Since the earliest days of human lore, the vampire has terrorized the night. Most of us are familiar with the Eastern European version, Count Dracula. The familiar vampire transforms into bats, lives the life of the aristocrat, fears sunlight, fire, silver, wooden stakes, and holy relics. They do not fear humanity, and in the case of literature like Dracula, even openly flaunt their position as a vampire. They require blood to survive and if you’re bitten, you become one. You’re in luck, though; just kill the guy who made you a vampire and you’re free.
While the above vampire lore is interesting, it is nowhere near believable. If vampires did exist, would they actively flaunt their existence? How long would they exist in a world of flamethrowers and phosphorous rounds? White Wolf took the entire concept of the vampire and turned it on its head.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines takes place in White Wolf’s World of Darkness. Vampires exist, but they have to carefully hide their existence from humanity at large because if they were discovered, the vampire species would quickly go extinct. Other rules of vampirism have changed as well. While sunlight and fire still pose a giant problem, holy relics don’t do jack and stakes only paralyze the vampire if caught in the heart.
Even the creation of new vampires is drastically changed. The thinking was that, if simply biting someone made them a vampire, it would quickly reduce the human population, either through over population of vampires or simply killing too many humans. Vampires in the WoD are treated like an exclusive club. They have to be consciously made. Further, they feed on blood and their victims may never even know it happened. The result is a true vampire culture and society that is very close to being believable.
The whole thing would make a great video game, and Activision saw that. Handing Troika the keys to the Vampmobile, they drove off in an effort to bring the world of politics, backstabbing, and bloodsucking that is law school…I mean, the World of Darkness, to virtual unlife.
The biggest hurdle in creating a Vampire the Masquerade game is trying to turn a pen and paper RPG that focuses on power plays and politics into something entertaining to play on your computer monitor. That is a difficult line to tread indeed. Adventure games, which a vampire game would best follow, don’t sell well and won’t do too well in combat. A pure combat title would dilute the intrigue of the vampire world.
Activision settled on the Source engine to run the game. It is better known as that engine that runs Half-Life 2. Troika also chose to move the slider, to my enjoyment, further toward that adventure game end of the spectrum.
The game runs like a first/third person shooter (depending on what camera view you use). Controls are generally what you’d expect. WASD controls movements, the mouse looks around, and the left mouse button attacks. The adjustment comes in the form of your vampiric powers; the right mouse button activates them while the mouse wheel cycles through them. Weapon selection is a bit of a pain, as it requires the use of the function keys (F1 for melee, F2 for ranged). The actual combat model, however, is very simplistic: Just point and click. When it comes to firearms, that part is just fine, but the melee portion of the game, which happens to be the best way to take down enemies, is lacking. You get, at most, a three hit combo, and melee combat involves just clicking really fast. There isn’t any hit direction to deal with; aim up or down, and the attack is the same. This basically makes attacking enemies, like zombies that need to be killed via a head shot, a random event.
The powers are what make the game a bit more interesting. Each vampire clan has its own set of powers to use, many of which are quite fun. For example, the Ventrue dominate skill makes people do things that you want them to do and the Malkavians can use dementation to cause people to go crazy. They also range into combat. Celerity is a fun one, but it is a bit too difficult to control. Each power has its own unique use, and none are skimped on, so they all have value in or out of combat. Unfortunately, even most of these are little more than extensions to the already simplistic combat system. Potence only adds some strength and Auspex makes guns easier to handle, but doesn’t improve on anything.
The meat of the game comes in on the adventure end. Bloodlines is story driven, so it is easier to forgive the dull fighting system. The story unfolds through dialogue with other characters. Your decisions, humanity level, and even clan can change over the course of the game, as well as what dialogue is available to you.
The story is very interesting; backstabbing, political maneuvering, and a really old guy are all waiting for you. The story has multiple arcs to it. Because of such, you can play through multiple times without it getting dull. The Nosferatu and Malkavian are very fun to play though. The first scares the pants off everyone and the second is just so insane he is funny.
