I have completely given up on VTMB.
Got into Chinatown and just wasn't having fun, but it was the Sewers with the Tzimisce fleshbeasts that really hurt my soul. Also the SPAS-15 fucking sucks, it's a pump-action unlike what Mercurio and
its own fucking tooltip tell you, and is all-round worse than the Mossberg. That really fucked me off, so after finishing the Fu Syndicate I uninstalled.
I still have a craving to play a WRPG though, so I've 'acquired' Jade Empire - the first time I've touched it since the original XBox. The GoG version supports widescreen natively.
This runs with nearly zero issues, which surprised me for a game so old the configuration utility for it has the silvery version of the Windows XP UI.
So far I've completed Chapter 1, and I'm enjoying myself. There's some definite jank with animations (especially attacks) and controller rebinding (gave up and went with KB+M), but that's about it.
The amount of sincerity Jade Empire has is refreshing. It's not trying to be edgy, it's not trying to "subvert my expectations" constantly, it's not trying to have snarky detached modern writing. So far it's just an interesting story to insert myself into and play through.
The only thing that has made me raise an eyebrow is the morality system. A tutorial NPC does his best to explain how too much "good" becomes authoritarian, and "evil" has some positive aspects like survival of the fittest through one's own determination and skills. In practice, in playing the game, this is
absolute bullshit.
Every "evil" choice up to this point is just being an unreasonably huge baby-eating asshole, and every "good" choice is being a simpering doormat - but "Good" sort of wins by default every time due to being the closest thing to a reasonable course of action:
Sure, I
could fake the healing medicine for the Top Student to make a cakewalk optional fight even easier, but that gives no practical benefits and I think results in her dying later, which again probably has no upsides. I'm glad morality meters mostly stopped being a thing in games, I don't think I've seen a single one that makes a game better.
Cool game though, I forgot for a hot minute that it's
not made by Obsidian because it feels very similar to KotOR, but then I remembered the Bioware NWN games.