Hello and welcome to this first post about games. There’s no general idea here. Posts in this category can vary between my general experiences of specific games, genre musings, thoughts on design and storytelling, or just disgruntled ranting, and of course an invitation for some, hopefully more in-depth, discussion of everyone’s favourite games.

Today’s game, and the topic besides this introduction: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Specifically with the latest user patch version (6.0).

Well now, I had tried once, long ago, to play the original Vampire the Masquerade. It was one of those games that took me 2 or 3 hours to get to even play at all. Reinstalls, driver updates, windows bullshit, it was crazy workaround central. Inevitably then, when after the first few minutes of actual play, the game crashed on me just by being buggy my frustration reached such epic levels that the add/remove programs window was summoned and the name vampire cursed for evermore. The direct result was that I simply hadn’t bothered paying any attention whatsoever to the name until reading about it recently on one of my favourite blogs (rockpapershotgun). So, throwing caution to the wind (or rather: noting RPS comments about the user patches working), I found the old game and gave it an install. 5 days later I finished it.

First off let me say that the user patches worked. In fact, worked is an understatement, I experienced not a single bug, not one missed line of dialog, not one glitch or weird issue whatsoever. This game is now as impeccable as a game of the period allows, far as I’m concerned anyways.

Now, let me get to farcry 2. I don’t know the actual data (Blogs are journalism? pfah!), but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Farcry 2 cost probably about 10 times the scraps Activision threw Troika to make Bloodlines. Farcry 2’s second biggest feature, according to Ubisoft, was the cast of unique mercenaries, each of whom you could play as and work with/for in the world, and the NPC inhabitants. Now, as those who played this game will attest, these characters were all the same, not one of them likeable. The double crossing nature of the factions was always completely predictable and to finish the game, you essentially still did every mission for everyone, meaning you had to double cross them yourself whether you wanted to or not. Not exactly the open world freedom the landscape (and box) promised us. Mind you, that didn’t matter, because the second any of the silly hyperventilating South African madmen opened their mouth you always wanted to shoot them in the face for their voice acting being so horribly implemented (and acted). Fast for…, uh…, reverse, 4 years, back to bloodlines in fact, where relatively small studio Troika manages to do a shitload better on all these fronts.

For those unfamiliar with the game. In this stat driven first person RPG you’re a vampire, sired (eg. turned into a vampire) at the beginning of the game and dropped into the LA vampire scene. This scene consists of 3 major vampire factions: The Camarilla: essentially a vampire maffia. The Anarchs: a kind of biker vampire hippies, and the Kuei-jin: eg. Vampire Tong. These three factions are the ones you can align yourself with, or rather, be used by. There are several more you find yourself (and your factions) fighting against.

Throughout the game you’re constantly confronted with the insane amount of paranoia, double crossing, politics and xenophobia the factions have between each other and you’re constantly given opportunities to influence these, as well as work your way up various ladders in these factions. It’s incredibly intricate, but in an ingeniously addictive way. You see, you’re the n00b. You’re naive (both as character and as player), and everyone tries to exploit that. Rather than force feeding you buckets of lore in a heavy godlike voice and then not giving you a choice on what to do with it the game assumes you know nothing and leaves you to form your own opinion of people and things based on what they say and do. If you’re lazy or prefer not to stay directly informed you’ll likely spend most of the game getting exploited by one of the factions and doing their dirty work, which is a fine way to play really, and will result in a relevant ending. If, however, you embrace the things the NPC’s try to teach you and start actively uncovering the plots and politics you can find yourself truly powerful within the factions and starting to really understand the things going on in the world.

