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New Vampire Title Uses Half-Life 2 Engine
According to Gamespot, who have exclusive details and a single piece of concept art up, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has been announced for PC, courtesy of publisher Activision and developer Troika Games (of Arcanum and former Fallout-involvement fame.) Quite apart from the excellent RPG pedigree of the team working on it, this is an FPS blend which is the first announced third-party title to utilise Valve's Source Engine, as being used in the gorgeous-looking Half-Life 2.
Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil.
Lots of gaming goodness coming from Troika!
I feel tingly, Brock.
I do believe the word "joygasm" applies here.
(And no, you pervs, I'm using this definition.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Why should we care about commercialized closed source games? This just propogates the copyright evil.
Hey that concept looks like Jenna Elfman.
Here's a few hints for the next Vampire game. I hope you take them to heart.
Don't have NPCs that are so flamingly stupid that they'll spend all their blood on buffs the moment a rat looks on them wrong, and then frenzy from the lack of blood and attack you.
If the Big Bad Guy can only be defeated by the non-descript bone lying in the corner, a _hint_ would be a nice idea.
If the main character absolutely must have a love interest, please have more than five minutes pass between him meeting her and him professing his everlasting love to her.
For God's sake, don't make it another (bad) Diablo clone.
Ehh, what happened to Nihilistic, you know, the original developer of the series??
Any word on multiplayer capabilities yet? Nihilistic's V:tM game had excellent multiplayer, along with the ability to script add-ons in Java. So anything they didn't put in the game could easily be scripted in by us fans.
There were only two problems with Redemption's multiplayer. 1) Finding players who didn't want to powergame and then get mad and leave when you won't let them. 2) Finding storytellers that didn't just throw a bunch of NPC's in a room and let you beat on them.
Just another classic case of the player base ruining the online aspect of an RPG.
I actually got to play in one game run by some marketing guy at White Wolf. It was proof of how great the multiplayer portion of Redemption actually was.
Troika's not known for doing any multiplayer really, so is there any hope?
Yes...!
I was one of the few people who really *liked* the earlier VtM game, Redemption, by Nihilistic Software. The thought of another VtM game fills me with joy! I hope Troika can learn from Nihilistic's game, keeping what was good, and reworking what was bad.
The graphics and sound of the first game were just excellent. I even made steps for a dance simulation game, using Redemption's main theme song! I hope they bring back Kevin Manthei as composer. For graphics, a lot of the game's best graphics were missed by many players, due to the poor choice of camera angles. I hope very much that the next game doesn't have the camera always looking down at the dull ground. Using the freelook mode in Redemption (for observation only, sadly not playable), and looking up, you can see a lot of incredibly detailed artwork and layouts.
The full-motion video cutscenes were terrible, however, and gave the game a bad reputation early on. The main character (Christof) looked completely different, handsome in game but ugly in the cutscenes. The game engine was very good, and 99% of all plot sequences were already done in the game engine, so why not simply make it 100%? I hope the new game is completely in the engine, never going to a cutscene. The Half-Life 2 engine should be more than powerful enough for this.
The plotline of Redemption was just great. I would have loved to read it as a novel. It is true that it is extremely stereotypical in places, and the love interest of Christof is contrived and grating at times, but the overall story was very good. The game was completely driven by this heavy plotline, which unfortunately made it extremely linear. There were alternate choices that could be made in the game, but these only affected your character's statistics (making the wrong decision hurt), and there were no real plot branching points. The alternate choices had great dialog, though! I would have liked to go back and read the various possibilities in the script. It is a shame that the game didn't have a "walkthrough mode" where selected parts can be replayed after beating the game.
It is true that there were three possible endings, but they were selected by the final choice the player made after the game was already essentially beaten, so there were no real alternate plotlines. Perhaps a more lightweight plotline, with several possiblities and side quests, would have made a more engrossing game. I hope they add more exploration opportunities and side quests in the next game.
The first game attempted to simulate the overall mood of the White Wolf "World Of Darkness", and pretty much succeeded. It did not do so well at actually implementing the rules of the world, however. There are many obvious glaring errors. The massive slaughter of cannon fodder, like a vampiric Gauntlet Legends, is laughable. The game is mostly a series of dungeon crawls. It's as if they designed and completed another game, and then just slapped the White Wolf label on it afterwards. As it stands, the game is still fun, but nothing like the real VtM roleplaying game. The game is one of political subtleties, backstabbing, and maneuvering for power - things not really possible in a computer game. The things that are easy to program, like the mechanical system of the game, were needlessly changed (botched!). I would have liked to see the real dice rolls, ala Baldur's Gate. Attributes could have been made to better match the real game, perhaps going from 0.0-5.0 instead of 0-100. The breakdown of Discipline level-building into individual Discipline powers instead of entire Disciplines, however, was a good thing as it slowed down the rate of character advancement enough to allow smooth gradual character building thorought the entire game storyline. It also allowed characters to be built in many different ways, allowing players to choose which powers to specialize in. I didn't like how many of the powers overlapped and were redundant with each other, though. I hope they are able to inco
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