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

[The best and greatest]

When you're an neo-liberal and you're incredably superficial. We may all be Serfs in a crumbling system but at least you can bum a man. Some of them may give lip service to socia change but more honestly they'd rather squabble online about pronouns.

In short SJW's.

Maybe the game will be about useless woke Bourgeoisie elites who proclaim love for the little people...Just not enough to actually do anything helpful.

 

[ZehnBoat]

Honestly if you had to go political, a game about bloodsucking parasites analogizing capital owners would practically write itself.

How do you fuck that up and get LGBT rights out of it?

because the people who want politics in everything have a stupidly narrow view of the world
and are lazy as fuck

problems with sexism and homophobia in the middle east?
that's too hard, muh hierarchy!

uwu just have two men fuck and a strong woman, maybe with a prosthetic or mental problems
that'll show drumpf
oh and have all the bad guys be white males that are straight uwu

i have a feeling the plot of this game is "brave minorities who are obviously the good guys fight drumpfs who are obviously the bad guys"

No Mutants Allowed, a Fallout fan site, has a thread on VTMB 2. Looking through it, one member partially sums up my feelings on this, especially since all I've seen so far is a CGI trailer that doesn't show any gameplay.

there's no reason to care about what scummy dlc shit they will pull or how bad the gameplay will be
this product is dying in the womb and at most
AT MOST
we can expect "just playable, but not as enjoyable as the previous"
if we're lucky

 

[Techpriest]

A lot of people have been focussing too much on the political side of the devs and not enough on the genuinely scummy practises that warrants concerns no matter what political alignment you have. The mere fact that they've started tiered pre-orders a year in advance for a game we don't have any gameplay for, is being developed by a no-name developer and published by paradox who are known for shoving overpriced dlcs into every one of their games should raise some eyebrows.

They did the same with Battletech, and that game turned out great. I still won’t preorder (at least until I see some solid gameplay and development diaries far closer to release) but in general I trust Paradox to not shit the bed.

I didn't say it caused her to become a malk I said it eventually led to it.

Fair enough, I must have misunderstood the angle you were approaching that from.

 

[c-no]

there's no reason to care about what scummy dlc shit they will pull or how bad the gameplay will be
this product is dying in the womb and at most
AT MOST
we can expect "just playable, but not as enjoyable as the previous"
if we're lucky

Honestly, with how they revealed it recently with saying release is within a year, that itself makes me feel this game isn't going to be as great as the hype claims. As the guy I posted stated, one would ask where are the stats? Where are the skills? The cynic in me wouldn't be surprised if this was just nothing more than a nostalgia based cash-grab for Paradox.

 

[byuu]

Pre-order for 100$, playable on: March 31, 2020
lol

 

[SiccDicc]

Honestly, with how they revealed it recently with saying release is within a year, that itself makes me feel this game isn't going to be as great as the hype claims. As the guy I posted stated, one would ask where are the stats? Where are the skills? The cynic in me wouldn't be surprised if this was just nothing more than a nostalgia based cash-grab for Paradox.

Now I wonder if it's gonna be a Tell Tale style game... or David Cage tier even.

 

[Techpriest]

Now I wonder if it's gonna be a Tell Tale style game... or David Cage tier even.

Its system is based off of V5, so it has a solid mechanical foundation to work on. It won't be a telltale game.

 

[ZehnBoat]

As the guy I posted stated, one would ask where are the stats? Where are the skills?

at this point things like that are the shit frosting to the shit cake
i'm interested in seeing how much they fuck up the game
considering it seems they've showed very little, they might have just as much faith in it as everyone else.
my bet: they're hoping for "the right people" to give it "good enough" scores and hope people see the tepid 7/10 and buy it because of that (and the name). while ignoring the fact that most of the reviews will only be talking about "right side of history" and "pronouns" and stuff like that

 

[SiccDicc]

Its system is based off of V5, so it has a solid mechanical foundation to work on. It won't be a telltale game.

Well I suppose that's... better? Because if narrative was all it was gonna have going for it then that would have been very unfortunate.

