Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines: 2 - I want to believe, but...

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Adamska said:
It's fucking telling that coding which can only dissect, dissassemble, analyze, and reassemble and synthesize from prior sources
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I am kind of sure I saw one of those before, it probably took an existing art whole and reconfigured a bit (some AI start spewing out entire pictures from their dataset once in a while).
 
Snekposter said:
For whatever reason I cannot explain, the incredibly ugly, clunky, and what I can only describe as surreal face models in the first VtMB make the game in so many ways. Probably because they're just as not-quite-real as the world they inhabit. What Troika did there is magnificent.
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The one-off NPCs are ugly as sin, but a lot of the story important NPCs have aged pretty nicely considering the technical limits, budget and time constraints. The thing that always bothers me when I replay it is how stilted the walk cycles are in cutscenes, I still remember watching the intro for the first time and giggling like a retard at how the Fledgeling walks with LaCroix.

Next to Mitsoda being fired, what makes me the most MATI about VTMB2 is that it has no real identity, just off of visuals and design. Jeanette inspired Harley Quinn's modern look as we know it. People that haven't even finished the game remember her and her sister's arc, The Asylum and the track that plays in it. Ocean House Hotel shows up exactly once, still unnerves new and old players close to two decades later. What sort of impact will any of the designs or locations in 2 have?
 
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Bankingway said:
The one-off NPCs are ugly as sin, but a lot of the story important NPCs have aged pretty nicely considering the technical limits, budget and time constraints. The thing that always bothers me when I replay it is how stilted the walk cycles are in cutscenes, I still remember watching the intro for the first time and giggling like a retard at how the Fledgeling walks with LaCroix.
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Yeah, the walk animations are... best not mentioned. The faces though are great.
Bankingway said:
The Asylum and the track that plays in it
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TBH I'm just fucking tired of that song since you spend so much time going in and out of Asylum as part of Tourette's quest chain and chatting with Knox. Confession is thankfully not a major quest hub though.

Speaking of Downtown, there's no way you'd get a Fat Larry or anything like him today, despite the fact that a guy like him is exactly the sort of person who would be selling shady shit out of the back of a truck in downtown LA. Or Tseng's high caliber herbal remedies. Can't let people know the PRC has a history of smuggling weapons into the USA, no sir.
 
Snekposter said:
Yeah, the walk animations are... best not mentioned. The faces though are great.
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They had to cut out a lot and didn't have time to bugfix anything, but these devs made full use of that early Source engine facial animation goodness. Valve wowed everybody at the time with their characters' expressions in Half-Life 2, but Troika somehow made them work in an even more stylized graphical style.

It's glitchy as fuck and nothing to write home about in 2023 but watching a character seamlessly changing expressions while talking, with full mouth animation for each phoneme instead of just generic mouthflaps, was really cool at the time.
 
That ventrue outfit makes me want to throw up, why can't we have a female ventrue that looks like Lou Grand.
 
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
Welp, the fourth and apparently final Base Game clan is apparently the Ventrue. Notably, they don't seem to have a video for this reveal, or at least not one that's public at time of posting. Did they get blasted that badly over the last one?
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Four clans only and neither Malks nor Nosferatu being one of them, in favour of fucking Assamites? Even more dead on arrival than previously assumed. If it ever arrives, that is.
 
There's something just so poetic in summation about the game cutting two of the most memorable and unique choices for clans in the original. Can't have anything too interesting when it comes to how the player might interact with the world through gameplay or dialogue, no, no.
But, of course, we're getting two fucking DLCs! They haven't even finalized the fucking assets for the Ventrue, but they've already got two lined up, and one of them isn't even available in the main game! What a joke. I'm not even the biggest VtM fan, and this just feels like intentionally pissing on the IP. I can't imagine what it'd be like for people who spent years dreaming up a sequel to their favorite game and then seeing this slowly take shape.
 
Leaf Wage Slave Jr said:
Welp, the fourth and apparently final Base Game clan is apparently the Ventrue. Notably, they don't seem to have a video for this reveal, or at least not one that's public at time of posting. Did they get blasted that badly over the last one?
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Dying Light didn't have ventrue skins to steal from.
 
I think I've figured out Paradoxes plan guys. They known its a trash fire. But its a trash fire of a Video Game like "The Room" is a trash fire of a movie! People are going to buy it just to see how bad it really is!

It will be this generations "Ride to Hell:Retribution". A literal meme game of laughably bad animations, quotable bad dialogue. Everyone will buy, play and stream it just to make fun of it. Whole youtube careers will be launched! Vtubers will make funny mouth noises over how cringe the game is!

It's going to be an unqualified triumph lol.
 
mindlessobserver said:
I think I've figured out Paradoxes plan guys. They known its a trash fire. But its a trash fire of a Video Game like "The Room" is a trash fire of a movie! People are going to buy it just to see how bad it really is!

It will be this generations "Ride to Hell:Retribution". A literal meme game of laughably bad animations, quotable bad dialogue. Everyone will buy, play and stream it just to make fun of it. Whole youtube careers will be launched! Vtubers will make funny mouth noises over how cringe the game is!

It's going to be an unqualified triumph lol.
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Only if they had balls they'd let me join up with the inquisition and wipe everything out.
 
Michael Wade said:
Only if they had balls they'd let me join up with the inquisition and wipe everything out.
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I actually like the idea of the Modern Inquisition, mostly because with all of the monitoring these days the Jyhad would stick out just as much as a Jihad to people who investigate things. The idea that some of the glowies would put 2+2 together and realize there's someone out there up to no good, and in fact have been for god knows how long, adds to the plausibility.

Naturally the execution of that simple concept was done as terribly as everything else they've done. Hell, their book on the London guys has the Sikh running the show face constant discrimination from his co-workers A Sikh, discriminated against in London! Ah, I guess that's the price of importing all those Musl- no wait, the guy with low-level PTSD from Afghanistan associates his boss with the goat fuckers that were trying to blow him up.
 
Snekposter said:
I actually like the idea of the Modern Inquisition, mostly because with all of the monitoring these days the Jyhad would stick out just as much as a Jihad to people who investigate things. The idea that some of the glowies would put 2+2 together and realize there's someone out there up to no good, and in fact have been for god knows how long, adds to the plausibility.

Naturally the execution of that simple concept was done as terribly as everything else they've done. Hell, their book on the London guys has the Sikh running the show face constant discrimination from his co-workers A Sikh, discriminated against in London! Ah, I guess that's the price of importing all those Musl- no wait, the guy with low-level PTSD from Afghanistan associates his boss with the goat fuckers that were trying to blow him up.
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The Second Inquisition would make sense to form, but honestly it should have been in response to bullshit like the Ravnos antediluvian waking up and fucking rampaging across India or some of the other events in 20th they reference occuring. The other problem is as mentioned, they wrote them like shit since they wanted to throw in their one-sided agitprop and forgot that while the hunters can be as monstrous as those they hunt, you're a fucking monster too.

Also they should've just made the London guy ran by either someone of East Euro ancestry or Pakistani proper if they want to actually play discrimination games.
 
Adamska said:
The Second Inquisition would make sense to form, but honestly it should have been in response to bullshit like the Ravnos antediluvian waking up and fucking rampaging across India or some of the other events in 20th they reference occuring. The other problem is as mentioned, they wrote them like shit since they wanted to throw in their one-sided agitprop and forgot that while the hunters can be as monstrous as those they hunt, you're a fucking monster too.

Also they should've just made the London guy ran by either someone of East Euro ancestry or Pakistani proper if they want to actually play discrimination games.
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Huh. I thought they somehow retconned out the Antediluvians for the obvious reason of that just wrecking everything, but I guess not. Even more retarded to tie it to 9/11 then. And yes, they should have had a Paki instead of a Sikh, but the writers are so Ameri-centric they forgot people in the favelas love a nice BOPE raid because it means the trash gets taken out. So of course the niggling little fact that the Sikhs are beloved by the natives completely escaped them.
 
Corn Flakes said:
They had to cut out a lot and didn't have time to bugfix anything, but these devs made full use of that early Source engine facial animation goodness. Valve wowed everybody at the time with their characters' expressions in Half-Life 2, but Troika somehow made them work in an even more stylized graphical style.

It's glitchy as fuck and nothing to write home about in 2023 but watching a character seamlessly changing expressions while talking, with full mouth animation for each phoneme instead of just generic mouthflaps, was really cool at the time.
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It was also only the second game to use the engine. It's why the ghost throws things around - had to show off that physics engine!

TBH with the unofficial patch bundled with GOG now there really is no reason a person who hasn't played the original shouldn't in 2023.
 
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