The first patch for Vampire: Bloodlines is out. They promise a fix to a game stopping bug, some “gameplay updates” and that’s about it. Performance issues? “You may need to upgrade your computer or turn down some detail settings.”
This is a game released so flawed the intro movie is broken.
It runs on the same engine as Half-life 2 and in scenes with much less stuff happening runs a lot worse; I have a gigabyte of RAM and a 9800pro radeon card and I have to cheat in some quests because the framerate is so low it’s unplayable.
There are fucking SPELLING errors in dialogue. How do you miss this? I’m talking “teh”, “,” instead of “…” text not matching up to dialogue…
You can’t skip movies. Every time you start a new game you have to sit through the same 10 minute intro which is rendered in game and has stuff like: stuttering, sound effects occuring at the wrong times, characters gliding instead of walking, really bad lipsynching… etc.
About 3/4 of the way through the game it looks like they just got sick of it; gone are the long and interesting dialogue trees, the twists and turns, the relationships. All replaced by long and boring combat sequences, and that bastion of crappy mid 90’s shooters… a sewer level! Built up a charismatic character who can’t fight but can talk their way out of anything? You’re screwed!
Anyway, I’m just mad that a high profile game wasn’t released even in Beta form; IMO this doesn’t even make alpha. And I had high hopes going in…
Yep. That’s the Half-Life legacy, right there.
I had several of the same problems, including a weird bug that froze all mobile elements (like laser trip wires). This meant I couldn’t sneak past them. This turned out to be quite painful in an area where those laser tripwires were lethal.
I also agree with you about the gameplay: What in the FNARG was Troika thinking? These bozos have managed to make serious screw-up sin every game they’ve made. They’re good - but no better.
What I don’t understand is this damnable obsession with making white-wolf rpg’s into action games. The entire point of vampire was that it emphasized role-playing interaction, politics, and character ingenuity rather than monster-hacking (unless you were a Brujah). Bloodlines has extensive combat sequences the charater gets forced into, often with no warning. This RPG should have been more like Arcanum: characters shouldn’t have had to ever once kill or fight if they took the proper steps.
Other things that bugged me:
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Persuade was actually mostly useless with a handful of exceptions; there’s certainly no reason at all to max it out. Research was nice for beefing your character up.
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There’s one boss very close to the end of game who has a truly ridiculous amount of HP. Its just stupid. She has about 200X what you get. Even with good weapons and Celerity 4 it took me almost a half-hour to kill her, and I had not one blood pack left. It actually got boring.
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Nearly every area wound up used once and never returned to.
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Definite spoiler Having a ghoul was cool. Sadly, they built in a cutscene where she gets whacked and there’s nothing you can do. WHich is really goddamned stupid. First, she’s a fnargin ghoul and she basically died from being slapped. Second, you should be able to embrace here or just donate more blood in any case to revive her. “Mommy, why didn’t they use a Pheonix down on Aeris?”
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This game has some of the worst compression I’ve ever seen. Half-Life 2 runs fine on my Radeon 9600se, with larger and more detailed areas being traversed much faster. This just sucks.
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Spoiler, mostly there were basically three endings, but they were tiny variations on one ending. You were forced to do the whim of the Prince the whole game. You couldn’t join the Sabbat, your “relationship” with the Anarchs was largely pointless.
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Playing through with different kinds of characters doesn’t actually give as much of a different feel as you might want. And sometimes they force responses out of you, which I didn’t feel like using. Playing as a Malkavian was pretty cool, but ti also forced many responses, too, greatly limiting your dialogue options at times. Not to mention that very few of the dialogue options had any real effect.
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You know that irritatingly long sequence at the game’s start? That just pisses me off. I swear I’m writing nasty letters to the next company that has unbreakable cutscenes.
Now, on the whole, it’s still a good game. But it should have been a great game. And it isn’t because Troika’s just lazy as always. Honestly, they should fold up and move in with Obsidian. The big Obsidian has two awesome sequals lined up - less than six months after founding!
But in HL2 it lasts for less than a minute. And the non-combat portion actually runs pretty neat.