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

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I had fun watching the new writers just plagiarize old ideas though. That shitty Anarch Tremere house was hilarious in that respect since it was just a woke House Goratrix with Daughters of Cacaphony added in.


Our GM took one look at this, laughted and re-wrote them as Wicker man "murder you in the woods" Pagans with adept style reality hackers tagged on to make up the numbers. House Tremere are a clan of evil bastards and have engaged in attrocities throughout the centuries who personally exterminated vampire jesus and his apostles while being completely unapolegetic about it-where the fuck would they get someone woke enough cause a 3 way split who has the muscle to back it up? The clanbook even referances attempts at internal reform have ended badly due to the fact the clan culture, being a vampire and the darker aspects of thaumaturgy means you're never going to be that nice a person to begin with.
 
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Our GM took one look at this, laughted and re-wrote them as Wicker man "murder you in the woods" Pagans with adept style reality hackers tagged on to make up the numbers. House Tremere are a clan of evil bastards and have engaged in attrocities throughout the centuries who personally exterminated vampire jesus and his apostles while being completely unapolegetic about it-where the fuck would they get someone woke enough cause a 3 way split who has the muscle to back it up? The clanbook even referances attempts at internal reform have ended badly due to the fact the clan culture, being a vampire and the darker aspects of thaumaturgy means you're never going to be that nice a person to begin with.
Oh god I forgot about Saulot. Is he running around in the new edition, or did they retcon Tremere finally losing that fight?
 
I don't know lads, I want the game to be good (I think I've completed VTMB like 6 times minimum, love that game with all my heart), but pre-release footage that they show right now is making me lose all hope. Just look at this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_oYJAnhvgNk
Even if you ignore the braindead squid that's playing the demo, all you see is stiff as fuck combat with no reaction or weight, characters that may as well be cardboard cutouts with how little they move and articulate (not to mention the facial animations that look worse than the first game because muh realistic artstyle, can't let our characters look a little bit exaggerated) with bland voice-acting, the general washed out look of the game that doesn't evoke any mood other than "eh, it's a city at night".
I see no charm, no character, no fun. I see nothing, least of all things I'd expect from VTMB. I want to be wrong and play a great game that just looked worse than it actually was, but boy am I not :optimistic:.
Too be fair, the video says its pre-alpha footage.
 
Oh god I forgot about Saulot. Is he running around in the new edition, or did they retcon Tremere finally losing that fight?

Hard to say, recent edition seems to downplay the dance the immortals aspect of the game and nudges towards the Elders vs neonates. Cam vs Anarch aspects.
Personally I think getting rid of the Sabbat was a huge mistake, increasing anarch power would have been far more interesting with them in the picture as the carmarilla struggles to hold on after the loss of their two martial clans and Sabbat struggles to justify it's own existance in the face of anarch personal freedoms.
Plus watching the sabbat going to war with the 2nd inquisition would have been fun as it's very existance negates their claims of vampiric superiority.
 
The story's pretty hard to follow if you go with Malkavian at first. I went with Toreador on my first run because I'm one of those people but it really doesn't matter what you go with first outside of a few dialogue differences, excluding Nosferatu and Malkavian of course.

Tbh I haven't been having trouble deciphering most Malk dialogue now that I'm going through the game again, in fact my first impression was that Malk insanity was overstated (for the game at least). I haven't played vtmb in probably 9 or 10 years so I pretty much forgot everything, but I read a line and I'm like "oh yeah he's asking about cops, or his insanity grants him the intuition to know about Jeannette's situation". It's basically just colorful metaphors.
 
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Hard to say, recent edition seems to downplay the dance the immortals aspect of the game and nudges towards the Elders vs neonates. Cam vs Anarch aspects.
Personally I think getting rid of the Sabbat was a huge mistake, increasing anarch power would have been far more interesting with them in the picture as the carmarilla struggles to hold on after the loss of their two martial clans and Sabbat struggles to justify it's own existance in the face of anarch personal freedoms.
Plus watching the sabbat going to war with the 2nd inquisition would have been fun as it's very existance negates their claims of vampiric superiority.
I know very little about the new editions. They got rid of the Sabbat? Really? Isn’t half the point of the Sabbat/Camarilla dichotomy that the Sabbat are right but making things worse while the Camarilla do the opposite, or am I overestimating how dangerous the Antedeluvians are? I can’t be condsidering they had to nuke one. Did they blow Beckett’s brains out too?
 
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I know very little about the new editions. They got rid of the Sabbat? Really? Isn’t half the point of the Sabbat/Camarilla dichotomy that the Sabbat are right but making things worse while the Camarilla do the opposite, or am I overestimating how dangerous the Antedeluvians are? I can’t be condsidering they had to nuke one. Did they blow Beckett’s brains out too?


The Sabbat apparantly wondered off the middle east to try and kill the methusulahs and 3rd gens who are waking up there. I can't imagine it will pan out as a 13th gen shovelhead Panda with a broken bottle doesnt really seem up to Ur-shulgi's weight class. I',m not even concinved it's going to get that far as they can't speak Urdu and the locals really believe in God and both the main clans of the sect are really badly suited to rapid travel in hot sunny places .
The books also seem to ignore that this effectively means about 1/5 of USA, Spain, Eastern europe and about 2/3rds south America don't have that many vampires in it at the moment. If anything the political situation should be everyone else rushing to grab the territories as the Anarchs decide taking montreal is a preferable option to fighting some 6th gen ventrue.
No idea what's going on with Becket but he's bassically the protagonist so it's doubtful he's dead.
 
