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archonreviews · 6 years

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The Archon’s Review of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a modern fantasy role-playing game developed by Troika Games and published by Activision. You play the role of a newly sired vampire in 21st century L.A. Your sire is executed on the orders of Sebastian LaCroix, Prince of Los Angeles, and you are then forced to do LaCroix’s chores. Thus begins an adventure through the seediest parts of Los Angeles as you attempt to recover a mysterious sarcophagus, fight off the attentions of the violent Sabbat, and decide where their loyalties lie. Oh! Also, don’t murder too many “innocent” humans, or you’ll turn into a monster or something.

Man, I wish this game got at least half the love it deserved from... well, from everybody. Or rather, I wish it had received more love from Activision and the public, and less from Troika. After all, it was Troika’s excessive design scope, combined with Activision’s apparent indifference and callous deadlines that made this game far less than it could have been. It’s been more or less left to fans to improve and even in some ways “complete” the game after its release.

All that said, however, the game as released is quite good, especially in the writing department. The story has you navigating vampire society, completing various missions for the clandestine Camarilla organization (not to be confused with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s circle of advisors headed by Otto von Bismarck), and more specifically Prince LaCroix, and has you eventually picking a side in a decades-spanning conflict between the rebellious Anarchs, and the Camarilla itself. The world is rich and enveloping, with characters that feel like real people even if you only speak to them for a little bit.

Before I go into greater detail about the story and writing, let’s talk about the mechanics of play, which are... ehhh-but-kinda-okay??? I’ll talk about your vampiric abilities first. Basically, as you increase in power, you’ll acquire greater powers as you attain higher levels in “disciplines”. Each vampire clan has a set of three disciplines at its disposal, ranging from superhuman strength and speed, to invisibility and extra-sensory perception, to literal magicks and the ability to afflict other people with madness. As you level up and put character points into those disciplines, either you get new powers, or the power of the discipline itself becomes greater. For example, more points in Thaumaturgy (otherwise known as Literal Blood Magick) gets you additional spells to cast, while putting additional points into Potence (otherwise known as Swoleness) makes the affect of the discipline greater when used. All of that, that being the character progression and the gradual increase in power over the course of the game, that all works pretty well. You can actually feel your character’s increasing power over the course of the game.

(Pictured: Me trying not to get wrecked by a surprise boss. Punching it worked well enough.)

However, I will criticize a couple of things. First, when selecting disciplines to use, the default is using the mouse wheel, which is fine, I suppose, when selecting guns in a first-person shooter. But when trying to sift through ~7 abilities, each of which does different things, it can be something of a bugbear. I died at least a couple of times when I was trying to select the spell that makes nearby enemies barf their blood vessels out, and I accidentally selected the power that makes everything glowy for a bit. I only found out that you could (presumably) assign disciplines to the number keys very late in the game.

Second, combat difficulty can be a bit wobbly. Against human opponents, the difficulty depends almost entirely on whether the enemies have high-powered automatic guns. If yes, then it becomes a game of getting the enemies to come at you one-by-one for strategic beatings. If no, then feel free to run right into the middle of them and beat on all of them. Make sure to save one human for feeding though! Feeding regenerates your health and powers your blood gauge, which acts as a sort of mana bar for your disciplines. And since you can feed freely in combat areas, there’s no reason not to kill every human enemy except one, then get all your health and blood back from them.

(Omnomnomnom...)

Against other vampires, however, it’s a different story. Most vampire battles are boss battles, so it makes sense for them to be difficult. But the battles against regular vampires can also be nightmares if you’re not careful, and even if you are. Here, you have to be a bit more conservative with your disciplines, because for some reason, the game prevents you from committing diablerie (which I feel perfectly entitled to), so you can’t get your blood or health back from them. One thing I would recommend when fighting other vampires: use edged weapons. Even if your edged weapon and your blunt weapon or gun supposedly do exactly the same damage, even counting lethality ratings, you always want to use edged weapons against vamps. For some reason, edged weapons always do more damage to vampires, and stagger them more often.

(Fighting this motherfucker was... unpleasant, but it taught me that even if my punching stat was higher than my weapon stat, I should just use an edged weapon anyway.)

Let us get back to the writing, which is the game’s strongest point. VtM:B has extremely good writing, like, possibly the best out of any game I’ve ever reviewed on this blog. First off, I want to talk about the characterization. Even the minor characters get personality injected through them in every line. Every character feels like a real person, and I found myself relating more to them than to people in real life. Even when a character has aspects of a racial stereotype, the layering of their personality traits and motivations made them into composite humans whom I could get behind. The reason I mention racial stereotypes specifically is because of one character in particular: Fat Larry. He’s an overweight black man who sports an afro, wears a basketball jersey, speaks in jive, and deals in illegal goods. When I first encountered this character, my first thought was “Ohhh, nooooo.” partly because A) the obvious caricature, and B) I knew I’d have to talk about him. However, after talking to him, it became readily apparent that his character extended beyond the stereotype. He’s aware of his weight problem, and to quote “[He] don’t give a fuck”. He has a hand in running a large corporation, and has interactions with people from the local street gangs, all the way up to the Chinese Mafia. He likes steak. As for selling illicit goods; well, most shopkeepers seem to be selling the same kind of illegal goods, that is to say, guns. This pattern holds true for many other characters who seem flat at first, but then, as you dig just a little, they flesh themselves out until you have a wonderful tapestry of colorful characters.

(Ah, Fat Larry. I will never forget you.)

