Where are the vampire-themed and modern fantasy crpgs that aren’t Paradox licensed?

[gabel]

When I was a pre-teen, there was a vampire-series on German TV called "Der kleine Vampir", iirc.
There was some girl character as well whom I had a crush on...

 

[Shaki]

I always find the Codex's love of Bloodlines funny, because it does so many things people here claim to hate. The game's extremely linear, it's full of unkillable NPCs (even when it doesn't make any sense), the haunted hotel has as much gameplay as a walking sim, poor combat, huge sections of the game that are just mindless copy and paste combat slogs, poor skill system, and your choices being mostly meaningless when it comes to the ending. Definitely a style over substance type game.

True, it's one of these games where if you objectively judge it as a sum of its parts, then it's pretty mediocre. But it had enough charm to make up for it, and make it feel much greater. Tbh that's true for all Troika games, they had tons of issues, but somehow they just hit different, they have some intangible quality that elevates good parts high enough above all the crap, that you forget it's even there.

 

[Roguey]

I always find the Codex's love of Bloodlines funny, because it does so many things people here claim to hate. The game's extremely linear, it's full of unkillable NPCs (even when it doesn't make any sense), the haunted hotel has as much gameplay as a walking sim, poor combat, huge sections of the game that are just mindless copy and paste combat slogs, poor skill system, and your choices being mostly meaningless when it comes to the ending. Definitely a style over substance type game.

Codex is full of storyfags.

Disco Elysium is a spiritual successor, only they didn't bother with the combat.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I always find the Codex's love of Bloodlines funny, because it does so many things people here claim to hate. The game's extremely linear, it's full of unkillable NPCs (even when it doesn't make any sense), the haunted hotel has as much gameplay as a walking sim, poor combat, huge sections of the game that are just mindless copy and paste combat slogs, poor skill system, and your choices being mostly meaningless when it comes to the ending. Definitely a style over substance type game.

True, it's one of these games where if you objectively judge it as a sum of its parts, then it's pretty mediocre. But it had enough charm to make up for it, and make it feel much greater. Tbh that's true for all Troika games, they had tons of issues, but somehow they just hit different, they have some intangible quality that elevates good parts high enough above all the crap, that you forget it's even there.

Yeah. I admit that I like the charming style more than anything else. That’s why I think anyone trying to cash in on its success without understanding what makes it memorable is doomed to fail spectacularly. As we have seen many times now.

They’ve undergone a huge crunch compared to their 90s heyday and never recovered.

Goth content in general has diminished since the late 90s/early 2000s, not just RPGs - or even games.

You mean mall goths have vanished as they got absorbed into other scenes like Hot Topic and the modern label movement. No loss there.

Gothic horror is still widely prevalent in the horror gaming scene. It’s hard not to be when crumbling castles, malevolent weather and old timey fashions lend itself so well to horror. Just yesterday I got a youtube rec for a gothic horror short game titled Lorraine.

When I complain about the lack of certain genres being well represented in video games, horror games don’t make the list at all. Horror games are probably the most diverse game genre ever. If you can imagine it, then there’s probably a horror game where it tries to kill you. Fear is the most primal human emotion. Sure, there are stupid fads like mascots, creepypastas, and shared universe lorefag bullshit that deserves to die in a fire, but those always fade away and don’t strangle the creativity and innovation of the genre at large.

I only wish non-horror was even a fraction as creative and diverse.

 

[Bad Sector]

You mean mall goths have vanished as they got absorbed into other scenes like Hot Topic and the modern label movement.

FWIW this is a term i found online in recent years and i don't remember hearing about it back then, according to Wikipedia it started as some sort of pejorative for people who went for it just for fashion but later that became its own thing? It wasn't something i heard back in late 90s / early 2000s here in Greece at least. At the time it was all "goths" without subcategories :-P.

I do not refer to just fashion, though that is also an aspect, but the whole gothic style was also in mainstream movies and games. Also...

Gothic horror is still widely prevalent in the horror gaming scene. It’s hard not to be when crumbling castles, malevolent weather and old timey fashions lend itself so well to horror. Just yesterday I got a youtube rec for a gothic horror short game titled Lorraine.

...i don't mean just horror, but even other genres, e.g. action games.

In any case, i didn't mean that goth content has disappeared, but that it has diminished when compared to the late 90s / early 2000s when it was more mainstream and so you had more content (movies, games, etc) with it than nowadays and because of that you were much more likely to see it. There are certainly new works coming out now and then and events still happen. Perhaps i should have written than "goths went back underground" or something like that :-P.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

In any event, there is a bazillion ways you could do urban fantasy without involving vampires. Even if you do involve vampires, there’s tons of ways you could do them without racially segregating them by high school clique.

