This Series of blogs titled 'Great Games' will feature reviews on games which, though may even be buggy and severely flawed, have features which elevate them to an epic level.
Today we look at 'Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines'. I'll try to keep it clean but there may be spoilers.
In 2001, Troika Games teamed up with 'WhiteWolf''s RPG and started work on this masterpiece cult classic game. The 3 heavy hitters of the computer RPG world; the power players from the excellent Fallout series (1&2): Jason Anderson, Tim Cain, and Leonard Boyarski were at the heart of it. Troika consisted of 32 people all busting their asses to make the best computer RPG ever made. That was the goal, anyway...and it had heart.
Troika attempted to add code to Valve's unfinished source engine (the finished one was used in Half-Life 2). That is where most of the bugs happened.
Ideas flourished while those in the trenches with blowtorches and wrenches (metaphoric) struggled to catch up. Eventually, David Mullich was hired as a game producer and said 'I know you want the moon and the stars but the budget says you need to start trimming and get a game out or all this code and media goes the way of 'Duke Nukem Forever'...and Troika with it. DNF had been scrapped twice(?) even by that time.
Even with the cuts, and a little sneeking a peek at Valves code improvements, in November 2004 Activision released the most bug filled RPG ever...competing against (ironically) Half-Life 2. Doom 3 and Quake 4 came out around that time. Gamers, who only had a limited amount of money, had to make a choice. What VtMB had that those other games didn't was heart. The Soundtrack and ambient sounds were amazing. Choices and variety of characters? Awesome! Dialogue options and individual experience. Superb! Combat wasn't anything special except that you could use abilities and essentially spells to make that a unique and fun experience.
So loved was VtMB by the users that they started supporting it well after Troika went belly up (2005). Troika went broke because they over extended themselves and the returns from sales of this game weren't enough to bring them back. They were dropped onto the market at the same time as Valve's Half-Life 2 (Some would say this was Valve's intention in response to the 'Stolen' code) and HL2 squashed them in sales. HL2 was big budget and ran like a well oiled machine compared to VtMB. Having over extended themselves in this project and sales not compensating for it, the company folded. It's a damn shame. We could really use more of this sort of game now! Yet, with more people comes less creative control and the heart can get lost. There are examples where, even though the business is big, the heart is still there (Far Cry 3 is one example) but it is rare.
I originally picked it up at a sale on STEAM in 2011 for about $5. This game has provided me with at least 20 times that in value. Even now, the objects sometime don't work so well with the environment...or the sprites forget themselves and you find a chair where the door knob is supposed to be. Just smile and sigh...save and do a restart of the game.
"I can't tonight, hon...Copper, Julius, E, Lilly and Rosa are having a party down by the pier"
Difficulty? the game is hard enough made more so in the fact that hard choices need to be made early "Do I take an extra point in Strength or buff out my persuasion skill for a test that I know to be coming up?". This game seems more like comfort food for the haggard gamer. I was just playing Just Cause 3 before and the guy was surfing a plane while firing an RPG7 at ground targets. I think I rolled my eyes so hard they actually made a sound! I thought there would be a choice? No choice... point and click...and I felt my brain die by the second of this non sense. This game - the guy has a grappling hook mechanism in his arm. You can launch yourself to the top of a ten story building in a second...guess what? if a person actually had this? Their arm would get there but that's it. Everything is all super sized and stupid now. It's funny how an old game about vampires seems more physically realistic than a new game about regular people.
I enjoy a game where I have to earn being a major badass...not one where it is given to me. VtMB does that. The success of this game 'In the wash' has not gone unnoticed. Paradox games acquired the rights to it in 2015 following their purchase of White Wolf. They will work on a new project when the time is right. Could this be a new game of the ages? When the stupid 'Supersize' bullshit wears off and people realize that you can't fall 10 stories without going 'SPLAT!'. A game with Troika imagination and the backing to kick it into gear. The mind reels. I do love the thought though.
