Am I the only one who really didn't like Nines? The guy always struck me as being just a slightly different flavor of condecending prick from the prince.
I played through as a Malk when I first bought the game almost two years ago and I just recently restarted as a Tremere. I'm shocked at what a different experience it is.
Unfortunately, I never finished my first playthrough because I couldn't kill Ming Xiao (firearms aren't nearly as effective as I wish they were, but they're so much more awesome than melee) and then my laptop with my save files got fried.
Xaev on
Steam - Lysus || XBL - Veax || PSN - Lysus || WoW - Lysus (Korgath - US) || Guild Wars - Lysus Yjirkar || Starcraft II - Lysus.781 || League of Legends - Lysus Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
0
kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
edited July 2009
i lived for about 4 years in santa monica. it's weird seeing their design of it. it's definately more noirish. but i wish they were a little more true to LA - or got the feel of downtown or other places down more. they're actually more depressing. downtown is actually devoid of foot traffic at night, pretty much, besides the vagrants.
a game that's true to the city it's set in is actually pretty rare, aside from including local landmarks. I mean, "hollywood" didn't feel very distinctive to me at all; just a couple clubs and a hotel and a convenience store?
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I played through as a Malk when I first bought the game almost two years ago and I just recently restarted as a Tremere. I'm shocked at what a different experience it is.
Unfortunately, I never finished my first playthrough because I couldn't kill Ming Xiao (firearms aren't nearly as effective as I wish they were, but they're so much more awesome than melee) and then my laptop with my save files got fried.
I found firearms to be so much more effective than anything else, as long as you pump up your skill. By endgame, nothing could survive blood purge -> empty weapon, with any of the fancy endgame guns.
then decided to install the fan patch and start over because histories and shit looked rad
aaaaaand the fan patch made it so you can't go up in the elevator to take to jeanette
which basically stopped the main quest
so
the fan patch pretty much broke the whole game for me
so fuck it
I had that problem briefly. Reloading fixed it.
How can a person not play these games with noclip at the ready?
I've never used noclip to get unstuck from stuff in this game, because I've never been stuck in things with just the official patch yet. The first time I used it was to skip the Warrens after my first two playthroughs and now on every subsequent one, because fuck that shit.
As far as the shit-storm goes in the previous thread.
If the cab driver is a Malkavian who is convinced that he's Caine, then you, as a Malkavian, will believe he is Caine, because of your shared insanity.
Huh, you know I never noticed you could knock down a water tower thing at the Sabbat warehouse by shooting the gas can. I have no idea why you would do such a thing.
I also never noticed that in the abandoned building you start in there's a dresser with drawers you can open, but there is nothing in them. I think there's only that one dresser in the entire game that does that. It might be the only dresser in all of Source that does that.
I think those two gas cans are like the only shootable explosives in the entire game. So weird.
Am I the only one who really didn't like Nines? The guy always struck me as being just a slightly different flavor of condecending prick from the prince.
I don't know that I found him condescending, but I don't think I liked him nearly as much as the writers wanted me to. They push him hard as this cool and aloof badass type, especially in your first meeting, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like I was being rescued by Elminster with fangs. Talking to him in the Last Round made him a bit more likeable for me.
In general though, I just didn't gel with the anarchs. The more pragmatic ones, like Jack and Skelter, I'm cool with. The crusader/idealist types, less so. Nines seemed stuck in the thirties, looking at the world from the murky bottom of the depression and seeing everything through that Grapes of Wrath-colored lens. He kind of has a point - as it turns out, there really are titanic forces beyond our understanding and control, and we really are at the mercy of them. They just happen to be elder kindred, not the company store. But I had the feeling that he was stuck in that Nines vs. The Man mindset no matter what the actual circumstances around him, that he'd always be very much a product of the time of his embrace.
As for Damsel, I was digging her whole spitfire thing up until she started opining and philosophizing. Her bit about how communism could actually work for vampires was supremely goofy. Couldn't take her at all seriously after that, even though she could probably kick my ass. One of the reasons I took to Skelter was his dismissal of Damsel as the "college girl".