For example:

A person who dies but is too scared to cross over reanimates their own body as a vampire who, absent the direct emotional ties that fuel ghosts indefinitely, must drain that emotional energy from the living. Joy, anger, fear, awe, inspiration, sexual ecstasy… any emotion will suffice. Some become torturers, bards or muses. A vampire can even retrieve recently deceased souls and revive them as new vampires subservient to the one who animated them. But as one of the evil dead, the vampire’s magical nature is unraveled by things like sunlight and funerary rites.

A person who suffers a near death experience or nightmare passes through the lower planes, however briefly. This one was unlucky enough to bring back a shadow person, who assimilated their soul and turned them into an ageless being who must absorb energy from emotions to sustain their immortality. As a being of the nightmare realm, the incubus can develop thematic magical powers like transforming into a monster of nightmares, conjuring nightmare creatures from the lower planes, or even communing with the dead and raising them to a semblance of life.

A vampire is not a viral curse, but a corpse reanimated by a passing demon. He retains his memories of life, but now hungers for blood and fears the sun. His undead body will live forever if he is careful, and the demon grants magical powers. He cannot turn people into vampires, but makes empty promises to sway familiars into service.

The vampire is the result of infection by alien nanites leftover from an ancient war. The nanites transform human hosts into ageless augmented supersoldiers, even awakening the latent psychic ability of the human brain. Vampires are reliant on drinking blood to get sufficient iron to manufacture nanites, and UV light overexcites the nanites to the point of fatally burning out their host. The nanites cannot overwhelm a healthy immune system, so vampires must drain new hosts until comatose to weaken the immune system enough to allow sufficient replication.

Etc.

As for settings without specifically focusing on vampires…

You could go for a more X-Files route where there are aliens, cryptids, fairies, demons and Illuminati conspiracies competing.

You could go for a more fantastical tone where fantasy races like elves, dwarves and orcs live in the modern world hidden behind glamor.

You could have the magic be public knowledge, ranging from recently revealed to other possibilities…

A full blown alternate history where Tir Na Nog holds a seat on the British Parliament and Dracula is prince consort to Queen Victoria.

A secondary world where a medieval fantasy world underwent an industrial revolution.

You could have a scifi future setting where demons invaded Earth a la Doom, only for the gates of Heaven and Fairyland to release tides of magic that reshape the post-Apocalypse Earth into a fantastical wonderland full of elves, dwarves, orcs, wizards, robots, cyborgs, mutants, etc.

All of those are examples of urban fantasy. The possibilities are endless!

 

[Bad Sector]

In any event, there is a bazillion ways you could do urban fantasy without involving vampires. Even if you do involve vampires, there’s tons of ways you could do them without racially segregating them by high school clique.

Assuming with "racially segregating them by high school clique" you mean the different clans in VtM, i think that is a very reductionist view - at least in VtMB (which FWIW together with VtMR are my main encounters with "VtM") it works perfectly fine to represent different classes, which i'd guess was the main motivation behind having the different clans in the first place. After all the setting is first and foremost for a game.

But yes, you can have all sorts of different vampire settings, it isn't like VtM is the only one. There have been several different settings in various works, including games (e.g. in Bloodrayne some vampires are basically giant bats, in NecroVisioN's alt-WW1 world you have vampires build giant underground steampunk engines, etc).

 

[lukaszek]

vampires are fun due to their restrictions. But in most gamez you dont see those and are left with over powered character instead.
slumber, day&night, running water etc are all cool. Vampire themed survival game would be interesting to play. Doesnt need to be yet another social aristocrat cliche

 

[Reinhardt]

vampires belong to horror. they are bloodthirsty monsters. that they are considered "urban fantasy" now is enough to kill any interest.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

vampires are fun due to their restrictions. But in most gamez you dont see those and are left with over powered character instead.
slumber, day&night, running water etc are all cool. Vampire themed survival game would be interesting to play. Doesnt need to be yet another social aristocrat cliche

V Rising fits the bill. It’s medieval fantasy.

vampires belong to horror. they are bloodthirsty monsters. that they are considered "urban fantasy" now is enough to kill any interest.

I don’t think this is actually the case. There are probably more medieval fantasy games with playable vampires than are urban fantasy games period. The problem is that devs mostly aren’t interested in doing anything beyond ripping off Tolkien for the bazillionth time.

For eff’s sake, Hideyuki Kikuchi sold 17 million volumes of Vampire Hunter D ! That’s one of the best selling books of all time! It’s set in the year AD12,090 and features gothic vampire castles in space. You’d think somebody else would’ve tried something even vaguely similar.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

So it's more or less confirmed that Paradox has killed their franchise and the only options left for fans of Bloodlines 1 and the urban fantasy genre is indie games. Do you think this will finally force indie devs to get off their asses and make their own games with their own IPs, or will we spend another two decades in limbo without new games where busty vampiresses in risqué outfits flirt with the protagonist?

In other news, Nighthawks has switched to Godot and it's working even better than Unity! Last I heard it might release sometime in the first half of next year, but don't hold it to that.