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There's a reason that I tend to homebrew settings and ignore official ones half the time, and the new edition's one of them.

Seriously, the Sabbat are hilariously fucked, and despite what casuals think aren't THAT stupid to pick some fights with world ending monsters that need Spirit Nukes to go away. They're a paramilitary organization and Jesus Militia for Caine (Lancea Sanctum spliced with Circle of the Crone for those Requiem guys), not weird 80s made-for-tv movie gangsters that hoot and bleat in a coke induced mindlessness as they crawl out of ducts and trunks like in the original Bloodlines.
 
Tbh I haven't been having trouble deciphering most Malk dialogue now that I'm going through the game again, in fact my first impression was that Malk insanity was overstated (for the game at least). I haven't played vtmb in probably 9 or 10 years so I pretty much forgot everything, but I read a line and I'm like "oh yeah he's asking about cops, or his insanity grants him the intuition to know about Jeannette's situation". It's basically just colorful metaphors.
It's not that it's difficult to decipher, they will reference stuff that's yet to happen in the game because of the madness network, it'll also probably unintentionally spoil certain events if you've never played the game before.
 
Somehow we missed out on this video of a demo from E3.

 
Crossposting from Yahtzee thread - Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw interviewing Brian Mitsoda about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2:

 
what worries me are the developers behind this shit, Hardsuit Labs (previously Zombie Studios), haven't made a single RPG, and have been generally been making unmemorable games the past two decades. is that demo just jank as shit because it's in alpha, or is it because the developers just don't have the chops? i think they'll need more than 9 months to fix and polish it.

for reference, here is their last game, why this title got outsourced to these who's is beyond me.
 
what worries me are the developers behind this shit, Hardsuit Labs (previously Zombie Studios), haven't made a single RPG, and have been generally been making unmemorable games the past two decades. is that demo just jank as shit because it's in alpha, or is it because the developers just don't have the chops? i think they'll need more than 9 months to fix and polish it.

for reference, here is their last game, why this title got outsourced to these who's is beyond me.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OrTEb3htTUc

Because they were the lowest bid. They could make it for way lower than a UK or US studio so if the game flops (which it might) they didn't spend big bucks on it. And if it does well? Then it's pure profit for what they spent.
 
Finally getting around to playing Bloodlines after mostly getting by on bits of playthroughs and hearing shit about the cabbie. Was it a mistake going with Malks as my first run? Some of the lines are close to unreadable, but the insanity of making a guy laugh off having a coworker get drained dry is funny as fuck.

In terms of comprehension, Malkavians are probably better played on a second run, since a lot of what they say is foreshadowing for later events that no player would be able to catch on the first playthrough. That said, I also chose Malkavian first, and it's definitely my favorite of all the options - you certainly have the most fun as a Malkavian. Plus, getting thrust into the fucked up world of vampires and only being able to speak in tongues that even you don't understand sounds pretty accurate to the Malkavian experience.


Somehow we missed out on this video of a demo from E3.

The graphics look great, but I am still a little apprehensive. My main fear is that they're just going to remake VTMB down to the letter without adding anything new, just putting a shiny coat of paint on top of it. And, honestly, the rough graphics in the first game were a big part of its charm for me. It's this dingy, crappy looking mess, but it really matches the goofy tone of the game and makes it feel less "serious," which I really liked about it. I'm hoping VTMB2 finds some way to retain that.
 
I wasn't all that impressed when I saw the gameplay. The gameplay in the original VtMB wasn't all that great either, it was the characters and dialogue that made it worth it. Felt like a great RPG at the time, but now this sequel is being made by a different group of people that may or may not want to have that sense of edge and grit the original game had. I'm hoping it sticks a lot with the table top's lore and general depth but I'm not holding my breathe for this one.
 
I'm really hoping this will be decent.

The announcement made me replay Bloodlines 1 for the first time in 9 years, a lot of aspects of the game are pretty dated, mostly the combat, but it still has a great atmosphere and I still had a great time with it.
 
The announcement made me replay Bloodlines 1 for the first time in 9 years, a lot of aspects of the game are pretty dated, mostly the combat, but it still has a great atmosphere and I still had a great time with it.

I still find the story and the multiple paths you can take pretty refreshing for such a big game. It definitely took the open sandbox idea from GTA, but managed to have pretty much everything you did tie back into the main story and come back to bite you in the ass later, which was rare in those days. The combat was definitely ass, but you can't win em all. I'll take a fun, immersive story over decent combat any day.
 
I still find the story and the multiple paths you can take pretty refreshing for such a big game. It definitely took the open sandbox idea from GTA, but managed to have pretty much everything you did tie back into the main story and come back to bite you in the ass later, which was rare in those days. The combat was definitely ass, but you can't win em all. I'll take a fun, immersive story over decent combat any day.

I'll take a fun, immersive story over decent combat any day as well, I always judge a game as an overall experience, far too many gamers judge a game by it's weakest element rather than looking at the bigger picture, which I've never understood.
 
Right now I'm most curious how extensive VtmB2's mod support will be. Since they confirmed it has it but not how extensive it is. (IE: Will it be like Ubisoft's Create a quest but nothing else, Doom 2016's snapmap? Or will it have a full sdk?)
 
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