Why does this level of depth work in bloodlines but not in farcry2? Well, farcry 2 only pretended to have it, bloodlines actually does, but ignoring this (probably quite relevant… I suppose… maybe…) fact: believable characters. Hands down Vampire: Bloodlines has some of the best voice acting I have ever seen in a game. Especially Jack, your biker Anarch mentor, was an instant top 10 ever game character for me. He looks like a nihilistic apathetic hedonistic long-haired bad-smelling biker asshole, and he is (though the smell may just have been me), but from the first moments in the “tutorial” section of the game you realize there’s just more to it than that, he’s instantly likeable because he helps you when no one else will, he’s funny in a manner you’d expect, and he’s incredibly cunning, although you’ll only find out by being as cunning as he is. He’s also obviously flawed, as every well written character (regardless of media) should be. All this makes him a real character. Not some generic mercenary who just looks unique and has a his own bio page in the options screen and art book(let). Like almost every character in the game he has his motives and his plans for himself, and for you although a lot them he won’t just tell you.

The writing is obvious enough to occasionally hint when characters are lying to you (a lack of body language requires as much), but subtle enough to leave a constant layer of distrust and paranoia for the NPC’s you meant. Distrust and paranoia that is inherent to the vampire society you’re placed in. It’s also incredibly witty and modern, which is a bit of a double edged sword really, cause it often left me with a very heavy “Buffy the vampire slayer” feeling. I can see how some would think that’s a good (and relevant) thing considering the pop culture of the time. I personally hate Buffy though. Which is actually a giant compliment to the gameplay.

You see this is an rpg. There are skills and stats ranging from unarmed combat to lock picking, from hacking to persuasion. Not only that, but the name of the game: bloodlines, refers to the 7 bloodlines vampires can have. These are essentially their “race”. Each race has completely different disciplines and largely affects how you play the game. Now naturally the game won’t be completely different based on your starting race, but significant things will be different, certain races are more dispositioned to certain factions for example, to the point where you may not be able to enter factions at all. The way humans react to you can also be very different. One of the races can’t even be seen by humans without serious repercussions.

I played the game as a very human-like character, heavy on the manipulation, lockpicking, hacking skills and not all that combat orientated. Now there were times where the sneaking, infiltrating, conniving nature of the game had me sitting on the edge of my seat more than splinter cell ever did. You’re usually not finding information because you have to to get on in a linear fashion, but because you can and/or want to know more about people. From a story progression standpoint this makes the information less valuable, but for immersion it makes every useless email, every meaningless factoid you find about a character invaluable to the experience. You see, there was always that level of social paranoia and that idea that you’re missing a crucial piece of information, as well as the sensation of getting closer to it, that had me subconsciously ignoring the (subjective) annoyance of the “buffy” moments.

Mind you, the world was not strictly a buffy world, it certainly takes itself less seriously. Almost every computer you hack into has emails waiting, a lot of genuine comedy gold. Dialogs with NPC’s, especially with a little persuasion or dominating (clan Ventrue specialty) can be amazingly funny. The world, which is essentially just a taboo-less parody of ours, much like the last 2 GTA games, is simply consistent.

Which leads me to conclude that this games rocks. Simply put. It really is a pity there’s not more games like this. I secretly hope Alpha protocol, the upcoming spy RPG by obsidian will have a similarly intricate world of paranoia and manipulating factions instead of just being a “24″ game with stats. I can understand how difficult it must have been to make a world like that, especially with the insane amount of work the writing and characters will likely have been. However, after playing through it, and looking back on my own reactions in this post, I can’t understand how publishers would forego this level of depth, critical acclaim, and customer satisfaction for the watered down experience of Gears of War 2, Prince of Persia 3 or Tomb Raider 6. All of which can be finished in half the time it takes to play through bloodlines, none of which leave you with the feeling of having really experienced something, let alone accomplished something.

Just like film seems to fluctuate in priority from generation to generation between technical prowess (be it size of the screen, 2d/3d, visual effects, sound) and storytelling I can only hope that the decline it feels like we’re in regarding games’ depth and writing is an indication of the medium taking a similar wave-like pattern and that it’s only a matter of time before we get back to immersive worlds and characters that keep us addicted for days, rather than immersive graphics that keep up staring for a few minutes.