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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines | Team Jacob and Team Edward Eaten by Tzimisces
TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
What is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (V:TM-B)?
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is the 2004 action RPG made by Troika games, which, before it went out of business, shat out gold bricks encased in software bugs. V:TM - B uses the Source engine and takes place in White Wolf's Old World of Darkness (oWoD) which is just like our world except dark. And monsters exist! Like vampires.
This sucks (NO PUN INTENDED) for almost everyone, even the vampires sort of, but in V:TM - B you're a vampire and you get to use your superhuman vampire powers to try to figure out what the hell is going on after you wake up one day and find out that you've been turned into a creature of the night. Set in Los Angeles, you get to visit places like Santa Monica and Hollywood, interact with interesting, well-written and awesomely-voiced characters, and sink your teeth (NO PUN INTENDED) into the awesome story and the excitement of being immortal.
The gameplay is a lot like Deus Ex: you're more or less free to explore the various hubs, picking up side quests and exploring areas and doing missions for people, but the main quest moves you along a more or less linear path (although you have tons of choices along the way). The plot deals with a sarcophogoausous (that might not be the correct spelling) and vampire politics and vampire ninjas and weresharks and werewolves and lesbians and ghosts and all sorts of amazing things, and the facial animation will suck you in (NO PUN INTENDED) to the one of the most detailed, well-written games in forever.
How do I play?
Step one: Buy the game! Steam has it and it's fully compatible with the fan patches (more on that later). You could wait until Halloween when it customarily goes on sale but honestly it's one of the best games ever made so buying it now isn't a bad idea.
Steam will patch it but otherwise you'll desperately need the 1.2 patch. It's included in the unofficial patches though, which you should probably grab unless you're Cardboard Tube.
The World of Darkness is a dangerous place, even for vampires, and it's even more dangerous when it crashes all the time. Because this is a Troika game, it's buggy, and because Troika went out of business, it stayed buggy even after 1.2. This is where the fan patches come in. It's possible to play more or less without them, but you have a chance of running into a crash bug that will end your game or some crap like that, so really, why bother unless you're Cardboard Tube or a masochist (these coincide)?
This is the place to pick up the latest patch.
To make a long, tedius, emo-goth-nerdrage-sexually-repressed-internet-dork-developer-intent-penandpaper-balance debate short, you basically just want to download the latest patch by Wesp and install it. When asked, go for the bugfix install, not the "Plus" install, which changes a bunch of stuff that you can bother with on your 4th time through or whatever.
Are you sure I should buy this?
Yeah you should definitely get the game. Here are some of the people you'll meet:
Velvet Velour - Velvet is a beautiful woman who only wants to have sex with you. She will never ask you for a favor and would not think of manipulating you.
Ming Xiao - Ming is a beautiful woman who only wants to have sex with you. She is inherently trustworthy and has your best interests at heart.
Heather - Heather is a beautiful mortal woman whose life you can save if you want to. She only wants to have sex with you. Despite your status as an inhuman monster who feeds on the blood of the living to survive, she is grateful that you saved her life and spends most of the game living contentedly under your protection. Life is pretty awesome for her and she doesn't really have many of the problems that other characters in the game do.
Venus - Venus is a beautiful woman who wants to have sex with you. She's a bartender in a club. She's not a very important character in the grand scheme of things but I remember being mesmerized by her breasts in the first footage of this game ever released. Couldn't find a good picture though.
Jeanette and Therese Voerman - Jeanette's the only one who wants to have sex with you but both are beautiful. These two sisters are major players in Santa Monica and they're all business. They've got it together and work together as a well oiled machine. Don't even worry about anything if you take a job from them: just do what they say and there won't be any complications. Do the work, get paid. If only everything were that simple.
Sebastian LaCroix - LaCroix is the "prince" of Los Angeles and, being French, is a beautiful man who only wants to have sex with you. He is so powerful that he has no need to backstab or trick you and spends most of the game helping you out and being your pal.
Calico Jack the Pirate Captain of Yore - Also known as "Jack," his voice actor is the guy who did Bender in Futurama. He's the nicest of all the vampires, even though he doesn't want to have sex with you, and leads you through the tutorial. This is only the first of many times he does something nice for you without ever wanting anything in return. He keeps no secrets from you and is entirely selfless in his dealings with you.
Pretty much everyone you meet is this helpful. I didn't even mention the ghost of a serial killer who guides you through a rickety old hotel so that you don't fall through the stairs and hurt yourself, or the obliging werewolf who protects you when you're all alone in an observatory in the woods! There's even an insane scientist who opens his luxurious mansion to you so that you can be safe from a vampire hunter who wants to kill you with fire. Oh, also:
Pisha - Pisha eats people.
Those Guys are Neat but What About Me?
