Bloodlines 2.03 - Power up your ass

I've felt monumentally unmotivated to continue my Bloodlines 2 run, but luckily I tend to jump back into games I hate all the faster just to satisfy myself that I've gotten my money's worth and chuck them into the Bozo bin. So after cleansing my palate with a strategy campaign (that'll be faction #24 if anyone's keeping track) I waded back into the bloody morass and ground my way through the next few in-game nights. Which mostly consisted of grinding blood points.

Mmmm. Scaaaarf. D'oh!

The new resource system is... odd, and not particularly satisfying. Instead of a blood pool, each individual skill has to be charged with blood, and most can be charged at the same time in 1-3 feedings,* including bleeding your stunned enemies dry in the middle of combat. (Technically not diablerie if they're ghouls? Except you also drain vamp bosses? Not sure.) As feeding also heals you, you'll polish off your last victims each time by draining them. As a result, you rarely or never actually need to replenish your blood mini-pools outside of combat. Instead, feeding is crammed back into the system by MMO-inspired farming of melancholic/choleric/sanguine blood (yes, I heard it too; quit that spinning, Galen) as currencies to buy spells from your trainers, which you can then enable with XP. 

I have a lot of problems with this whole crap'n'kaboodle.

1) The idiotic pinball scoring for your humors, seen on the left-hand side. It seems impossible to get less than ten points per tick of sucking, or spend less than ten, but they just had to inflate the numbers to impress... whom, exactly? Second-grade dropouts that can't divide by ten?

2) Each flavor of human comes with its own minigame, with the goal being to get them out of sight into some dark alley where you can bleed them undisturbed, by chasing them, making them chase you angrily or having them follow your sexy ass. Decent bit of fun in itself, but it comes with zero skill application or dialogue. Hit the talk button and the chase triggers. So after a lot of repetitions (each skill requires ~5-15 humans, depending on cost and how completely you can drain them without a Masquerade violation) it still becomes a chore.

3) Randomized spawns. They just pop up on your map as HUD markers. There's hints of a more interesting dialogue-based system where you'd sniff out incipient victims and somehow encourage their humors to unbalance... or something(?)

- but currently it does nothing and appears to have been replaced with the ready-made HUD spawns halfway through development.

4) Homogenized demands. Talk of the four humors sounds like a prime opportunity for roleplaying, expressing your own character's personality via your favored flavors, but you'll just be asked for preset quantities by various NPCs. While each skill has different requirements, they even out to irrelevance overall. A flaw largely inflicted by:

5) Worst of all, what I mistakenly took for a Lasombra skill tree in my first post turns out to be the skill tree. For everyone. Your clan merely makes various skills cross-class in XP cost. Except cross-class availability only works when other aspects like spells or weapons remain wholly separate to lend each class some personality. Otherwise, in what sense is this still a clan system? Even if you work it into the plot "I'm so special that I don't even need a personality!" is a terrible, terrible self-insert fanfiction idea for a protagonist, subverting the setting all for snowflake narcissism.

6) As a bonus, even within a relatively limited and homogenized skill selection, several seem redundant as implemented into the slap-happy combat. You're got a couple of super-punches, that Earthshock stun plays out as a Greater Magic Missile counterpart to my Arms of Ahriman knockback/root, and I'd guess the Toreador/Ventrue's many brainwashing abilities don't play out very differently either. At least BL1 was honest about "upgrading" powers. And given you don't need any general stats or support skills, by the fourth(?) night I've already hit max power.

7) Zero noncombat skill integration. (At least for your actual protagonist; your Malkavian alter-ego is all noncombat.) And to think I specifically cited the original Bloodlines as ahead of its time among cRPGs in this regard.

8) XP grinding. You get ten (or multiples-of) points for every feeding or killing, and need them by the thousand for each ability point. (Pinball numbers again.) Quest completion does award far more, but once again, I've explicitly cited the original Bloodlines' positive example in downplaying the grind. Here though, the lack of inventory, crafting, resource pools, base customization or other ways to reward adventuring between quests forced them to re-institute it.

 

It's a bit telling of the skill system's superficiality that the second and third boss fights... don't require it. They revolve around one-two-pimp-slapping endless chains of weak adds, either not requiring or outright turning off your vampiric abilities. Out in the city, things spice up slightly once anarchs start spawning randomly on various rooftops (and finally start getting better guns) and again when Sabbat ghouls join them for rooftop firefights, but this is still a paltry amount of mob/combat diversity. And given they leash pretty close to their spawn points, you can cheese most fights by running away and returning to "stealth" kill freshly unaware mooks, Skyrim-style. But that's an old routine. Hell, despite unlocking half a dozen spells, my most entertaining moment came when I realized I could stand a street away and just lasso mooks to their deaths off ledges using my infinite free-cast telekinesis.

telekillnesis

Luckily "it's raining ghouls" doesn't count as a masquerade violation. (Man, Seattle's got some issues.)

Behold my wondrously deadly vampiric power! - of... magnets...

*sigh* I guess making more use of physics is at least one marked improvement over a title from twenty years ago.