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?

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.

Bloodlines 2.02 - Fuckin' Nuclear

This century gleams.

Above each doorway, beneath humblest eaves, upon a myriad stalks like sunflowers returning their gift, a brash future glares its challenge against the inheritors of darkness. The sparest tenement boasts electric candle-flare enough to shame the gaudiest palace feast in centuries past, each street aglow to the horizon with an ocean's conflagration of spermaceti. The City of Light dims in remembrance. Above, the Milky Way washes out to a milky pudeur at such garish displays, the stars I called my faithful guides across lifetimes of wandering blinking out in annoyance, mocked by fools lighting their own way to dusty death. This Promethean gift the kine take as their due, with such galling aristocratic detachment: 

Oh, little matchstick girl, will you sell me a whiff of phosphor? Your city of pitch footing and coal gas galloping chokes my senses, your gleaming metal facades scorch alive old fears of the witch-hunter's heated brand. And there, secreted in your coat, buzzing and chiming for your limited attention: what cacodaemon thought to wed a pocket Victrola to an ever-flowing gossip rag?

 

Had I foreseen this incandescent, screeching madhouse, I should have hunted down those fools Marconi and Tesla in their cribs and by hallowed leechcraft eased the world of this plague of buzzing fireflies, this insult to the mute eternal night beyond. 

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Feeling Bloodlines 2's tedium set in more firmly with every simpleminded fetch quest and slapfight against identical mooks, I'll set aside my many other complaints to ask: will any detail of my character or the setting ever prove relevant? Why force a premade player character on me if you're not going to give him any personality?

 

The culture shock of a creature four centuries old and a century absent is elided in a single paragraph of dismissive exposition, then ignored, begging the question of why an "elder" vampire was warranted in the first place. At every step, TCR's gaggle of sorry excuses for writers pass up chance after chance at colorful dialogues which would've taken no more development effort than voiceovers triggered by environment. The Christmas tree you see as you walk out your door the first time could've been a commentary on shifts in religiousity, a visit to Fletcher's bar with its speakeasy history could be punctuated with: 

"Ah, but those were gayer days."

"Oh. About that word..."

 

Could The Nomad comment that The Great War was good eatin' and such fruitful catastrophe could never be duplicated? Maybe give us an aside about women's suffrage or flapper fashions vs. modern ones? Something about the damn dirty commies? It's bad enough our protagonist has zero opinion on new technologies, but could he not show some passing interest in the improvement of those he would have encountered in more primitive forms, like the velocipede or motor carriage? Sure, piling on too many such asides could sound goofy if they're not properly spaced out and interspersed with more serious, plot-relevant content.... but come on... nothing?!

 

Even when their own script sets up an obvious opportunity, they fail to follow up on it logically, like the fact a vamp sleeping since 1920 should react with confusion at Benny's "nuclear" comment. Maybe you could insert short information age training dialogues at the start of each night in your haven. Or imply the PC speed-read a few books like Armand in Interview. Or hell, yes, try to imagine how modern light pollution would look to someone who went nappy-naps back when street lamps still ran on oil. Take advantage, in some way, any way, of the backstory you so thoughtlessly spat out. Have a reaction, an opinion, of some kind, beyond "give me quest!" It's not as though game design is lacking in examples to follow. Your ghost buddy is even a direct counterpart to Joey Mallone from Blackwell, where he played so much more fruitfully off the heroine. Or hear how much mileage Gabriel Knight got out of its protagonist and narrator snarking at the much sparser pixelated scenery back then.

 

Bloodlines 2 is an astoundingly lazy product in many ways, but this becomes especially obvious in facets of development where even a minimal effort and interest would have easily borne proportionately far greater fruit.

Bloodlines 2.01 - Bouncing off the walls

Disappointing playthrough. Spoilers unmarked. (edit: Wow, did this go downhill fast after the tutorial.)

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Friday

A'riiight, my first quest as a vampire is to sniff out the voice in my head. But this being me, screw that, let's run around aimlessly a bit. And I do mean aimlessly because the game lacks a compass or minimap.

 

My god... it's full of... hobos. Should I bite one? Wait, do I need blood? I don't see a health bar (unless it's marked with a crown for some inexplicable reason?) or blood pool. Avoid the po-po paddock and instead climb up an air duct. Nothing up here except a graffitid smokestack. Let's try this gliding thing. Can I make the jump?

(Seattle) gamers never look up, luckily

Yup. Easily. Except there's still nothing to see or do on this block of rooftops either, except another graffito. Drop down to street level and I've already hit the northern edge of the map. Well that was a significantly duller exploration mission than my last hike north. Can I break into a car? No? Pick up a trash can and throw it? No? Can I at least kick the bucket? No bucket. Fine. Guess I'll do the stupid quest after all. Sniff-sniff, meet the sheriff, sniff-sniff, and I'm already across town. Wow. This can't be the entire overland map.