It made the unaligned ending so perfect for me. Here he is, grovelling for me to join the Anarchs because I've proven myself to be so awesome. I don't even look at him. All he gets is me flipping the bird as I push past him and his Brujah thugs, off into the uncertain night.
Am I the only one who really didn't like Nines? The guy always struck me as being just a slightly different flavor of condecending prick from the prince.
I got a similar vibe from him, it was like he really wanted to be a down to earth man-of-the-people style dude, but couldn't get over being a bit of a smug self-satisfied douchebag.
"The fan patch broke one game so never use it" makes about as much sense as "Tube's game just broke because he didn't use the fan patch so use it."
My game breaking had nothing to do with that though. The bug I got isn't fixed by the fan patch, and reinstalling and copying my saves fixed it. There are plenty of other good reasons not to use the fan patch, such as the fact that it's fucking stupid. There was recently a discussion on the fan patch forum thread as to whether or not the reference to "rockerfeller" in the money description should be changed because "that's when you have like 5000 dollars and rockerfeller is much richer than that".
Am I the only one who really didn't like Nines? The guy always struck me as being just a slightly different flavor of condecending prick from the prince.
I don't know that I found him condescending, but I don't think I liked him nearly as much as the writers wanted me to. They push him hard as this cool and aloof badass type, especially in your first meeting, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like I was being rescued by Elminster with fangs. Talking to him in the Last Round made him a bit more likeable for me.
In general though, I just didn't gel with the anarchs. The more pragmatic ones, like Jack and Skelter, I'm cool with. The crusader/idealist types, less so. Nines seemed stuck in the thirties, looking at the world from the murky bottom of the depression and seeing everything through that Grapes of Wrath-colored lens. He kind of has a point - as it turns out, there really are titanic forces beyond our understanding and control, and we really are at the mercy of them. They just happen to be elder kindred, not the company store. But I had the feeling that he was stuck in that Nines vs. The Man mindset no matter what the actual circumstances around him, that he'd always be very much a product of the time of his embrace.
As for Damsel, I was digging her whole spitfire thing up until she started opining and philosophizing. Her bit about how communism could actually work for vampires was supremely goofy. Couldn't take her at all seriously after that, even though she could probably kick my ass. One of the reasons I took to Skelter was his dismissal of Damsel as the "college girl".
The writers didn't "want" you to like Nines. The way he came off to you is how he was written. You could come out of the last round thinking "Those Anarchs are awesome! Down with the man!" or you could come out thinking "Nines is naive, Damsel is an idiot and Skelter is a conspiracy theorist (who turns out to be riiiiiight)". The anarchs are more sympathetic than LaCroix certainly, but they aren't the "right" option any more than Strauss is. Nines is perhaps more likeable than most characters because he saves your life, twice, but the game still portrays his struggle as somewhat naive and gives you the option to tell him such. Note that he's not on Rosa's list of people you can trust.
for the most part, he didnt screw you over. He was pretty straight up with you, and answered the questions you asked. A bit closeminded, yes, but hes one of the few people in the game who didnt try to kill you. So thats a plus. However, siding with him had a crappy ending. So... screw him, I guess.
As far as Nines goes I always liked him. A lot of the way he treats you early on has to do with your clan. If you're a Brujah or a gangrel, for instance, he warms to you much more quickly (his dialogue during your first meeting is different, I know, and I think it's easier to get through his early dialogues in the Last Round without pissing him off if you play as one of those clans). If you're a Ventrue or a Toreador he seems to think you're already a Camarilla patsy and is kind of a dickbag ("Watch your ass, newbie, this ain't the suburbs").
Personally I always liked the Anarchs in general. If you don't let Damsel piss you off and keep your responses to her civil, she quits screaming at you and is much easier to tolerate (although she's still one of the more obnoxious characters in the game). The same goes for Skelter - don't get in a big-dick contest with him and he warms up to you as well. And of course I couldn't help but like Jack - yeah, he's manipulating you through the whole game, but he's such a badass while he does it you can't help but respect him a little bit.
Jack seems to be a fairly standup guy if he respects you - he obviously tipped Beckett off about what was in the Sarcophagus, presumably because Jack just liked/respected Beckett and didn't want him dead because of some bullshit conflict between the Camarilla and the Anarchs.
