Bloodlines 2.04 - The Game of Your Dreams

"Loving you was like loving the dead

Was like loving the dead

(Was like fucking the dead.)"

 

Type O Negative - Black No. 1

 

 

Not sure if I'll even bother finishing Bloodlines 2 for the moment. Since six years ago I preordered the expanded cowpie with extra plop, I may as well return to it in a year after the ensuing contents trickle out. But I do think it's worth pausing for a bit to address the artistic side of things. I've seen at least one developer trying to turn the blame around on either the publisher's branding or on customers for having over-inflated expectations of a Bloodlines sequel. And sure, some lacks (no moving vehicles, no interactable objects, limited mob models and behaviors) can be blamed on a lack of budget or time budget. Such things do happen.

 

But that's not all we're complaining about by a longshot. It's that the content they did include comes across as cheap and lazy and uninspired and just... lame. It fails to stand on its own merits. Here's one example: snatching guns from across the room with telekinesis. Cool action movie gimmick? Sure, okay. Going a step further and hovering them in mid-air firing them telekinetically... still a cool action movie gimmick?

Well, when Magneto did it with fifty guns at once in the first X-Men movie, hell yeah, badass! Doing it with exactly one gun though, even if it leaves my hands free to climb around, just looks like my character forgot how to use his fingers for some reason, especially since it still replaces your autoattack! And if you think that's as stupid as the over-reach gets: 

For a basic fetch quest, you're sent to click a supposedly important package in a dumpster. Can you "interact" with the dumpster to lift its lid? No. It must be activated telekinetically to dramatically rip the lid off and send it flying across the alley. Wow! What an ostentatious display of supernatural might... this would be, if I weren't still just standing in an grungy back-alley performing magic tricks like a toddler flexing his muscles for an audience of one bum who can't even be bothered to look over at my godlike display of AWESOMAH POWAH because apparently I'm too stupid to operate a lid without magic. Thank Caine I haven't run across any childproof caps!

 

The funniest thing about Bloodlines 2 would have to be its launcher link to a deep dive video series. It's damn near impossible to find any facet whatsoever of this game that anyone would call "deep" even down to basic wording. I'll freely admit I make constant typos and occasionally misuse terms myself, and when I charge people $90+ to read my blog, we can argue about that. But with a hundred pairs of eyes in your writing/production/voice/testing crew looking over your shoulder I should think someone, at some point, would point out your classy Ventrue man about town Fletcher should possess better functioning vocabulary than to send you chasing after "graffitos" - congratulations, you've managed to conclusively demonstrate that two wrongs make a wrongo. And then there's Ysabella, whose voice actress accomplished two even more crass back-to-back mirrored fuck-ups:

Hawt nostril shot, babe.

First she pronounces "craven bow" as in 'bow-and-arrow' which I might've been inclined to chalk up to some weird west-coast dialectic foible inverting the tendencies of those other clahwns frahm Bahws'n except she then immediately flips to pronouncing Lascaux as "lass-cow" or something until you're holding your head and moaning 'owe' and could someone please give this heifer's third-grade teacher a slap across the face? Even more hilarious because Yzzy's a Toreador. Even if she knew nothing else, would anyone in the world be more partick'ler about her French than a supernatural art snob?

 

I'm unwilling to chalk such flubs up to deliberate irony on TCR's part either (some meta-commentary on Seattle's flimsy upper-crustiness?) considering the utter lack of awareness in the text that they should be flubs, and how well they suit a cast filled with nothing but Svengoolie-grade horror* and shoujo-grade characters designed around simplistic emotional cues. Even Redemption, the previous V:tM adaptation before the original Bloodlines, while a far weaker, painfully cheesy script, managed to maintain an overall feel for vampires as inherently monstrous even as they struggle to retain their humanity, beings of dangerous power and even more dangerous appetites.

 

Here though? How many of Bloodlines 2's vamps truly act like creatures of the night? Like raveners beyond the campfire, consumed by ambition and power-lust as much as by bloodlust? Is it the cringing self-help fashion victim at the auto shop? The romance novel audience surrogate shrinking violet incapable of cold reason that's supposed to also somehow qualify as a brilliant scientist? The twink spymaster that spends all his time mincing and lisping instead of providing any useful intel? The imbecile headsman trying to play Superman? Well over half the cast are nothing but needy, whiny, preening pissants swooning at compliments and microaggressions. I suppose at least the wintertime setting is apt enough to be littered with snowflakes. If you want a case-in-point, look at what they did to the Nosferatu.

Hello, kitties.