The sound content is a bit strange. On one hand, the voices are absolutely incredible. The voice production is easily in the top five of all video gaming. The actors show a wide range of talent in VtM. The credits showed actors voicing wildly different characters and still keeping the high quality. Unfortunately, the other sounds aren’t too exciting. Combat effects are terribly weak and there is a minimalism to the environmental effects. There are even little quirks. For example, on a hard surface, the walk and the run sounds are identical, which feels half-assed.
The musical score is abysmal. It is mostly a grouping of rave music and Goth stuff. While that makes sense in a traditional vampire fare, VtM has a wide variety of vampire culture; not all the undead are depressed and anti-social death lovers. Maybe adding in other songs, ranging from classical to more contemporary pieces would have helped a bit. A good range of classical pieces would be Bach’s organ works, such as Fugue for Organ in G Minor. They could have even bit the bullet and licensed a few songs, like AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells, to add a bit of spice, yet stick within the theme of the game.
Visually, well, this is going to be a hard one. Since the game is based on the Source engine, the graphical and physical potential is huge. The environments are highly detailed and very easy on the eyes. Because the game takes place purely at night, the lighting effects abound and Troika made sure they were spectacular. Every object casts soft shadows in relation to light sources and Troika even did a very good job of depicting shadowing from multiple light sources. Environment effects like shining, reflections, and water effects are among the best in class, with only FarCry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 beating VtM out in this regard.
Up close and personal, the visuals are very sharp and detailed. Conversation takes place in first person mode right up against the face. The eyes have a shine and aren’t dead like most other games up to this point. The facial detail is impressive and when the characters talk, they lip-synch almost perfectly. Combat effects are decent as well. Fire is impressive and beautiful, but there are a few quirks in combat. The most obvious is that many gunfire flashes don’t originate at the muzzle but somewhere in the middle of the gun.
Unfortunately, the engine is bugged to hell. First, the camera sucks. It frequently gets stuck in things or randomly switches between third and first person modes and just sticks like that. Also, the physics engine is a bit wonky. Gravity and hit detection work well, but there is an issue with weights and character strength. It was clear the game was not designed with vampires at strength level five because certain actions, like throwing, just won’t work very well. A thrown object will seem to defy gravity and travel in a straight line. Also, the concept of weight is off. A character can toss a trashcan down three city blocks, can toss bodies around like pillows, but a tuna can is only able to travel five feet and a camera on a tripod will move two with great effort.
Opening the console (where errors are recorded while playing the game), it is quite apparent that the game did not go through any serious quality control. It is quite common to enter a level and have the game unable to load up light maps, character sounds, and other effects because the game can’t load something, or else the file is just plain missing. The game was clearly tossed out the door unfinished.
The most glaring error, though, is the disgusting performance. The game simply will not run on any reasonable level with less than a full gigabyte of RAM. My PC listed at the bottom has major issues running the title at full quality. The performance issues are highly perplexing because games like Half-Life 2 and FarCry look much better, have larger environments, and yet don’t suffer from this pitiful performance. This game stutters to hell on my machine, while I can run Half-Life 2 with antistrophic filtering and 4X FSAA without a single slow-down. The graphics look nice, but the piss-poor performance cost the graphics score a good three points.
The loading and level designs are also abysmal. The game takes a long time to load between areas. Some of them simply do not make sense. For example, in Santa Monica, there are around 11 buildings you can go into. Each of them is a small area connected to the main Santa Monica strip. The issue is the developers could have simply just tied all these areas into the main level as one large level and probably not had any further performance issues while cutting down on the lost time due to loading.
From various sources, it would appear that Activision simply refused to let Troika master the final code and get everything working smoothly. That is simply unacceptable when releasing what is otherwise a very good title.
Ultimately, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines had a lot of potential to be of game of the year caliber. It had the best story in a game in a long time and an incredible voice acting effort. Unfortunately, the worst engine coding I’ve seen in a long time, along with simple quality control issues, bog it down. I’d suggest holding out until all these problems are patched. Otherwise, this is a game that is worth playing through three or four times consecutively. It’s just a shame it is such a technical mess.
PC Specs:
AMD64 3500+ Winchester, GeForce 6800GT, 1 Gig RAM
