Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

(This is the reincarnation of the lost review that spawned this blog. It has been a week since I played the game, so some details may be fuzzier than they used to be.)

I guess the most important thing to say about Bloodlines is that it's one of those good games where the worst frustration is seeing how it could have been a great game.

Before I start ragging on its weaknesses, I must stress that this was a fine game. The story is interesting and progresses pretty well, as your PC starts out as a sireless neonate, used as a pawn by various political factions, and grows to become both personally potent and the controlling element in a political crisis.

The general feeling of the White Wolf world, emphasizing shadows and gray morality with a hint of Randian brutal individualism, is brought to life in large and small ways. Most of the game story takes place in four distinct neighborhoods around Los Angeles, with side trips to various one-shot locations. The first two of these areas feel extremely "alive", with lots of interesting side characters and optional quests; the third area and all the subparts of the main story are generally also polished and interesting. There are some fun and creative details all over - when you finally figure out what's going on with the sisters who own the club in Santa Monica it's a nifty twist, for example. My overall impression is that a great deal of loving effort was put into the game, but that they ran out of ideas before they came up with enough to fill in the last area. It is certainly refreshing that the game does not feel "rushed"; the weakness really seems more like running out of energy than of time.

Similarly, there is lots of loving detail in the conversations and voice scripts, though the final areas seem weaker than the earlier ones. Subtle differences occur in conversations depending on your clan, gender, and past actions - and some not so subtle: they actually wrote alternate text for the PC options in every conversation for Malkavians!

And the action/FPS elements are not too stressful even for a diehard turn-based player like me. I could hold my own in most of the fights until the ludicrously-hard final ones (more on that in a moment). For the worst cases there is a built-in cheat console, including an innovative feature I hope to see more often in these sorts of games: "Buddha mode". There is a regular "god mode", where your character is just invulnerable. But in Buddha mode, the game mechanics are entirely normal except you cannot die. If you are reduced to zero hit points, your HP meter flashes red but you can keep going, and eventually heal back up. This is perfect! You get all the feedback on how you are doing, motivation to do as well as you can, and a good chunk of the tension you would get if playing normally, but you aren't punished by endless boring reload-and-retry cycles when the designers failed to tailor the game to your personal skill level.

Having mentioned Buddha mode, I should point out the other big reason to use it. The patch for the game seems to have fixed most of the major bugs, but one pretty annoying one is left. If you die, and take the game's offer to load your last save, you will end up stuck in combat mode, unable to leave it. The only way out is to quit and restart the program. So if you want to play "straight", turn on Buddha mode and then manually reload from save when you would have died as a workaround for the bug.

World of Dimness purists may complain about the game running roughshod over the White Wolf mechanics while keeping the basic character statistics, but this was a very good decision. When you've already made your combat very actiony, adding a to-hit roll on top of aim and world physics would be icky. And the wild variance of the WW system combined with the limits on social/skill interactions in a computer game make the replacement with straight feat vs threshold mechanics much more workable.

Undoubtedly the worst thing about this game is the map/level designs. With significantly better maps this game could have been worthy of mention in the same breath as the original Deus Ex. The overall story is as good (if not quite as elaborate), the basic ability to choose character direction is present, and even the overall theme of the pawn who grows to become a player is there. But, sadly, it fails. Many of the maps are visually and tactically interesting; a couple are so well-realized and immersive that they gave me shivers. But every single one is totally linear, with almost no room for exploration, let alone rewards for it. Some maps require stealth, some require raw firepower, none let you meaningfully choose between them. None give you interesting options like sniping and the only ones where clever use of the environment can save you grief, practically force you to see that "clever" choice. One particularly annoying map gives you a blatantly-obvious stealth approach around a bunch of heavily-armed guards, and even rewards you with extra experience for successfully stealing a target object without being detected - but doesn't provide a stealthy exit path so you end up fighting all those enemies at once in order to get back out.

The single-track maps are particularly disappointing because the character generation and development system is fairly wide open. Like the Fallouts or Arcanum, you can make a character with your own mix of stealth, brute force, and social ability. The difference is, that choice doesn't extend into gameplay. Social characters get the opportunities for some extra experience by finding superior solutions to thorny political problems, can con NPCs out of money, etc. Stealth characters can get some extra goodies by picking locks and hacking computers. But then they have to fight through an entire apartment building full of zombies, room by room with no shortcuts, exactly like the combat monsters. And the combat monsters still have to sneak past alert guards patrolling narrow spaces in covert missions.

To give them some credit, I think the idea was that various characters would not take various missions. The extra experience rewards from social solutions are generally equal to those from the high-stealth or combat-heavy ones. But first of all, there is generally no way to tell what a given side mission requires until you've accepted it - or sometimes until you get well into it. Secondly, separate missions for separate characters is just not satisfying. The Deus Ex approach, where all characters get the same goals but each goal can be met multiple ways, makes a much better game.

As the swan song for Troika, I suppose it's only fitting that Bloodlines suffers the flaw that has marked every one of their games - a letdown of an ending. There are five different endings for the game, branching at a choice point where you must decide which faction you will back (or perhaps that you will back none at all, getting yourself out of the situation and then walking away). But the first problem is that you make this decision at the beginning of the endgame, and then face a series of extremely ugly fights that is basically identical for every ending in order to actually accomplish your choice. Depending on the choice you make, you might skip one of these fights, but if you really want to see the possible endings you will be repeating the most tedious and un-fun part of the game five times over.

The final cutscenes are also just too anticlimactic. The "best" ending, for example, has a great homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark in it. But sadly, the voiceover is delivered with a total lack of conviction and the visuals are a little weak, and it just doesn't feel right. It needed to be done with more passion, and about twice as long.

That's not the worst of it. The plot of the game centers on a specific McGuffin and political differences over who should control it and what should be done with it. An attentive player will notice the clues that all of the feuding factions are mistaken about the McGuffin, and even if they back a faction that prefers to "push the button" may not want to be in the near vicinity when said option is taken. But despite all that, the endgame removes that choice. Choosing a faction that wants to do the thing forces you to be there when they do it. So of the five endings, two result in Something Bad happening to your character after you win - despite the fact that in-character you would have gotten out of there. And actually, one of the other three isn't really all that happy either. Really, the designers had an idea that there was only one "right" choice, and they punish you for doing anything different. That fundamental disrespect for the choice they themselves gave you really detracts from the endings more than the lame implementation does.


In summary, I'm glad I bought and played this game, but I'm also glad I didn't pay a premium price for it or race out to get it in breathless anticipation. It's a good game, it's fun and (at least with god mode turned on for the final fights) worth the playtime, but the weak endings and the overall feeling that with better map/level/sidequest design it could have been a true landmark game leaves me more ambivalent than I like to be after finishing a game.