Can it? It's just about the same size or smaller than the combined zones from twenty years ago!

Destination's guarded, stealth-kill a couple of ghouls, sneak past the rest. I'll admit the parkour elements aren't too bad for providing alternate routes.

Except they just get called over by the door guard if I bypass them anyway aaaaand, I'm dead. Knocked back to the beginning of the sequence because of the stupid checkpoint system. Why the fuck is your combat copied from third-rate shovelware like ELEX, enemies bouncing around you instantly, randomly, inertia-less. On my fourth attempt I finally make it in. Hell with it though, I'm soured on this game for tonight.

 

Saturday

Fine, let's talk to some Anarchs. Except no, it's just more of this idiotic punch-drunk slapfest. The combat physics were admittedly terrible in the original Bloodlines, but at least they were merely primitive and underdeveloped, not purposely dumbed down and infuriating. I would assume TCR wanted to emphasize supernatural speed and power, with punches strong enough to knock enemies around. In effect it instead produces rubberized rag dolls bouncing back and forth like Tom and/or Jerry and every single mook instantly dashes behind you after attacks. Twitchy and boring at the same time. And what idiot thought it a good idea to remove the PC's inventory?

No weapons? What? My only option is to make improvised weapons out of what should become my own arsenal and throw them away? Okay, pro tip you cretins: THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN RPG!!! As in the genre most dependent on empowering the player to create a personal identity! To build up a multifaceted array of choices as he advances. That means class choice, skill choice, appearance choice, moral choice, combat/stealth/diplomacy quest solution choice and yes, included among all that, choice of weapon, my trusty gluon gun or fire axe or Mourning Frost or even a simple slingshot! Because it's mine and I-call-it-Vera!

 

Moving on. Find Fait-Bien's corpse in an unexpectedly flat scene. How? How do you manage to turn such drama as discovering you've murdered your now closest companion into a monotone snooze? Will every character in this game continue delivering nothing but the same vaguely bored, vaguely annoyed, unrehearsed line reading in every single dialogue? Where is the humour, the pathos, the tension which elevated A Machine for Pigs a dozen years ago past its simple walk-and-click mechanics? I try stopping by the pawn shop and am summarily placed back onto the plot rails without the mooks even introducing themselves.

Will this whole affair remain completely linear?

Yes I'm lonely because your supposed game offers no gameplay! By this point in the original I'd already eaten some rats, picked up some loot, slotted more than one skill point, met Smiling Jack, Deb, Trip, the scared guy I mugged for his watch, Heather, Mercurio and Lacroix each with vibrant, expressive personalities and divergent takes on your situation.

At least in Lou-Lou's case the voicing fits a bit better as restrained Ventrue aristocratic hauteur. Not that she has much to say:

Yes, let us dryly exposit the fact that we don't even have anything to dryly exposit.

Seattle: is a city.

Conflict: exists.

Player character: acknowledged. 

Continue plot? <YES>

End perfunctory speed bump.

Compare to "You will go to Santa Monica" where the emphasis told you more about the big cheese's personality in five phrases than these idiots struggled to squeeze out of five paragraphs. Here's the thing: Nines Rodriguez? His very first line "Yo, this is bullshit!" was as generic a stock phrase as they come, but properly contextualized it actually did some narrative work, pushed characterization and faction politics along, before you even officially meet him. Here I've repeated the same "I am old, anarchs are attacking" set-up three? four times over? 

 

No choice but to follow the exactly one objective and do the next quest. At least a few more dialogues open up. Mrs. Thorn and Patience have a smidge more personality. Fight twice more on the way, against the same generic rubberized melee fodder. Okay, fuck it, I've had it with this idiotic combat system, drop it down to normal difficulty. And we have our first megamook, fatso over here. 

Except he does nothing different. Dashes into you like the others, hitting harder. At least I got to win a fight by using my shadow cloak passive, running out of his sight after eating his last buddy to set up a sneak attack. Of course the checkpoint system makes you trudge through the vents toward the fight every time as a timesink. And the subsequent climbing sequence makes me wonder if the developers didn't deliberately make every possible stupidest design choice.

This is not a physics challenge. No matter how many ledges or handholds you see, there is only one path upwards. If you try to grab or stand on something the developers don't want you to, you're simply knocked back down to the bottom, no matter how feasible your chosen course. Obey.

Characters are also getting more and more ridiculous. A fangirl scientist, a mincing Nos, don't get me started on the anarch cannon fodder very pointedly calling The Sheriff "they" or Niko's talk of good guys and bad guys. Great, at least they're not glittering, but is any of this in the least bit vampiric? Anyway, since the one single quest is sending me to bed, I might as well take that advice literally.

 

 

Sunday

Alright, let's give this dumpster fire another chance. I'm thrown into Fabien's dream adventure, because... I'd been spending too much time developing my own character? Was the point to emphasize the fact I can't actually play a Malkavian? And again we get walked through feeding, running across the city, and some painfully telegraphed dialogues introducing Malk mind control. Fabien's gratuitous narration of the obvious is getting on my nerves. Bounce from one NPC to the next as I'm told. Oooh, a flashback within a flashback. How thrilling. If only they'd put the same effort into combat mechanics as they did into whole separate sets and costumes for the prohibition era vamps. And I repeat, what the fuck is this 9th-grade passing grade degradation of the art of dialogue you fonts of soporific pablum?

"I'm sorry to disturb your sleep" - ?? You're supposed to be writing vampires, children of the night, inheritors of original sin, blood-drenched predators, ruthless embodiments of visceral, primordial terror, not a bunch of dickless little suckups cooing and whining at each other and afraid to whistle in church!

 

Again we repeat the same exposition about the mark and weakness. Still nothing to do about town so schlep across it again to exchange five superfluous lines of dialogue setting up the tediously foreshadowed next quest step of tracking down the wayward sheriff. More fights against the same generic mooks. "Your generation ain't your fault" says the pissant with the trendy face piercings. Again, *this* vacillating, pronoun policing, mini-microaggressing self-esteem wonderland is supposed to be the World of Darkness?

Aww yeah, move over Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, the new monster that haunts the darkness is a cringing, apologetic, pop-psychologizin' snowflake that becomes an angel by bleeding others.

Fuck this.

 

 

Monday

More of the same rubberbanding fights against the same basic enemies. At least I amuse myself by stockpiling some melancholic and choleric blood on the way, not that anyone's explained what that does yet. Oops, masquerade violation. Dodged it by running?

More of the same mooks. Even more of the same mooks. Then even more more of the same mooks. They're made to be easy to run/hide from, so the highrise fights turn into a lot of hit-and-run ambushes. Drop attacks at least spice things up a bit. Boss fight against Benny: pop a couple of potions, make use of third-party bait, he goes down eventually, but no matter if you extend the slapfight to three phases, it's still a slapfight.

My first RP choice. Give him to Katsumi. At least I can stomach her gruffer dialogue. 

The map opens up a bit after this, finally offering multiple quests.

Well, as introductions go, Bloodlines 2's is sort of incredible, and not in a good way. Everything from environments to the skills, mobs, combat, save system, character design, tedious writing, simplistic mission structure, every design choice prompts "what the hell were they thinking?"

 

And, glancing at the rapid double-digit attrition in achievement numbers between the tutorial and the first couple of missions, I'm hardly the only one disappointed.

V: tM(r) - Bloodlines(tm)2.00 - The Titular Adventure

Does nobody even remember what titles used to sound like? Was it "PG-13 Adventures of Huckleberry (approved by the Food and Drug Administration) Finn (no Irishmen were harmed in the making of this novel) a Twained trademark of the Markorporation, published in Calaveras County? (Clip our coupon for 15% off frog legs!)" No. No it was not. Fuck your trademarks. Official title and byline only. Do the likes of Paradox / White Wolf not realize they're actually hurting their brand by insisting on such forceful insertions?

 

Anyway, the last time I talked about Bloodlines 2 was back in... oh, wow... October '19. So long ago that Trump was still in office. I know the project's previous crew got fired but found myself uninterested in the details, as their early bragging revolved around social justice warring and thus inspired no confidence in the first place. I've deliberately avoided reviews, hype or teasers and I'm doing exactly as I promised and diving into it fully blind on release day, give or take a couple of weeks to let them patch the more heinous bugs. However, I did also make another promise back then. How did it go again? Ahh, yeesssss:

"If it's great I'm in on the ground floor, but let's face it, even if it does turn out to be crap then ninety bucks is a small price to pay for the colossal amount of bitching I'm going to want to do on the topic, and if they manage to fuck this one up I'm quite prepared to output an entire new canine subspecies' worth of bitch."

 

So hang onto yer The butts Chinese Room, because I already dislike your title screen. The previous two V:tM titles did well enough with a minimalist approach, relying on the music to carry the mood: vaguely religious chanting for Redemption's '90s goth romance approach, and a thrumming, threatening undertow for the original Bloodlines' more visceral approach. Here the music is background noise. Okay. A cityscape would indicate you're trying harder, but slapping a red filter on it is just not trying much at all. Maybe they'll salvage it by making the opening screen change somehow in accordance with your in-game path.

 

The opening cinematic confirms we'll be making a big deal of Seattle itself as a setting. Los Angeles offered a ready theme by Hollywood's glitz and sleaze and shattered dreams. Seattle... kinda lacks that same universally recognizable character conflict. Depending on how hard you lean into it I'm not sure how many Starbucks and Cobain references I can stomach. But okay, okay, we're in the city. In a warehouse/basement? Oh... no character creation, we're doing this in medias refuse? 'S coo', I can dig it. Or dig myself out of it. Die, perfectly innocent worker bees!

 

Ugh, no saving. Checkpoint system. Has this ever in the history of games not been a gratuitous timesink? Not that I'm fond of mashing F5 every few seconds, but I'm even less fond of mindlessly repeating the same sequence of fifty moves fifty times until the last move is successful. Or backtracking because I'm not sure if the save caught all my exploration and interaction.

 

Aaand I'm playing a premade biography, which I rarely like. And he's a fuckin' bishonen too. Stake me now.

 

Plus I've already got a telepathic intruder in my head. You're just dead-set on hitting all my favorite gimmicks, aren't you?

 

Fail a couple of times in the tutorial. Weird mix of heavier physics implementation but less interactive decor than other modern titles. Okay, I'll admit I loved Fabien's amused delivery of "Some of the old guard don't like the idea of the glitterati." No, Fait Bien, no we do not.

 

Finally! Picking a clan. Let's see. Wait, what? Brujah was predictable enough, seems the baseline for new players. Then fuckin' Toreador and Ventrue made it into the options but not my first choice of Gangrel? No Nosferatu?* Was it too much to ask for Tzimicztsche? Instead they give me an Assamite option? No thanks. So it's between Tremere and... oooh... Lasombra. Morbid dark-obsessed ghouls? Okay, okay, maybe I can live with this. (Figuratively speaking.) "Arms of Ahriman" yeah, yeah, this is sounding better and better. Ew, they've got mind control powers though. Guess I can just eat around those like the tadpoles in BG3. No kissing on the mouth!

(I've got no qualms against causing uncontrollable panic, at least.)

So my first power is a "don't look at me" and my second is a "stay away"? They've kinda got my number on that account, don't they? I do like the look of my haven.

See, Cyberpunk? This^ is a modern lair worthy of an ancient beast. Bit of decrepitude, bit of decay, cozy chaos, pervasive intellectual endeavor and melancholy. Bonus points for vascular-looking ducts. And it comes with a housepet!

 

The family portrait, the stop sign, the Bet of Night, the first music track shallowly remixing the nerve-jangling dualist Hollywood track... do you think me so pathetic an old fanboy that you'll win me over by showering call-backs on me? Do you think I'm so easily taken in by nostalgia?!

 

Well... maybe. A little bit.

*Sigh*

Alright, alright. There's stuff I like and stuff I don't like. So far the former outweighs the latter. It just doesn't seem particularly ambitious or inspired. Guess I'll keep playing. Next time: I should probably figure out the deal with these blood flavors or whatever.

 

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* Guessin' Malks, Gangs an' Nossies were deliberately held back as future DLC fodder at $30 each. This is published by Paradox after all. 

Unus, Una, Vampirus, Vampira

"Could you stop the meat from thinking
'fore I swallow all of it
Could you please?"

Marilyn Manson - A Place in the Dirt


Heather Poe's character analysis ranks as one of my Den's more popular pages, but in one respect (not to impugn the perspicacity of my scant few readers) maybe I was being too subtle. When I said that the death of a female draws more sympathy than a warehouse full of disposable male mooks, did you assume it was just a case of "a million is just a statistic" - and if so, might you indulge me in reiterating my observation about Resident Evil: Afterlife?

"Hey, fun exercise:
The Resident Evil movies have skipped the 900mil mark in profits. Someone find me a billion-dollar action movie franchise in which a male hero and his male sidekick mow down row after row of female redshirts, cheerfully tossing shuriken through women's eyes, shooting women through their chin with blood spurting out the top of their heads, stabbing women in the face with machetes to the swell of an unapologetically triumphant soundtrack, caving women's chests in with shotgun blasts, sliding beneath women to shoot them in the crotch with coin-shot for a big applause moment.

Ask some Hollywood pretty-boy... ida know, let's say Ashton Kutcher, if he'd like to commit career suicide by starring in it. See if Sony Pictures wants the distribution rights. It'll give you some idea of whether our contemporary Western society despises women or men more. And hey, if you somehow find or make that despicable billion-dollar series of movies featuring male heroes curbstomping armies of women, then I might condescend to consider the question of whether women are "objectified" by our modern world."


Why are men always the statistic? I compared Heather Poe to a military conscript towards the end of my original post, to all the disposable cannon fodder for whom we hold no sympathy whatsoever. Do you find it at all odd that we require a female emblem for a male affliction? Well, as should happen, Bloodlines included other minor players in vampiric society. Gentle reader, mosey on over to the beach and let's us now visit, for a spell, with Heather's quaint and quirky Santa Monica neighbours the thin bloods.

While, as vampires, they should technically be slightly more powerful than ghouls, they occupy a similar low rung as the dregs of their society (or the "runts" in E's wording) and they are actively being targeted by more powerful vamps for being harbingers of the vampocalypse.

First up you've got Rosa the Malkavian fortune-teller, who is both a politically correct ethnicity and the politically correct sex, and so purely by coincidence is allotted the bulk of respectability among all of them. You cannot harm her in any way and only have the option to directly help her escape L.A.

Then there's Lily, a good-natured and innocent victim of vampiric machinations being held prisoner by an evil male ghoul.

The males are represented by E, Copper and Julius.
Copper's the one you repeatedly con into buying useless junk for hundreds of dollars and finally fool into getting himself killed by trying to stake "the head vampire." He's defined by his comical stupidity and derided even as he charges to his final death.

Julius is cruelly, openly ridiculed for his stuttering. He's also guilty of divulging vampiric secrets and thus you have the option of killing him as he runs pathetically in a panic around the beach, whimpering like a coward, this being AFTER several lines of dialogue where you repeatedly tell him his fate and he whimpers, begs and outright bawls like a baby at you to spare him, with dialogue like "f-f-f-find your h-h-heart" specifically designed to make him sound even more worthless.

And last, let's not forget E, who's permitted to be a good, level-headed male... for having his existence justified by his devotion to a female, for having his entire raison d'etre revolve around rescuing his girlfriend Lily.

Now, it would be dishonest of me to leave the discussion at that. Part of Bloodlines' storytelling quality lay in not diving headlong into FEMale chauvINISM or other politically correct superficialities. Ming Xiao as a representative of the Orient is both a backstabbing villainess and at the same time a supremely dignified, well-spoken and self-possessed woman of power with little of her male counterpart LaCroix's foppish overtones. LaCroix himself in his role as eurotrash was offset by the respectable Maximilian Strauss. Fat Larry's a laughable pastiche of an inner-city black hustler, but two blocks away at the Last Round stands Skelter, a black Vietnam War veteran who couldn't be more dignified and his own man if you chiseled him out of basalt... and they were both voiced by Phil LaMarr for good measure. In fact your campaign features a direct female counterpart to Julius in the Downtown area: Patty the Toreador ghoul, recklessly blabbing about vampirism, whom you also have the option of killing directly, and who was also rendered extremely irritating by her speech patterns. Bloodlines has remained a classic for the past fifteen years partly because its characters had actual character and were so rarely predictable based on their chromosome maps or other superficialities.* The thin bloods stand out only when dissected as a single group, and your character can even mock Lily and E the romantic vamps for being fodder for a cheap airport paperback.

But nonetheless, it's worth noting that if you choose to execute Julius you have to do it yourself, while Patty's quest lets you pass the buck to another -female- character. And I'd very much like to see some datamining of the millions of playthroughs since 2004 to see how many players chose to let Patty escape, because I'll wager many of those did not, in turn, "find their heart" with Julius.

Players love Heather Poe. They pity Heather Poe. They weep for Heather Poe. They want to save her and in fact design special patches for the game in order to save Heather Poe.

Would they have sympathized as much with a putative Heath Poe? Or would they have been perfectly fine chasing him in circles around a beach, gradually cutting and bashing him to death while mocking his speech impediment? Would you have done that to Heather? Feminists did not invent our human favoritism toward women. They've merely tapped into our species' protective instincts for political gain. Instinctively, before all other considerations, we see female suffering as a great wrong to be righted, and we see male suffering as comical or at the very least well-deserved.



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* Well, mobsters aside. The Mafia was always a caricature, be it Italian, Russian or Chinese.

Piano / Forte! (A Dimension of Sound)

"One thousand cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We found a place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there"

Judas Priest - Ram It Down
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"And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And Rrroht inside a corpsy shell"

Vincent Price, in Michael Jackson's Thriller *
_________________________________________________


Though its most memorable moments tended to come from its more tech-driven episodes, The Twilight Zone only rarely qualified as SciFi. I'd speculate that, as Paramount would with ST:TNG forty years later, CBS just found it cheaper to reuse the copiously superfluous cowboy hats and fedoras it had lying around its studios than to pay to build the more unique cardboard rockets and fishbowl helmets by which to ennoble a SciFi production. Looking at it now, the whole series seems anything but a lavish affair (at one point they were even denied the cash for film) and it shows. We might praise the stark realism or the poignancy of one episode after another in which a lone protagonist wanders about an empty town (or an even emptier alien planet) but let's remember it precluded paying extras. And the deserted alien planets were quite depopulated of props and decor as well.

What it did have was sound, from Serling's narrated bookends to details like the sharp pinprick noise of eyeglasses shattering on concrete, to immortalized one-liners like "there was time now" or "it's a cookbook!" More than one episode centered on ventriloquism, of all things, but then it's rare for the real world to provide such sinister props pre-made for a televised thriller. In fact, the show had at times more in common with old-school radio dramas than with the more lavish visuals of its successors, with much of the plot expressed through dialogue instead of action. I had the fortune earlier this year to catch a marathon running through not only the big hits but some of the less popular episodes, including Sounds and Silences, in which a big fat loudmouth is sentenced, in standard Serling style, first to one aural extreme, then the other.

It hit closer to home for me than for most, since I happen to be just a tad sensitive to incoherent noise. When I was young and my ears even sharper, I was even annoyed by those supposedly ultrasonic vermin-repellent devices. (Please try not to draw the obvious conclusion.) I've occasionally gotten up in the middle of the night to close my bedroom door against such noises as... my refrigerator... from six meters and two corners away. Advertisements, with their deliberately intrusive, attention-grabbing flood of white noise, still drive me into a frothing rage. I'm the type to stop dead while walking and track the wind as it hits the trees or the side of a building. Though active noise control has remained slightly too expensive for my tastes, I've come to view a good solid pair of ear-covering headphones as essential to sitting at my computer. My stance on voice chat noise pollution in games is well documented, and it's not too far from my stance on voice chat noise pollution in the physical world.

So in context it's no surprise that so many things remind me of a song I once heard, or that I keep returning here on the blog to the topic of audio in computer games. Watching and listening to Sounds and Silences made me more attentive to how sound was used back in the days of radio and the first grainy, barely discernible flashes of the cathode ray. To some extent we can still hear the same quality these days in a well-narrated audio book, because regardless of technological improvements the main problem still lies in conveying intent. Good narration will relate apprehension and tension by halting, ponderous sentences, will rush awkwardly through relating shameful events, will threaten in a stony monotone, letting the microphone do the work of amplification. Where televisuals fall short, well-placed sound effects will not only color an event but will mark different phases of the action or provide new information. (You -know- the glasses have broken before you ever see the shards.) And, perhaps most importantly, good music is more than filler. It sets the mood and provides nuance.

As far as games go, I more or less started off this blog by complaining about the non-massive nature of MMOs, microtransactions as legitimized cheating, and the decay in game music quality. And I never let up on them. For a long time after Y2K, sound degenerated, as far as I can see for three main reasons:

1) Video cards continued to rule the tech specs while sound cards plateaued fairly quickly. It might shock younger gamers now to see old game boxes from the '90s advertising the number of sound channels a particular title was capable of occupying, right alongside its polygon count. Or Diablo 2 advertising itself for having hired an orchestra. As everyone started getting the same quality sound cards and sound stopped being a mode of conspicuous consumption, companies also invested less and less in what was no longer a selling point.

2) Graphics really did improve. Tremendously. Thus, much like TV shows stopped conveying information via sound in favor of displaying it visually on ever-larger, ever higher definition TV sets, video game sound became more vague, relegated to the background.

3) For ten to fifteen years companies were tripping over each other to widen their market base from obsessive wer-nerds to the mass market. This meant providing more instant gratification, simplifying and dumbing down everything from controls (there were no noteworthy 3D strategy games after Homeworld) to cultural references to level design, to shrinking party / match sizes in multiplayer and eliminating secondary roles in class-based games.... to, as a matter of course, music. It was especially noticeable in online games where you could at times still hear the more recognizable, launch-quality music even as newer patches added more generic white noise. But it was not unheard of for companies to actually go back and vandalize their own previous work, scrapping more interesting original tracks to replace them with blander, more generic, more forgettable, lowest-common-denominator fare.

And sure, it hasn't all been bad. The Secret World, a game from 2011 which failed miserably as a game but dressed up its failure via surprising artistic panache, recently held its yearly Samhain event, part of which treats players to a collection of radio dramas from the days before video killed such stars. While it's unforgivable of Funcom to charge its customers subscription fees for public domain radio as a timesink, I do have to thank them at the very least for their selection, which includes not only the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast but The Thing on the Fourble Board (**) Give it a listen. It's twenty minutes of sane, didactic, low-key narration punctuated by a few precision strikes of otherworldly presence. And you will know it when you hear it, trust me. In turn, TSW was one of the few games which managed to emulate that old-timey radio drama attention to sound. Its colorful yet still nuanced NPCs set a delightfully mundane backdrop against which its various boogey men can boogety-boo!

In fact, horror games and horror themed segments in general have invested more in sound. Shrieks, groans, creaks and ominous footsteps add a great deal to their suspense, especially since they so often need to hide their boogeymen until the last second and can't bank entirely on graphics as other genres do. But, banking on a contrast with eerie silences unfortunately leaves no room for a real soundtrack. While voice acting has always oscillated in quality between titles and sound effects have had their high points, music consistently diminished. My recent jaunt through System Shock's introduction reminded me how much more expressive that '80s/'90s synthesized backdrop was. While some series (Heroes of Might and Magic, Divinity) were lucky enough to latch onto a good composer from the start and clung to them as selling points through many reiterations, most did not, and they really should've paid more attention to how effective a well-integrated, memorable soundtrack can be in other media. Don't believe me? O.K., three, two, one, let's jam. And it's not like animation was new by that point.


But I am happy to note some signs that music might once again be considered a distinctive element of game design and not simply white noise to fill the background silences. Justin Bell's sound direction wasn't bad in Pillars of Eternity but still largely generic, unintrusive medievalism. It wasn't until he really cut loose two years later (2016) in Tyranny that he put out something worthy of having his name mentioned. What's more, I've been seeing some amusing signs of companies reversing the old trend of downplaying music after release. Stellaris' more noticeable tracks seem to come from its later DLCs like Synthetic Dawn (2017). Warframe, launched in 2013, has some surprisingly engaging tracks... most attached to content added since 2015-2018.

MAKE SOME NOISE !

Yes, music can sometimes intrude on other gameplay elements (those thunderous old '90s tracks were partly meant to cover up the lack of other sound effects or ambience) but intruding can also be a good thing. The Tristram theme did as much for the original Diablo's popularity as any other of its high points, and many a mediocre game has remained fixed in gamers' memories for its soundtrack. And there are endless ways to mitigate the potential nuisance factor. Set it in-character or in an appropriate locale. The sea shanties in PoE2: Deadfire were more immersive than half its chauvinistic abortions of storytelling put together, the Sleepless Lullaby along with Lilith's monologue or the Siren Song rendered their little corners of TSW unforgettable, no-one who's played STALKER can forget the NPCs randomly breaking out their guitars and We All Lift Together defined Fortuna better than any other location in Warframe. V:tM-Bloodlines made its night spots come alive with Isolated, A Smaller God, Lecher Bitch... and appropriately enough, Come Alive... and nobody and I mean nobody was complaining about Bloodlines' music being too intrusive!

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE !

Even completely out of character, let music symbolize your setting instead of just underscoring it. Even a twenty-second flute solo can stick in your customers' minds years afterwards for marking their call to adventure. I sure as hell have never met that wailing banshee in Tyranny's soundtrack in all my replays of the game, but she fits her imaginary world every bit as perfectly as The Thing on the Fourble Board's inhuman meowling.

It's not unreasonable to assume that people still remember that often painfully jarring 8-bit tootling from 1980s computer games for its sheer nostalgia factor... but let's not exclude the possibility that they memor it for being memor-able. Yeah, that's a quality we really should get back around to recapturing.

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* You know, on one hand I'm disappointed that after three decades that's still one of our most satisfying portrayals of lycanthropy. On the other hand... might as well enjoy it!
Aaroooooo... AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA !

** Shockingly enough, that is, officially, a word.

V:tM-B2 ! Apprehension

"The last of the rock stars
When hip-hop drove the big cars
In the time when new media
Was the big idea
That was the big idea..."

U2 - Kite


Le *gasp* - in a shocking and unprecedented plot twist, a video game release has been pushed back several months! Stop the presses!

The original Bloodlines has clung to its status as a true classic for fifteen years now, lauded for its narratives, characters, sound, replay value, quest structure and general atmosphere yet lambasted for its poor combat and a degree of bugginess and clunkiness evoking a termite-powered tractor. So when the developers for the sequel declare they need more time to avoid the first title's problems... well, yes, by all means do please try to keep the loading times under marathon length. But more than avoiding the original's weak spots I'm worried it simply may not be possible to match its strengths.

I'm not going to pretend to have any insider knowledge of Bloodlines 2. In fact I fully intend to forego looking up any of their press releases or other hype. After this post I'll probably just ignore it until it comes out then install it on release day and dive in, quest by quest, zone by zone, chapter by chapter. It's one of the few games I've had no problem pre-ordering blind. If it's great I'm in on the ground floor, but let's face it, even if it does turn out to be crap then ninety bucks is a small price to pay for the colossal amount of bitching I'm going to want to do on the topic, and if they manage to fuck this one up I'm quite prepared to output an entire new canine subspecies' worth of bitch.

I do know that none of the three founders of old Troika Games seem to have any involvement in the project, as all three now work for inXile or Obsidian, both of which companies have been subsumed into the soul-devouring vacuum which is Microsoft and are therefore no longer worth mentioning. I know nothing about Bloodlines 2's developer beyond skimming the game's Wikipedia page. I'm slightly encouraged by Paradox's involvement (they tend to have superior tastes) and they did get Brian Mitsoda back, who was supposedly responsible for so much of Bloodlines' charm. (edit: and then they fired him)

But no matter how creative your team might be, the main problem with trying to sell any game these days is that it largely means marketing to snowflakes, and catering to the younger generation's moral cowardice and narcissism will:
1) sap games' atmosphere of their more gut-wrenchingly memorable moments.
2) snow any quality under mountains of politically correct, self-righteous posturing.

