Lokus

I'm surprised no one made a topic about this game already, perhaps it got shoved aside with all the excitement with Half Life 2 and Halo 2. Anyway, I've been playing it non-stop since I beat HL2. They both use the Source engine so I got to compare the two. Half Life 2 utilizes the engine much better of course, Troika made little use of the physics and the graphics can look amazing sometimes and like crap at other times. Most notably, clothes and hair. The face looks pretty good with good animation and facial expressions but the hair and clothes usually looks pretty bad. Overall, it's a pretty game but HL2 has spoiled me in the graphics department.

With that aside, the gameplay and story is great, very engrossing. You play a vampire "fledgeling" who has been sired illegally and your sire is killed. The "masquerade" from the title refers to the vampires' efforts to conceal themselves. If you let a human see you feed or use supernatural powers, you lose a masquerade point. As you lose more masquerade points, vampire hunters start stalking you and if you lose 5 points the game ends but there are quite a few quests that redeem masquerade points so it's not a huge deal if you're careful. You start off working for the prince of the Camarilla, one of the main groups of vampires. They are also split into a number of clans, I think 7 are playable. Each clan is unique and has their own areas of expertise and disciplines (disciplines are basically vampire spells). The nosferatu are so deformed from their vampirism that they can't even reveal themselves to humans and are forced to use the sewers to travel everywhere. Another interesting clan are the malkavians who happen to be insane. They hear voices of "insight" which may or may not be helpful. The amount of dialogue in this game is staggering and it's all voiced with facial expressions and such which does wonders for immersion.

The combat is pretty bland, the melee combat is a bit like Fable, you can combo up a few swings and pressing different directions while attacking lets you use different attacks. The ranged combat is like Deus Ex, your skill in firearms determines how accurate you are, how much damage you do and how quickly the crosshairs return to "normal" accuracy. In the beginning though, you will suck with firearms. I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with the pistol with my melee guy even though my firearms skill was 3 or so.

It really is a great game, lots of fun to play. Only other problems I have with it was some choppiness in the city and occasional stuttering. Oh and some npcs/locations can be hard to find, I spent 10 minutes looking for this one bum. They hid him behind a dumpster in the darkest part of the alley.

I highly recommend it for any rpg fans out there and now it's time to play some more. Here are a couple of screenshots I took.

http://s94772067.onlinehome.us/img/bloodlines1.jpg
http://s94772067.onlinehome.us/img/bloodlines2.jpg

Enjoy!

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Thogg

I purchased this as well and have been playing it.

I agree it is a great game, good story lines, decent graphics.

One thing that can be noted in your second screen shot that you didn't mention is the use of alot of foul language...Its quite amusing to listen to some of the people tell you to fuck off in the voice overs....not something your used to hearing in a game.

I kinda wish you could interact with more people on the streets other then the hookers and select npc's...but then again i guess you really shouldn't due to the fact you don't want to be recognized...still would be fun to harass others tho...

I have never played any others in the Vampire series i can't really compare it to them gameplay wise.

And even tho the tasks are the same, playing with different combinations of the clans and disiplines truly changes how you accomplish the task at hand.

Overall a good buy imo...

portwineboy

Ya I've been thinking about starting a thread on this one and I'm glad someone else did. This game has some seriously well written dialogue and characters. I found myself replaying content just to see where the other branches would take me. I'm nowhere close to done this or Halflife, but I can certainly see the "Fallout" influence from the Troika designers. Fantastic content, iffy useage of the fantastic Source engine. Anyone who like vampires should give this a try...or anyone who just likes a damn good story and some seriously nice environments.

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Orodinn

Im definitely gonna get that game. There are so few RPGs set in modern urban settings that I have to get this one. Fantasy settings are cool and everything, but its getting redundant.

FngKestrel

Saw this at the 2003 E3 and it looked fucking incredible. Picking this one up to add to the slew of excellent games that came out this month.

arf

Dam it ain't out here yet (Australia), well not that I know off anyway. I have the first one and I liked it, it actually got me looking up the actual real life game (I can't remember the actual term) but i didn't think my friends would be intrested in dressing up like vampires and role playing them.
But I'll probably get it as soon as it come out.

Locs

Very glad someone posted on this. Saw it at the store and didnt pick it up because I never played a game in this series, and the reviews I read were somewhat vague.

tooblekane

i'm sure i'll get it at some point .. but i can't say i'm going nuts over it though. it does look interesting, and the reviews i've seen have been fairly positive. is it really as buggy as it seems?

omega2K4

Great game. Awesome storyline, decent graphics (Well, comparing it to HL2. It IS running on VALVe's Source engine, but the game can be pretty damn fugly at times. Character models and the enviroment look good, but some textures are just down right ugly.), and nice music that fits the settings (I just wish there was some Industrial music in.). I love how this game isn't linear, you can practically do whatever you please, and work for whomever you please (or just go all lone wolf). The game isn't perfect however, besides the obvious clipping/lip synch/texture problems in cut-scenes (though there aren't too many), some shitty in-game textures, the game does have the tendency to crash from time-to-time (I've had it crash about 3 times in close to 20 hours of play).