And no, he doesn't extend this courtesy to you, but let's be fair, you're a very young vampire he barely knows that's had somebody wanting them dead since the night you got vamped. Jack's several hundred years old, so I'd say it takes a lot more than what you've done over the course of six months or so to earn his respect. Plus, unlike LaCroix, Jack really only manipulates you if you let him do it, going to the Last Round and asking him for advice, and most of the shit he tells you while manipulating you (such as that LaCroix wants the Sarcophagus for diablerie purposes) turn out to be right anyway.
Nines did strike me as a little naive and his "fight the power" shtick got tiresome really quickly. But the bottom line for me, when it comes to the ending, is usually this. Nines saved my life twice, while nobody else in the game ever lifted the finger to help me. I owe him one. Also, by the end of the game I've made enemies of a lot of dangerous people - the Giovanni, Kuei-Jin and the Sabbat - and if I'm going to live very long after the end of the game I'm going to need some allies, even if they are a little obnoxious or naive.
For what it's worth, though, my actual sympathies lie more with guys like Strauss and Bertram. They seemed to have a much more realistic outlook toward how to run undead society and the WoD doesn't seem to be a place kind to idealism. But I have a hard time liking or supporting the Camarilla when my introduction to them was nearly my own execution for something I couldn't even help.
It's actually, as far as I know, impossible to get the free training from Nines without saying a couple of things that will kind of piss him off.
Part of that was because you just had poor dialogue choices in your first real dialogue tree with Nines. Most of the time the PC's dialogue was pretty good and gave you lots of options (and was even, occasionally, hilarious; one of my favorite lines was when Therese is forcing you to deal with her ghost problem and you can tell her that you're "Sick of this Halloween bullshit").
When you're dealing with Nines, though, for some reason the game makes you say some really dumb shit that anybody with common sense would know not to say. I know I was a young vampire, and OOC I knew nothing about the WoD before I played through Bloodlines, but I'd already figured out that Nines wasn't exactly a "prince" and was more of an informal leader, and obviously wouldn't take kindly to being called one. But the game makes you do it anyway, even if you're trying to be as open-minded and polite as possible.
The only free training I can remember is asking about the history of LA (he gives you an unarmed point for that IIRC), which I didn't think pissed him off too much. I know there's the option to get a firearm point from him later in the game but I can't remember what brings that one up at all.
I played through recently as a Tremere, and he mentions thinking that Lacroix is young and foolish, but doesn't seem to have much scheming going on. Then, when I was playing as a Malkavian I keep calling Prince the 'Jester' and Strauss the 'Mage-King' or something. Am I to believe that Strauss is the power behing Lacroix, and that Lacroix is being somehow manipulated all along? Is this gone into in any more depth later on? I've never noticed Strauss having much to do with anything.
Also, I really like VV.
When the others manipulate you, it's always pretty obvious that they're manipulating the character, not the player, but VV seems like a conscious effort to subvert that by trying to convince the player to help her out. A nice little touch, I thought.
I played through recently as a Tremere, and he mentions thinking that Lacroix is young and foolish, but doesn't seem to have much scheming going on. Then, when I was playing as a Malkavian I keep calling Prince the 'Jester' and Strauss the 'Mage-King' or something. Am I to believe that Strauss is the power behing Lacroix, and that Lacroix is being somehow manipulated all along? Is this gone into in any more depth later on? I've never noticed Strauss having much to do with anything.
I'm only speculating here, but...
Strauss isn't the power behind LaCroix. He is primarily devoted to the LA Tremere or, if you feel like being generous, the LA Camarilla. LaCroix can stay (or perhaps is merely tolerated) so long as he doesn't do anything foolish, but once the guy goes off the deep end, Strauss is quick to move against him.
So... Strauss isn't pulling LaCroix's strings any more than any other Primogen might (well... maybe more than Grout), but he does have far more independent power and influence than he lets on. After all, if you side with him in the end, he takes the position of Prince with such confidence that he probably expects the rest of the Primogen won't oppose this promotion he just gave himself.
It's just that when you see him as a Malk, you say something about him wearing a crown, and he agrees but says that maybe you shouldn't tell other people about it. I don't know, but maybe it means he thinks of himself as the Prince, and he doesn't want you running around telling everyone his ambitions.
I'm not sure if this is part of the fan patch or not, but you can get some extra dialogue out of Jack at the start of the game
It's the first game I remember telling me off for cheating
The only reason I'm not sure if it's fan patch or not, is because last time I played the game I must've done the cheats after the tutorial.
Makes me wonder if there's any other stuff in this game I've missed
(Oh and it's from giving yourself max stats, just doing giftxp doesn't trigger it)
Im thinking its meant that, even if its not offical, Strauss really does have more power. If you take the ending with him, he basically has a camarilla hitsquad with him waiting to pick off LaCroix. He shuts his mouth, and gets things done. Whereas the jester prince yells and screams, and things still suck for him
I'm not sure if this is part of the fan patch or not, but you can get some extra dialogue out of Jack at the start of the game
It's the first game I remember telling me off for cheating
The only reason I'm not sure if it's fan patch or not, is because last time I played the game I must've done the cheats after the tutorial.
Makes me wonder if there's any other stuff in this game I've missed
(Oh and it's from giving yourself max stats, just doing giftxp doesn't trigger it)
Awesome isn't it? It's in the vanilla version I believe
I wish there was some way to get more info on the Sheriff. Or diablerize him.
He's an African Vampire, most likely a Nagloper; they're essentially African Tzimisce. As for why he's LaCroix's bitch, it's likely that LaCroix has forced a blood bond on the Sheriff somehow.
Posts
Am I the only one who really didn't like Nines? The guy always struck me as being just a slightly different flavor of condecending prick from the prince.
Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I found firearms to be so much more effective than anything else, as long as you pump up your skill. By endgame, nothing could survive blood purge -> empty weapon, with any of the fancy endgame guns.
How can a person not play these games with noclip at the ready?
I've never used noclip to get unstuck from stuff in this game, because I've never been stuck in things with just the official patch yet. The first time I used it was to skip the Warrens after my first two playthroughs and now on every subsequent one, because fuck that shit.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
"The fan patch broke one game so never use it" makes about as much sense as "Tube's game just broke because he didn't use the fan patch so use it."
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
It's worse than that. I had it bug out so that all I see is a pair of ears at groin level, with the wolf head bobbing back and forth.
I also never noticed that in the abandoned building you start in there's a dresser with drawers you can open, but there is nothing in them. I think there's only that one dresser in the entire game that does that. It might be the only dresser in all of Source that does that.
I think those two gas cans are like the only shootable explosives in the entire game. So weird.
I don't know that I found him condescending, but I don't think I liked him nearly as much as the writers wanted me to. They push him hard as this cool and aloof badass type, especially in your first meeting, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like I was being rescued by Elminster with fangs. Talking to him in the Last Round made him a bit more likeable for me.
In general though, I just didn't gel with the anarchs. The more pragmatic ones, like Jack and Skelter, I'm cool with. The crusader/idealist types, less so. Nines seemed stuck in the thirties, looking at the world from the murky bottom of the depression and seeing everything through that Grapes of Wrath-colored lens. He kind of has a point - as it turns out, there really are titanic forces beyond our understanding and control, and we really are at the mercy of them. They just happen to be elder kindred, not the company store. But I had the feeling that he was stuck in that Nines vs. The Man mindset no matter what the actual circumstances around him, that he'd always be very much a product of the time of his embrace.
As for Damsel, I was digging her whole spitfire thing up until she started opining and philosophizing. Her bit about how communism could actually work for vampires was supremely goofy. Couldn't take her at all seriously after that, even though she could probably kick my ass. One of the reasons I took to Skelter was his dismissal of Damsel as the "college girl".
I got a similar vibe from him, it was like he really wanted to be a down to earth man-of-the-people style dude, but couldn't get over being a bit of a smug self-satisfied douchebag.
My game breaking had nothing to do with that though. The bug I got isn't fixed by the fan patch, and reinstalling and copying my saves fixed it. There are plenty of other good reasons not to use the fan patch, such as the fact that it's fucking stupid. There was recently a discussion on the fan patch forum thread as to whether or not the reference to "rockerfeller" in the money description should be changed because "that's when you have like 5000 dollars and rockerfeller is much richer than that".
Buncha fucking rocket scientists.
The writers didn't "want" you to like Nines. The way he came off to you is how he was written. You could come out of the last round thinking "Those Anarchs are awesome! Down with the man!" or you could come out thinking "Nines is naive, Damsel is an idiot and Skelter is a conspiracy theorist (who turns out to be riiiiiight)". The anarchs are more sympathetic than LaCroix certainly, but they aren't the "right" option any more than Strauss is. Nines is perhaps more likeable than most characters because he saves your life, twice, but the game still portrays his struggle as somewhat naive and gives you the option to tell him such. Note that he's not on Rosa's list of people you can trust.
Your logic is unassailable, not to mention fucking stupid.
Also Fallout New Vegas. And Mass Effect 2.
Which patch is the one that switches some of the item rewards/locations around? I seem to remember that one making (at least some) sense.
Also, is it possible to get a rundown of the official and unofficial patches, and what they do?
Personally I always liked the Anarchs in general. If you don't let Damsel piss you off and keep your responses to her civil, she quits screaming at you and is much easier to tolerate (although she's still one of the more obnoxious characters in the game). The same goes for Skelter - don't get in a big-dick contest with him and he warms up to you as well. And of course I couldn't help but like Jack - yeah, he's manipulating you through the whole game, but he's such a badass while he does it you can't help but respect him a little bit.
And no, he doesn't extend this courtesy to you, but let's be fair, you're a very young vampire he barely knows that's had somebody wanting them dead since the night you got vamped. Jack's several hundred years old, so I'd say it takes a lot more than what you've done over the course of six months or so to earn his respect. Plus, unlike LaCroix, Jack really only manipulates you if you let him do it, going to the Last Round and asking him for advice, and most of the shit he tells you while manipulating you (such as that LaCroix wants the Sarcophagus for diablerie purposes) turn out to be right anyway.
Nines did strike me as a little naive and his "fight the power" shtick got tiresome really quickly. But the bottom line for me, when it comes to the ending, is usually this. Nines saved my life twice, while nobody else in the game ever lifted the finger to help me. I owe him one. Also, by the end of the game I've made enemies of a lot of dangerous people - the Giovanni, Kuei-Jin and the Sabbat - and if I'm going to live very long after the end of the game I'm going to need some allies, even if they are a little obnoxious or naive.
For what it's worth, though, my actual sympathies lie more with guys like Strauss and Bertram. They seemed to have a much more realistic outlook toward how to run undead society and the WoD doesn't seem to be a place kind to idealism. But I have a hard time liking or supporting the Camarilla when my introduction to them was nearly my own execution for something I couldn't even help.
When you're dealing with Nines, though, for some reason the game makes you say some really dumb shit that anybody with common sense would know not to say. I know I was a young vampire, and OOC I knew nothing about the WoD before I played through Bloodlines, but I'd already figured out that Nines wasn't exactly a "prince" and was more of an informal leader, and obviously wouldn't take kindly to being called one. But the game makes you do it anyway, even if you're trying to be as open-minded and polite as possible.
The only free training I can remember is asking about the history of LA (he gives you an unarmed point for that IIRC), which I didn't think pissed him off too much. I know there's the option to get a firearm point from him later in the game but I can't remember what brings that one up at all.
Also, I really like VV.
So... Strauss isn't pulling LaCroix's strings any more than any other Primogen might (well... maybe more than Grout), but he does have far more independent power and influence than he lets on. After all, if you side with him in the end, he takes the position of Prince with such confidence that he probably expects the rest of the Primogen won't oppose this promotion he just gave himself.
It's the first game I remember telling me off for cheating
The only reason I'm not sure if it's fan patch or not, is because last time I played the game I must've done the cheats after the tutorial.
Makes me wonder if there's any other stuff in this game I've missed
(Oh and it's from giving yourself max stats, just doing giftxp doesn't trigger it)
Awesome isn't it? It's in the vanilla version I believe
That's about all we really know.
I did my first playthough years ago as a Malkav, but I'll be damned if that isn't what I want to do again.
Are there any other interesting builds that might be fun, or a off the wall malkav build?