One more major writing point I want to talk about is the game’s use of horror elements. The game as a whole can best be described as a sort of RPG with heavy leanings of horror. However, when the game decides to use these elements, they are used to interesting, if not great, effect. The first such instance takes place in a haunted hotel, which is basically a homage to The Shining (one in a looong series of classics I have yet to check out). There are no enemies to fight, but goddamn if I didn’t have my weapon drawn the entire time. The sound effects and scare timing are perfect, and while the visual effects are a bit dated, they get the job done. I especially liked the whispering, indistinct at first, but increasing in clarity as you trek through the level until it sounds like someone’s whispering directly into your open earhole. Unnerving. The second horror-type location is a venerable house, opulent and imperial. Except this one was inhabited not by festering abominations, but by regular people driven to madness by the owner of the manor, an old-school psychologist who’s lived for centuries due to his vampirism. This guy loooved his insane asylums and it shows; the level plays like a combination of a haunted house and a haunted asylum; and I was never sure if an inmate was going to stand still and mutter or if they were gonna attack me. The audio logs kept on archaic recording devices further added to the atmosphere, detailing owner’s descent into paranoia as the voices that plagued him increased in volume and number. Next, we have zombie plagues! Zombies actually appear twice in the game, and both times they’re used to convey a sense that you are surrounded on all sides, as they spawn from areas you thought were cleared out, and have a nasty habit of appearing just around corners. The first time you encounter them is in the home of a blasphemous preacher who is... over-enamoured with disease and pestilence. Context and previous experience convey the idea that these zombies were formerly people, and that this preacherman’s sickness has touched far more people than expected. The second time zombies are encountered is in the basement of a deadly-decadent family mansion, and in this instance, there’s a sense that you are right in the middle of enemy territory, except the enemy wants to moan loudly at you and grab and eat you. Whereas in the first zombie-quest, you were trying to fight your way through the hordes to a definite end, in the second zombie-quest, it feels much more like you’re trying to escape a fucked situation, even though you’re again trying to get to a definite end. The last instance of horror is one wherein, again, there are no enemies, but there are still scares aplenty. It takes place in an abandoned hospital, and while the happenings seem to be spectral, in the end, it turns out that it’s all being caused by a cannibalistic vampire, who happens to have a quest for you. The end of the hospital is gruesome, and trek there is filled with tight corridors and gory killings observed too far away to do anything about. Oh! I almost forgot to talk about body horror. Yes, there are a couple of levels that indulge in quite gruesome body horror, once in a cliffside manor, and again in a sewer system. The sounds the afflicted enemies make as they announce themselves is far more horrifying than their actual assault, and when you learn that these monstrosities were once human, your sense of revulsion will tinge with pity and additional horror.

(There are also werewolves, which are unkillable and grant the player the additional horror of being chased and hunted down. Good stuff, that.)

So the game knows how and when to use horror elements, but on the other side of its lawn of atmosphere is a gritty, seedy weed-field that pervades the entire setting. Apparently, Los Angeles is going through some shit at the time the story takes place, with gun-hustlers on every street corner, cops shooting to kill for any given offense, and sex work being the industry of choice among young white ladies with bob-cuts. Everybody’s dressed to the 90′s. And worst of all, there seems to be a massive homeless problem that hasn’t even been remotely addressed. It’s not just always night, but it’s always gloomy to boot. One half-expects the Punisher or a similar personage to pop out of the plasterwork and start waxing philosophical about the inherent degeneracy of humankind of some such rot. But make no mistake, the atmosphere thus conveyed is not an unwelcome one; indeed, the gloomy, gritty feel of the game enhances the experience and really lets you feel the oppressiveness of the “something in the air” that the other vampires go on about without giving you a mechanical indicator. You’re clued in organically that something isn’t right by the low state of the general populace and of the city itself.

(Of course, the sex workers are there to provide the player with a way to non-suspiciously feed. I mean, it’s probably fine; I paid them after all, so it’s fine, right? Right?)

Of course, there some points about the game that may turn some people off from a sensitivities standpoint, and such concerns not without merit. First off, there’s the aforementioned ethnic and racial stereotyping, which for some people can’t be fixed even by all the characterization in the world. And it doesn’t just hit black people. Oh, you haven’t heard? Los Angeles has a Chinatown. In addition, a lot of the female NPCs, and even a female player, are clad in, by default, skimpy dress; and I’m not even talking about the sex workers. A more nuanced weirdbad thing occurs in the system by which certain victims give you more blood than others. Basically, while rats only give you a little blood and humans a lot, this makes sense. What makes less sense is that homeless people give less blood than upper class people when fed upon. Certain characters imply, or even outright state that the quality of a person’s blood is directly tied to the kind of life they’ve led. A PhD is worth more blood than a regular dude, who’s worth more than a homeless person. Attaching objective worth to a person’s standard of living is classist, if nothing else, and the implications made me uncomfortable. However, I think this comes from the source material, White Wolf’s Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop game, so I don’t think we can blame the game devs for this one specifically.

So do I like VtM:B? Yes, I should think so. Even if the gameplay’s a little janky at times, and the game world’s a bit gloomy, I liked the strength of writing and fleshed-out characters quite a lot. Will I play it again? Well, let’s just say that this is one of the few games I managed to finish in time for a review (for obvious reasons), and I already started another playthrough. For your information, I started with a Tremere, and in the second run, I’m trying out a Nosferatu.

(I should note that yes, this is exactly how all white people dance. Also note the lack of a band in the background. Yep.)

#archon reviews #review #video games #video game #vampier the masquerade bloodlines #dark fantasy #modern fantasy #vampires #rpg #vampire the masquerade

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