Better yet look first to their clan's namesake. Max Schreck's leathery make-up and gaunt, insidious features with exaggerated ears/nose were imitated in previous V:tM adaptations for their intrinsic monstrous interpretation via our neoteny-focused social instincts. But in keeping with the modern need to champion social causes or make some if you can't find 'em (much like Baldur Gate 3's demonspawn) Bloodlines 2's crew apparently decided nossies must be pitied and cooed over. So they're nothing but helpful**, are given rounded, small-limbed childlike proportions plus diffident, servile speech patterns, and of course their pug faces are rounded out to infant chubbiness. One doesn't even bite. Requisite sob story pining for his human wife included, to legitimize him as servile toward the unfairer sex.

 

It's tempting to point out the usual "man bad, woman good" routine. The badass fitness chick bodyguard sends you to kill man after man and the one-vampire justice brigade's targets are either men who've sinned against women, or, for a bit of oh-so-risque alternative, a couple of women who've sinned against... also other women.

Won't somebody please think of the thinkers of children?

Would you feel less justified in murdering a female car thief as punishment for emotionally inconveniencing a man instead of a woman? Obviously yes, and any writer worth his salt would've made you face that incongruity instead of padding your conceit for extra comfort. Then there's the pregnant damsel in distress for extra pathos. But honestly, I'll admit they did try to include some female villainy. No, it's the triteness of the writing, its flimsy emotional cues and limited congruence with playable content that will annoy you more than any active insults. That unimaginatively conventional morality I foresaw from A Machine for Pigs' plot hits in... whatever the opposite of narrative force is.

 

It's dull.

 

The three varieties of random mobs spawning on rooftops fail to entice. You end up breaking the masquerade repeatedly just to flip off the cops so something happens. Your haven offers nothing to do. Sexualized suckery ends up neither edgy nor enticing. (I'll admit I did let Mrs. Thorne tempt me. Don't judge.)

The scent trails looked promising during the first mission when you're reconstructing Fabien's day before you absorbed him, with his various stops contextualized as plot-relevant actions. After that though, tracking gets relegated to a pretext for cross-town timesink runs. While breadcrumbs are still an improvement over Skyrim HUD-marker chasing, every time I'm simply encouraged to rush ahead I can't stop thinking of the wasted opportunities to tell a story about your various victims and maybe tie it into a thumb-up or thumb-down judgement at the end of the quest. Apparently my target stopped while traversing various back-alleys to climb a shipping container inexplicably parachuted into the middle of Seattle. Okay. So? No matter since you'll just be one-shotting your victim and running away.

 

In between every step of the main quest you're handed a new set of three side-quests as blatant filler. One kill, one stealth kill (which you don't technically need to stealth) and one fetch quest of the dullest variety, where you literally walk over to the marked location, click The Thing and walk back. Among all this, the main quest does stand out as superior storytelling, but I'm betting that's largely for borrowing its central theme from Amnesia: Rebirth which handled it better.

 

I've seen enough to discern the main issue. Paradox wanted to technically fulfill delivery of the "RPG" for which it had cashed in preorders, The Chinese Room probably got a bigger payout from those preorders alone than it would have for whatever small-name project it actually had planned, and the only people who got screwed over were the customers, which is fine, that's how business works, like, duh. But gradually you do begin to see the actual work they'd originally intended under the timesinks and other padding. It was to be a traditional, linear, narrative, light puzzle-solving adventure game about a supernatural detective, much in the spirit of Amnesia. One cannot escape the realization that Fabien's flashback dreams are more carefully plotted and scripted, more detailed and far more relevant to the plot than your own character's adventures which mostly consist of an RP-lite, perfunctory XP-grinding, MMO-inspired runaround to feign the trappings of class-based role-playing. And the sad part is that derailing TCR's effort fruitlessly into all that "kill ten rats" nonsense also left that better adventure game underneath underdeveloped in itself.

 

The worst is that like Wasteland 3, like Baldur's Gate 3, like countless other hacks, they try to cover their world-building and character design inadequacy with pandering. Vamp romance novel self-insert heroines falling in love with dashing ancient lords, vamps who love their sisters, vamps who love their wives, vamps who love vamp mommies who love their vamp babies, vamps who love playing caped crusader and the women who love them, etceteree, etceterah. Catering to the lack of taste of infantile, narcissistic overemotional cripples is not something you get to blame on a lack of funding, and certainly not on high audience expectations. Quite the opposite. Those expectations offered you a far better chance to build a world aiming higher than shallow emotive mutual masturbation with Facebook teens. 

 

Well, we'll see what another year's worth of DLCs brings, but I'm not holding my breath. 

 

 

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* Ohh, couldn't it be lice instead of leeches... thirty years later, yes, apparently it could, in the form of these insignificant bloodsuckers. I normally try to steer clear of in-jokes, but there's one for all you upper-Midwest forty-something local cable fans out there.

** Ironically if you think back to the original Bloodlines, the Nosferatu, while nasty customers in general, actually treat you as an equal more fairly and consistently than other vamps. Is there not more value in that more dignified approach, giving the devil his due, than in infantilism?