As I already mentioned, you play as a newly "embraced" vampire. Your sire gets the axe about 2 minutes into the game for breaking the "vampire society before hos" rule or something, and you're left to fend for yourself. Your choice of "clan" drastically changes your play style: a Ventrue will find easy acceptance into vampire society and will be able to manipulate mortals to do their bidding, whereas a Nosferatu will find himself confined to the sewer system so as not to violate the "Masquerade," the set of rules set up by vampires so that people don't figure out wtf is up (otherwise we'd have a mob scene on our hands).
Play as a Brujah and you'll basically get to punch a lot of people, play as a Toreador and make lovey-dovey eyes at stuff and recite bad poetry, or play as a Malkavian and be batshit insane. You will hear newscasters speak secret messages to you and you will have conversations with a stop sign (sample dialog choice). Other choices include vampires who use blood to do magic tricks that kill people and vampires that have dreadlocks.
You can choose to be a melee character or a ranged combat character (the choice is a little more nuanced) but like, say, Deus Ex, the fun isn't from the combat but from the deep, intricate world, the story and characters, and the voice acting, although in this case it's fantastic voice acting instead of hilariously bad.
More Info
- A rather nice Wikipedia page, complete with spoilers
- Fan patch central, in case you missed it
- A nice Let's Play, from Something Awful
- A very nice Let's Play from our very own Aistan
- A Companion Mod so you can have people follow you around. It's apparently fantastically well done, so it might be worth a look once you've played through a couple times
This Wiki has a lot of fun info and we've got some WoD scholars here on the forums. Fun fact: White Wolf, the WoD guys, got bought by the people who made EvE, and now they're making an MMO in the "New World of Darkness (nWoD)" which is similar to oWoD but smells like a new car.
I have a 64 bit OS and V:TM - B doesn't like me
Have I got a link for you!
TychoCelchuuu on
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gl5vdnBE7w
Well, technically two of them.
And I say err on the side of caution: tag spoilers, especially if we're going to get new players in on it.
Otherwise nice.
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
Your thoughts?
Well, maybe not Malkavian. But you can act crazy!
If it's your first run, don't play a Malkavian. Save it for the next one so you can appreciate all the fine print.
On the other hand I got really sick of her obnoxious Toreador bullshit (even when playing as a Toreador). No, honey, you aren't a "dancer", you're a stripper who shakes her tits at rich, fat old men and gets paid a lot of money to do it. This does not make you an artist. I also thought the fact that she thought a pitiful hack like David Hatter was a "creative genius" made me want to laugh my ass off, and I couldn't help but wonder if other Toreadors had such low standards.
Mostly, I came away from it thinking that even bit players who really don't matter in the grand scheme of the game (you could easily miss Vesuvius and never even know it) were more complex and interesting than your average main characters in other games.
Also, her club had one of the better musical pieces in the game (at least one of the better pieces composed specifically for it).
Ha, updated OP is made of even more win :^:
Maybe I could do a delirious-Bruce Lee-hacker-Tremere mofo. That'd be pretty interesting.
The concept art in general is pretty awesome.
My favorites are their Beckett, Nines, and Tremere female PC:
Aisling's boring though.
Yeah, definitely Jeanette, or at least proto-Jeanette. She's on the box art too:
So, about the fan patches you linked. I didn't see any actual download links. I'd click on the (apparent) link to the latest patch, and get a little page with some stuff on it and no links provided under the download location. Any ideas? Is the site just momentarily borked or am I fail?
http://www.planetvampire.com/bloodlines/
It also has the infamous fan patch, so install that one at your own risk.
Download link works for me. Here it is direct.
They're working on Alpha Protocol.
I went back after the fight and she was just standing there. Hardly gamebreaking.
Awesome. It did start working for me after a few more tries, so I guess the site was borked somehow. Thanks the link anyway though.
Now just to download that, and redownload the game off of Steam. My ISP is just going to love me. By love, I mean throttling my bandwidth. I hate my ISP.
link?!
I'm probably tempting fate, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
got up to the end of the downtown quests
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
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=41386
I had that problem briefly. Reloading fixed it.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Someone linked you but it happens to be in the OP too.
Not only does it have an interesting story and characters, but the combat is actually really fun. I never really get tired of leaping on people and sucking their blood. The thing about an "action RPG" is that the action part has to be good.
Also I wish there were more people who had an 'oh goddammit you're a malk' response, but I guess that's asking for a lot of additional writing.
edit: one of the alltime great things to do is feed on a guy in such a way that he is between you and some guys shooting at you with guns. They will shoot their buddy rather than let him be drained!
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I've actually been rather surprised by how many "oh hey you're a malk" responses there are. Even if it's not a big thing it's there on a lot of people. Isaac says something like "Your clan does have a good sense of humor", and a lot of people comment on your foresight. Not to mention all of the dementia opportunities which sometimes have a lot bigger impact than persuasion would, and are always more hilarious.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat