions. But the Malk has both obfuscate and dementate making him able to get both the sneaky bonuses and the talky bonuses easily, and with Auspex he can go max shooty easily, which is the best endgame build anyway, so Malk is essentially OP as all hell when it comes to metagaming. Making combat somewhat trivial is relatively easy for everyone, so the game kinda has 3 modes - easy-do-everything (malkavian), normal (everyone else), self-imposed challenge (nosferatu, although it's not that much of a challenge).
If anything the game needed more clan-exclusive content rather than less. It ups the replayability.
--- Some thoughts on pacing, in the "revisiting VtmB" general line
About the stuff you can't change - there's bad pacing problems from Santa Monica onwards. Folks usually notice at the Sewers or at Chinatown, but the problem is that the Main Quest stuff becomes too samey and divorced from the rest of the world after Santa Monica.
In Santa Monica, You've got Mercurio sending you to the Beach House, but you can also nip over to the hospital to get him some medicine and get involved in random shannenigans there. If you go do his thing in the Beach house - you get to see the pier and the thin bloods which branches out into all sorts of stuff. Main Quest has you looking for Bertram, this leads to fighting the Kuei-Jin. You do the Lily thing, Vandal sends you to the Asylum looking for a victim so you get to run into Jenette. You sell stuff next to where you sleep. The quests actually feel varied, leads to one another reasonably well, etc. The Ocean House level is divorced from the rest of the stuff, but it's just one thing and part of the crazy quest chain for a crazy quest giver. You get to snoop around 4 different parts of the hospital ecah involved with a different quest.
Downtown, though...
You've got the sneak through the garage quest, sneak through a ship quests, sneak through a museum quest, sneak through a mansion quest. They're all samey, and they're all kinda disconected from the other stuff. You could fight through them, sure, but it's all the same. The difference with the fighting quests are that you just can't sneak through them - two are "go to this building, take the elevator, have a fight", two are go to this part of the sewer have a fight, go to this building have a fight. There's the skyline apartments but you just visit all of them, do pretty much the same thing in all of them, and afterwards they're all empty. And the main quest is very much divorced from the side quests. Sure, there's the whole serial killer going on, but it's not much. In Santa Monica the Ocean House can be tolerated, and the whole hub culminates with the separate-map Warehouse extravaganza.
In Downtown, if you do the main plot, you just don't get involved with the side stuff, it's all "warehouses and ocean house hotels". Technically, you're kinda better off doing all of the main quest first and then backtracking through the side stuff. What I did was actually go all the way to find Gary before tackling, say, Vick in downtown.
Because if you ride the train through the Downtown main quest and get to Hollywood,
what happens is that the "main" plot does start by taking place on-location, but in ways that don't really involve you with anything. And then the sewers separating you from the Nosferatu are just too damned long, cutting you off from the sidequests and being "disposable" - there's no point to them once you've done them once. Once you're at the warrens, the Nosferatu just give you a bunch of optional fetch quests, and if you want the plot to go anywhere you have to go to the next hub. And if I understood it correctly, if you're a Nosferatu you don't get the haven until right before pretty much the last mission.
The main plot is just divorced from the surroundings in downtown and hollywood, and if I remembr Chinatown correctly there's pretty much nothing but the main plot there.
Anywho, I'll finish my current run to refresh my memory of the rest of the stuff than see what I think...
For example this isn't true. There's music in the game I don't remember being there which changes the mood quite a bit in a direction that really doesn't fit. I would very much enjoy a version of his mod which doesn't alter the music anywhere, that didn't end up in the game for a reason.
THEN there's the question of messing up the game flow in places in various ways.
The Vandal quest. That quest was originally questionable in many ways and I don't mind it being modded, as cutting yourself off from the blood bank is too harsh, and what Vandal asks of you to do is pretty horrifying. Being able to do it to Patty, and being able to not mess yourself up about it as a Nosferatu is fine and dandy in my book, but..
The problem is that being able to send Gimble to him is indefensible. It's crazy because at the moment you send Gimble to Vandal he leaves you in his office where he was about to imprison you to immediately go across town to check out something he could have checked out whenever. Not to mention that it takes substance out of the Gimble quest. That fight is part of VtmB, and is semi-unaviodable, what the change did was make avoiding it be the most convenient and desirable universal way to solve the Vandal demand AND get XP for it. If my child had done this we would have had a long discussion about game design.
But this is even more of a problem in moving Fat Larry back into the alley at the tail end of the downtown map from where you enter. You're kinda supposed to meet him and deal with him right away, which is why he was likely moved to where he was originally.
The restored maze in Grouts mansion is not consistent in tone with the rest of the mansion, too, that was completely unnecessary. From a level design standpoint, it's completely silly, because the textures in the mansion are very consistent otherwise and the ones in the maze aren't consistent with that. Not just that, but it's function as a "shortcut" is undermined by the fact that it's longer and more convoluted and puzzly than what it's supposed to be a shortcut for. Yes, you avoid some combat, but you already had a way to do that.
Blood Heal makes a lot of the game's challenges kinda trivial. Really.
A REALLY useful thing would have been to have spent quest items actually dissapear once they have no more use (keycards and such), my inventory is loaded with crap I'm kinda sure I won't need but have no idea where to stash.
etc etc
--- Some likes for wesp
I do like that selling stuff to the guy on the beach got turned into a quest, same with heather.
I wish you could find Heather in a fixed place after you save her as a Nosferatu, because her jumping you in the sewer is just silly.
The sewer level shortcut I didn't mind. The sewers weren't so bad, honestly, it's just that they're long AF and it breaks immersion. It feels like it's out of some other game.
And if I had a proper, understandable change log of all that was changed I could probably say more.
--- Some thoughts on system implementation
The game still has the same elementary problem that the humanity and masquerade stats are meaningless. Humanity starts too high, is easy to rack up, and difficult to lose, and it virtually impossible to have more than one or two masquerade violation ticks at the same time, so it doesn't feel like a game about Vampires as much a neo-noir with magic powers or superhero's. There's also no pressure to feed. I've heard of a mod which makes your blood actually tick down, I'd love to try it one time if it were somehow available as a standalone tack-on to a stable bugfix patch.
Although, it feels like you could kinda-remake it without the licence easily.
Then the XP and skills game is heavily messed up. Obfuscate is hugely rewarding, because the Nosferatu needs his sneak XP he should be missing on social interactions. But the Malk has both obfuscate and dementate making him able to get both the sneaky bonuses and the talky bonuses easily, and with Auspex he can go max shooty easily, which is the best endgame build anyway, so Malk is essentially OP as all hell when it comes to metagaming. Making combat somewhat trivial is relatively easy for everyone, so the game kinda has 3 modes - easy-do-everything (malkavian), normal (everyone else), self-imposed challenge (nosferatu, although it's not that much of a challenge).
If anything the game needed more clan-exclusive content rather than less. It ups the replayability.
--- Some thoughts on pacing, in the "revisiting VtmB" general line
About the stuff you can't change - there's bad pacing problems from Santa Monica onwards. Folks usually notice at the Sewers or at Chinatown, but the problem is that the Main Quest stuff becomes too samey and divorced from the rest of the world after Santa Monica.
In Santa Monica, You've got Mercurio sending you to the Beach House, but you can also nip over to the hospital to get him some medicine and get involved in random shannenigans there. If you go do his thing in the Beach house - you get to see the pier and the thin bloods which branches out into all sorts of stuff. Main Quest has you looking for Bertram, this leads to fighting the Kuei-Jin. You do the Lily thing, Vandal sends you to the Asylum looking for a victim so you get to run into Jenette. You sell stuff next to where you sleep. The quests actually feel varied, leads to one another reasonably well, etc. The Ocean House level is divorced from the rest of the stuff, but it's just one thing and part of the crazy quest chain for a crazy quest giver. You get to snoop around 4 different parts of the hospital ecah involved with a different quest.
Downtown, though...
You've got the sneak through the garage quest, sneak through a ship quests, sneak through a museum quest, sneak through a mansion quest. They're all samey, and they're all kinda disconected from the other stuff. You could fight through them, sure, but it's all the same. The difference with the fighting quests are that you just can't sneak through them - two are "go to this building, take the elevator, have a fight", two are go to this part of the sewer have a fight, go to this building have a fight. There's the skyline apartments but you just visit all of them, do pretty much the same thing in all of them, and afterwards they're all empty. And the main quest is very much divorced from the side quests. Sure, there's the whole serial killer going on, but it's not much. In Santa Monica the Ocean House can be tolerated, and the whole hub culminates with the separate-map Warehouse extravaganza.
In Downtown, if you do the main plot, you just don't get involved with the side stuff, it's all "warehouses and ocean house hotels". Technically, you're kinda better off doing all of the main quest first and then backtracking through the side stuff. What I did was actually go all the way to find Gary before tackling, say, Vick in downtown.
Because if you ride the train through the Downtown main quest and get to Hollywood,
what happens is that the "main" plot does start by taking place on-location, but in ways that don't really involve you with anything. And then the sewers separating you from the Nosferatu are just too damned long, cutting you off from the sidequests and being "disposable" - there's no point to them once you've done them once. Once you're at the warrens, the Nosferatu just give you a bunch of optional fetch quests, and if you want the plot to go anywhere you have to go to the next hub. And if I understood it correctly, if you're a Nosferatu you don't get the haven until right before pretty much the last mission.
The main plot is just divorced from the surroundings in downtown and hollywood, and if I remembr Chinatown correctly there's pretty much nothing but the main plot there.
Anywho, I'll finish my current run to refresh my memory of the rest of the stuff than see what I think...
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