Mitsoda himself leaned slightly toward glorifying politically correct archetypes in Dead State, but it's more worrisome to see Cara Ellison, the new senior writer, bragging she's going to "move away from what she considered to be the 'male power fantasy' of Bloodlines to give it a broader appeal." Well... ok? I guess? We can certainly do with fewer big guys with big swords like The Sheriff. Though it begs the question: how willing are you to also move away from glorifying codependence, servility and emotional manipulation, a.k.a. female power fantasies? And do you, like most women and certainly well-indoctrinated feminists, treat individual freedom as a "male power fantasy?"

Oh well. They did also wrangle Chris Avellone into their team somehow (edit: and then they fired him) and if anyone in the game industry might have retained enough of a head on his shoulders to realistically depict both masculine and feminine crimes, it's the guy who wrote Ravel into Planescape: Torment and Grieving Mother's dialogue in Pillars of Eternity.

Wait and see... 2020 you say?
See you then.

V:tM - Bloodlines ! with Happy End?

"I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end it doesn't even matter"

Linkin Park - In the End


_______________________________________________________
As this series of posts runs through the entire length of the classic computer role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, assume spoilers.
_______________________________________________________


Bloodlines earned its "classic" status via its pacing, atmosphere, characters, XP/leveling scheme and viscerally immersive roleplaying choices. You'll almost never hear anyone praise its buggy and simplistic combat system. Its ending falls somewhere in between, cited, if ever, far behind earlier quests on most fans' lists of high points. Partly, the requisite climactic battles were hampered by that buggy and simplistic combat system.

When I set out on this little vampiric jaunt down memory lane two years ago I declared I'd try to do it the stupid way by banking on firearms, and I stuck to my guns. Literally.

However, by the end-game with 9/10 ranged combat points (auspex bonus included) even the best shotgun and assault rifle could barely drop human mooks with an entire clip. My fire-and-forget "vision of death" Malkavimagic spell interspersed with the occasional feeding proved much more effective. For boss fights, guns were moderately effective, mostly because it's possible to glitch out both bosses' AI or get them stuck in repetitive loops navigating around columns and staircases.

As impressive as The Sheriff looks with his big fucking sword, it's a dull first half of the fight once you realize he never took the "stair climbing" discipline and thus only teleports predictably between levels, allowing himself to be potshotted from harmless distance. At least he provided a use for the flamethrower, a weapon with an otherwise impractically small ammunition capacity. Since his Chiropteran Behemoth form can get knocked out of the air by damage, the DoT effect from even one pulse of the flamethrower causes him to rubber-band back down the instant he attempts to take off, never attacking you. Nice gimmick but still, that's entirely too gimmicky a victory for a final boss fight.

As for Ming Xiao, it's a close-quarters fight with knockbacks, which makes it both unsatisfyingly restrained and annoy-...
and...
oh, shit!

She's got nipples! Why in the name of everloving fuck does a giant tentacled worm have glowing nipples? And how did I never notice that before?
... disturbing...

Aside from disappointing boss fights, I'd guess most players hated being denied both a final fight against LaCroix himself and their macguffin to boot. Your adventure in mookdom ends with you still a mook, ping-ponged around in the conflict between the city's factions. And you know what? I'm fine with that.

Here I have to defend Troika's decision. For all the frustration of discovering there had never been a macguffin to begin with, the ending scene of Smiling Jack laughing it up on the beach watching the fireworks is as memorable as any in computer games. It also better fits White Wolf's V:tM setting as I understand it from my outside vantage point. It should, after all, be a game less about brute force or the accumulation of magical artifacts than about outliving the machinations of one's fellow bloodsuckers. "-the politics, kid. That's what'll kill ya." It's also one of the few RPGs explicitly letting you ride off into the sunset by yourself instead of becoming a lord or king or demigod or otherwise saddled with the world's cares.

Anyway, it's not all bad. The not-quite-reveal of the mysterious cab driver is greatly sweetened by playing a Malkavian and watching my character completely lose his shit and descend into incoherent panic at intuiting the dark stranger's nature. As you ascend Ventrue Tower you pass a window with a view of the street you've walked so many times over the course of your campaign. In a stroke of brilliance, just to tie everything up in a neat little bow, just to drive home the pure circuitous circularity of power games, there's the suicide bomber LaCroix throws at you.

When killed, he drops his explosive satchel. It's the Astrolite. It might be any batch of Astrolite, but we all know it's not. It sets you back to your own first mission, delivering Astrolite for LaCroix to prove your worth, never mentioned again. Until now. Was it worth it?

 

The encapsulation of Bloodlines' brilliance: making you kick yourself every step of your moonlit way.

 

 

 

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edit 2020/12/09

Rewrote the penultimate sentence, inadvertently made to sound too literal originally. My kingdom for a proofreading / editing department.