I say this because the current team of writers don't really inspire confidence, except Avellone provided they have a proper producer and he has a bit more of the reigns, but they seem to be exactly the kind of failed writers you see take up space at your local coffee shop and work for pennies as "entertainment journalists" -- fuck, their senior writer was exactly that. Mitsoda may have experience and such, but his comments are concerning considering the only people I've known to use punching up unironically are embarrassments themselves. He already sounds guilty for how they portrayed aspects before and sounds neutered in general, I don't expect much fun out of the game where you're supposed to be able to do batshit things.

 

[wrangled tard]

Now I wonder if it's gonna be a Tell Tale style game... or David Cage tier even.

Supposedly weapons you get you throw away as soon as you run out of ammo. I don't have much hope for the combat side of the gameplay but the original had terrible combat too.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

I've no past with this game but always admired its style. Cartoony, serious, adult, but cartoony. New one looks like a dime-a-dozen game. Anyone able to tell they kept the spirit and feel, as opposed to another cash grab off a familiar name?

 

[Syaoran Li]

I have this sinking feeling that Bloodlines 2 is a shallow Hail Mary attempt by Paradox to salvage the World of Darkness brand after V5 essentially killed it (with the Chechnya fiasco in November 2018 being the straw that ultimately broke the camel's back) and yet despite V5 having such a backlash that Paradox essentially killed White Wolf as a studio and pawned off the remaining unreleased-yet-funded V5 books to Modiphius Entertainment for release (presumably to fulfill contractual obligations) it appears Paradox learned nothing.

The biggest red flag is the fact that Bloodlines 2 is explicitly using the setting of V5 and continuing to pander to the same SJW crowd that crucified them less than a year ago.

I'm a hardcore World of Darkness fan and V5 was a disaster from beginning to end. The setting changes and mechanical changes alienated a lot of the old crowd and combined the worst aspects of old Masquerade and Requiem.

See, the people who liked the mechanics of Requiem didn't like the metaplot of V5 while the Masquerade metaplot purists didn't like the Requiem-inspired mechanical changes. The setting changes were so drastic that even the metaplot fans felt that it wasn't the Masquerade setting of old, while those who didn't like the metaplor or liked Requiem didn't like the fact that Nu-WW even decided to continue the metaplot to begin with, especially after the acclaimed and fairly successful 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire, which was explicitly metaplot-neutral while still updating the setting to be less dependent on 90's counterculture.

I get the feeling that Martin Ericsson and the Paradox guys hated the old Masquerade and wanted a game similar to Requiem even though they also hated Requiem because it "wasn't Masquerade" and Martin Ericsson himself made public statements where he expressed his disgust at Vampire: The Requiem and the New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness

In a lot of ways, it felt as if V5 was deliberately abandoning the old fans who kept the brand from dying out completely and wanted to court the SJW dangerhair crowd, which despite being a vocal minority in the actual hobby, dominate the narrative on both RPG.net and Onyx Path Forums (the successor to the old White Wolf Forums) to the point that RPG.net has its own thread in Community Watch and keep in mind that there is a lot of overlap in the moderation and admin staff of both websites.

White Wolf was always left-leaning, even in the 90's. But the free-spirited counter-culture Gen X leftists of the 90's were still problematic and not "woke" enough by the standards of your average Millennial SJW leftist. So in their vain and desperate attempt to win the SJW's over, Paradox made a lot of mistakes.

First was the fact that they hired Zak Sabbath as a freelance artist for V5 and Onyx Path Forums had a massive meltdown over it, to the point that many users preemptively decided to boycott anything to do with Paradox and the Classic World of Darkness. Keep in mind that Zak was not an actual full-time employee of White Wolf/Paradox and had no creative input in the development of V5. He just did some artwork for them.

While it did turn out that Zak Sabbath was in fact a degenerate rapist, this was not known to the public at the time and it looked like he was hated by the SJW's and the RPG.net/Onyx Path crowd solely because he made the mistake of disagreeing with a troon on the internet, even though he himself had more in common politically with the SJW's, albeit in the creepy male feminist sort of way.

The Zak S. debacle had already marked the new edition of Vampire as a target for the SJW's to attack, and then you had some furfag make a wide and sweeping accusation of Paradox being Alt-Right Nazi types and that the new version of Vampire was full of Alt-Right dog whistles, solely because one of the previews for the game used the word "triggered" in reference to the Clan Brujah flaw (for those not familiar, the Brujah are a clan of vampires whose primary weakness is that they are extremely prone to frenzy and rage)

Suddenly, Paradox began doubling-down on the virtue-signalling and appeasement to the point that in the final release of the core rule book, they had a whole section saying that anyone with right-wing opinions wasn't allowed to play the game.

Even then, sales were fairly low and there was a lot of criticism over the changes to the setting and the rules, especially when compared to previous editions (most notably, the 20th Anniversary Edition from 2011) and Paradox was stuck in a position where the old fans didn't like the game and the very demographic they were marketing the game towards weren't going to buy the game at all to begin with.

After the backlash over the Chechnya chapter in one of the V5 supplements, Paradox dissolved White Wolf as a gaming studio and basically gave the remains of their IP to Modiphius and release the remaining books so the people who backed these books on Kickstater won't have grounds to sue them.

The fact that Bloodlines 2 is using the exact same setting and rules that killed the tabletop game AND are trying to court the same crowd that rejected them the first time and bitched so hard that they managed to kill White Wolf, it appears Paradox has learned nothing.

TL;DR-"Get Woke, Go Broke" is going to be proven true once more

 

[SiccDicc]

The fact that Bloodlines 2 is using the exact same setting and rules that killed the tabletop game AND are trying to court the same crowd that rejected them the first time and bitched so hard that they managed to kill White Wolf, it appears Paradox has learned nothing.

Well, they're Swedish so that makes sense.

 

[HeyYou]

Suddenly, Paradox began doubling-down on the virtue-signalling and appeasement to the point that in the final release of the core rule book, they had a whole section saying that anyone with right-wing opinions wasn't allowed to play the game.

This can't be real.

 

[Techpriest]

This can't be real.

It’s not. You also had lefties reeing about V5 to no end because it posited that “hey maybe the far right have a point.”

Paradox also let NuWhite Wolf do it’s own thing, until the Chechnya thing which was basically a pizza cutter; all edge but no point to it being in the book. Then again when you put a guy who did larps as Dracula in charge of the new company’s vampire line I dunno what you’re expecting to happen that isn’t edgy bullshit.

 

[Syaoran Li]

This can't be real.

It was real, I assure you (although I am exaggerating a little bit)

Of course, there's nothing that they could do to actually prevent right-wingers from playing V5, but there was virtue-signalling disclaimer text that basically said something to that effect.

Basically, V5 was a disappointment for everyone involved.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

This can't be real.

It's not even unprecedented, transhumanist sci-fi game Eclipse Phase already did the same thing if I recall.

 

[frozenrunner]

I want this to be great, but...

Maybe we'll get an Un-Poz'd Edition fan patch someday.

 

[HeyYou]

Man, I just want to play as a vampire and do quests and shit. If vampire politics and race relations turn out to be carbon copies of human politics and race relations then it isn't a game about a super secret group of vampires that are completely alien to humans, it's just tumblr roleplaying. While it worries me that they were talking about issues that they take absolute stances on (unless it's just something like "fags can bang each other") the actual themes of modernization and technology that were mentioned actually do sound interesting. Just don't water down the brujah into anarcho-commiefags, please. I don't think it's going to inundated with heavy handed moments at all times, but Cara Ellison is an absolutely terrible pick to help write the game. I have a sinking feeling it's going to be a DAI/MEA situation all over again.

Also, I'm not a big fan of thin bloods. They were never fun to play, and I don't see how they're going to be fun here. They were pretty much just easy fodder, and they really only make good NPCs. The traditional generations, clans, Disciplines and clan weaknesses are pretty much perfect. I'd rather them explore the subsets of clans than make you a thin blood. I don't know, maybe the choosing your clan part involves cannibalizing a vampire and becoming a pure blood.

 

[Furina]

This can't be real.

It’s not.

It was real, I assure you (although I am exaggerating a little bit)

It's very real. It's in the section on dealing with difficult or controversial players.