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RAGEAngel9

how is/is there multiplayer?
I liked the 1st Vampire and couple of my friends are big whitewolf fans, so this would be sweet if it had multiplayer similar to the last game.

tooblekane

i think they announced a while ago that it wasn't in there, didn't they? i hope it is, but i seem to remember reading that

Thogg

Currently there is no multiplayer...and no product key so most likely the only multiplayer that will be implemented will be player created mods

Fate

Thanks for the headsup, I saw several videos about the game- which hooked me onto the game. But before I go out of my way to get it, I wanted a review by a person and not a marketted website before getting fully interested. So thanks.

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Dragonlich

I've been playing this game non-stop for the past few weeks. It is incredibly entertaining, even if there are a few problems.

The best part is the fact that you actually *want* to play the game again after winning; I played a fighter-type vampire the first time, and am now playing as a Malkavian girl. It is so incredibly funny to see the dialog go from normal talk to complete insanity for the Malkavians... (And yes, I play a girl. I like looking at that extremely fine piece of digital arse.)

Another good thing is that you can finish the game in many different ways, the guns-blazing shoot-everything way, the same killing spree with swords, a sneaky back-stabbing way, a talk-myself-out-of-everything way... Or a combination of these. None of these methods is necessarily better, but they lead to different reactions.

The bad things:
- No matter how long it is (took me a week to finish), you still want more; I can't wait for an expansion pack...
- There are some obvious spelling errors in the dialogue. Furthermore, sometimes there's an assumption you're playing a male character, even if you're playing as a girl.
- Some of the missions are nigh impossible to get, due to some bad scripting. As in: if you don't follow these exact steps, you won't be able to get that series of missions. This goes back to my first point - you want more!
- There are some clear bugs which make it pretty much impossible to finish the game without "cheating". <b>(SPOILER!!!)</b> There is one mission where you have to escape an explosion with a boat. This action then leads to a crash. The cause is bad scripting, where the computer expects a character to be somewhere it isn't. There's a patch, though...

As for the crashes: apart from that crash with the boat, I haven't had a problem at all. The game does suffer from speed problems at times, especially when you've just entered a new area (still loading). All of that is forgiven when you look at the environments and characters in them... it's gorgeous (and so are the women).

CyCo PL

The system requirements are pretty high on this game... My comp runs HL2 extremely well on high settings, but it stutters pretty badly when playing Vampire. Nonetheless, it's a great game. I would recommend playing as Malkavian just to see the weird dialogue responses.

Arc101

Good game - But it has lots of bugs. Also you need a high end system for it to run smoothly.

FngKestrel

It's built off of the half-life 2 engine, which has some tremendously long load times. One of my friends complained that it has to load entering and exiting buildings. Do you guys have any issue with that?

Eight

I keep looking at this wondering if I should get it or not.

Still cant make up my mind. Its looks good but the rumors about it being buggy as hell along with the load times put me off a bit.

portwineboy

I had very long load times while playing it and lots of them...supposedly the recent patch fixed a lot of the bugs.

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Dragonlich

Yes, there's a lot of loading, and it takes a long time to do so (less if you have a lot of memory, I assume). You indeed have to load upon entering/leaving most buildings, but the loading times for buildings are generally (relatively) short.

IMO, the bugs aren't as bad as some people claim. It's not more buggy than many other games I've played (Morrowind was worse, for example). There are some really annoying bugs, but the recent update apparently fixed many of them. Apart from that boat thing crashing the game, I have yet to find a bug that ruins the game.

As for buying it... I dunno; I enjoy the game, but it depends on the price, and how much you enjoy this type of game.

Homey_V

Im rather pleased with the game. I've been playing it off and on the past few days when I have time and so far the storyline is excellent and the game seems to flow quite smoothly. Overall a very nice RPG to play with good flexibility and a great use of the World of Darkness License.

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charlesesl

It is made by Toika, and they are known for making overly ambicous games with bad graphics and tons of bugs.

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Dragonlich

Luckily they didn't do that this time then, eh?

Okay, tell you what... you go find <a href="http://www.gamebanshee.com/showshot.php?/vampirebloodlines/walkthrough/images/screenshot111.jpg">Velvet Velour</a> in the game, take a good, long look at her, and then we'll see if you still think the graphics are bad. :P

Bauer_Power

I played the first one way back and I loved it. I can only anticipate good things from this. I got to stay true to my Brujah roots, just to see if Cris is in this game.

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CyCo PL

It's really nothing like Vampire:Redemption, I'd compare it more to morrowind, except a more linear story because you're trapped inside of small areas instead of having a whole world to explore. I would recommend this game to anybody who likes computer style rpg's though, and has a high end system.

I am running
AMD Athlon XP 2500
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
1024mb pc3200 ddr ram

and the game stutters badly all the time. I ended up turning the resolution way down and the graphics detail down just to get resonable framerate... I am a frames per second junkie, I get really frustrated if the game skips frames, and this game skips a ton of frames (at least on my system). So just beware of that...

Arc101

The constant loading times when entering and leaving buildings annoyed me, and it seems all the women have had boob jobs. However, I did find it addictive and I did complete it. One point to mention is there is about 4 or 5 different endings which is quite good - and not all the endings are beneficial to you. It is a very good game, but it could have been a great game if they spent a bit more time on it. I would advise buying it, it is worth the money.

ecomdan

Anybody here notice a problem with the textures getting corrupted? I seem to notice a lot of the characters faces turn totally black and wall textures sometimes don't display correctly... even the texture on my characters is a little messed up... tried the patch and updated my vid drivers but still get the same problem.

I'm running on:

3.06 GHz P4 w/HT
1024 MB RAM
128 MB ATi Radeon Mobility 9600 (using Igor Pavlov's Driver from Omega Drivers)
Sound Blaster Extigy

I had a similar problem with Sims 2 (i didn't buy it it was given to me so i tried it out) where the characters were similarly messed up... but a quick change to the texture quality option fixed that right up, although the issue would still occur if I used the body shop feature outside of the game.

Pacifier

Yes, it has a very high "replay" factor. I also played it first as a Brujah, very specialised at close combat (with his Fireaxe )

Now I play a Malk Girl (very fine digital ass ) and use seduction an vision of death mostly. This time I aim for the anarch ending.

and after that....we will see, tremere perhaps

There is a official patch and a inofficial patch that both solve this Problem.

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omega2K4

I loved the game, and the load times weren't bad for me (15-20 seconds). 3.4GHz P4 w/ HT, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 256MB GeForce 6800GT. You could increase your swap file size, and sometimes it can increase performance.

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Homey_V

The source Engine is a horrible RAM hog. The more you have, the better it runs.

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-=shikamaru=-

I just got off playing. This is really a great game, even with the bugs. Get the 1.2 patch and the game as soon as you can, it really is worth it

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akito

It uses the Source engine, same engine used on Half-Life 2. That automatically means it's a badass game. I haven't picked it up yet, but intend to this weekend.

Martel

God, this game takes for-EVER to load for me. I really like it, stylistically, playwise, graphics, everything, but I swear when I try to play it I spend more time loading than playing.

SO FRUSTRATING!

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DukeNukem4ever

Sounds like it's time for:
Athlon 64 CPU
Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive
Any New GeForce Ultra Video Card
&
A Boat Load of RAM

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DukeNukem4ever

Look for the GOTY Edition... as it has all three in one box:
The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind
BloodMoon
Tribunal

I got mine at CompUSA for $19.99 about 6 months ago.

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Martel

yeah, i have a laptop with a p4 3ghz, geforcefx go5200, 512mb of ram

i woulda thought that should be enough, but i guess not :/

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DukeNukem4ever

That's a pretty good rig you've got... I'd drop another 512 stick in it just for shits and giggles and cause ram is cheap. Check out http://www.4allmemory.com
I've upgraded the ram in several laptops from that place.
Remember WindowsXP uses roughly 230MB of actual ram... so when you start up MW you run out... and then your running off of virtual ram (empty hard drive space).
You should notice a little better game play.
It's to bad they put an FX series graphics chip in it... it's the budget series chip. The LE is the next step up and then the Ultra chip.
But as is your setup should run MOST games out today.

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bookerV

The more I've been looking into it, the more I want to play it. I think after I finish Battle for Middle Earth I will give this game a go. Despite it's flaws it sounds super fun...

I'm lost here. What does Morrowind have to do with this game??

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Martel

Unfortunately they cheaped out at the factory and put in two 256 pieces instead of a 512, so swapping one out for a 512 would only be an upgrade of 256 and then I'd have another 256 lying around with nothing to do with it. When I first got this one I was excited and popped the back open because I had an extra 256 I figured I could put in, but unfortunately not...

Ah well.

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Keist

I'm on my 3rd play through now.
Hahaha, this last time I went from 512 ram to a Gig, and load times have noticable decreased. w00t. I guess ram was my limiting factor!

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