Back in 1991 I used to run Vampire the Masquerade, a tabletop RPG that channeled the vibe of Anne Rice’s Vampire novels. The campaign was extremely popular with my players. But after a couple of years the theme had become too depressing for me to continue the game. The novelty had worn off and all the attention I had focused on the damned animated dead meat going through the motions of life while preying on the living just became too much for me to have fun playing out. And so I killed my campaign, over the protests of my players.
But that was a long time ago. This computer game was released in 2004. It comes from Troika, the ill-fated developers who had plenty of talent but an equal helping of troubles. I’m aware there’s more than one PC game based on the Vampire RPG, but I hadn’t played any of them until finally installing this one. Feeling that enough time had passed since my tabletop Vampire game, and that a PC game wouldn’t have the same depth or emotional impact as tabletop, I gave it a try. Spoiler, after I lost count of the number of people I bit in it, this game started to get depressing too.
To sum up it’s a good RPG and you should play it. Creating and developing your character is fun. You can flick between a first and third person POV. And while I’m not happy with real-time combat, at least it’s about on a par with something like Skyrim. Strangely you only see a strength bar over your opponents sometimes, and when I equip a gun I lose the targeting reticule. But most of all, I’m just weary with the whole real-time conceit. Weary. I like to plot my combat rounds like a chess player (without a tournament timer). I like to sort it out, get up for a cup of coffee in the middle of my turn, look something up, answer the phone without even a thought for the game, and treat it like a game. A board game. Sitting on the table there. At my convenience. Not a twitch-fest. I don’t want to have to jump on a button faster than the computer in order to continue. And let me just say that my hands start hurting during this game’s long real-time combats. That certainly isn’t a goal for anyone.
The graphics are fine, I haven’t encountered any bugs, the voice-acting is good and so is the music. The premise is right in line with the original tabletop game, and while the writing’s sometimes a little shallow, the story is satisfying. Now let’s get into more detail.
The point of making a game from a franchise is to provide a similar experience. I think they succeeded. You have the clans, you have the lore, you have the powers, you even have the basic mechanics, all on the character sheet. You can role-play a vampire, and you can bite people. There are limitations to your actions though. Your Humanity score drops when you take lives needlessly. There are consequences from the cops, and from vampire society. You have to maintain the Masquerade by not flaunting your powers. And so forth. It’s all incorporated into this game.
On the other hand, you have to be really stingy in using your vampire powers, because you need to keep fueling them with more blood. And that gets awkward mighty fast because as a game resource, getting blood can be a pain in the neck. Eventually, in order to feel like a tough guy (and avoid so much biting) I used a console command and was able to kick my powers on whenever they would make the game cool. Thank goodness for the console, because I would’ve dropped this game mid-play without it. Thanks, guys.
There’s an aspect of the setting that gets on my nerves. Everything is supposed to be edgy, and everybody’s supposed to be a bad-ass. There are even groups that are all bad-asses: The Sabbat, the Anarchs, The Brujah, the Gangrel, even the Lycanthropes. Here’s a news flash: everybody can’t be a bad-ass, because then nobody is a bad-ass, they’re all the same.
One other weird thing. Time does not pass. You can’t “wait” in this game. The sun never rises. You don’t have to find shelter from the day. Your first night just goes on, and on, and on…
Although there is one NPC who says we have to move before the dawn comes. Still looks dark outside. We drive while off-camera, and then the next cut-scene is inside a haven. You leave and it’s night outside. Did we let the daylight pass? Was he just using hyperbole? Who can say?
The game is NSFW. Or for your kids, your parents, and possibly your significant other. Yeah, when I was seventeen I would’ve thought that was so cool. Nowadays I think I could do without it.
It’s set in Los Angeles. There are no cars driving down the streets.
Puzzles. I get tired of puzzles, which were never my thing. Pull this, push that, in the right order, bah. I want to move through the game feeling like (in this case) a vampire. You can have stuff happen around me, but I don’t want to bounce out of my character and have to diddle around with artificial challenges in order to make the story advance.
Oh, and the design of some of these building interiors just strains credibility. Really. At least use some common sense. Or look at a blueprint. There’s an internet, you can find some.
There are doors and so forth that you can’t even attempt to open. Apparently if you get to an appropriate point in a quest you’ll be able to get in some of them, but not before. And not for all of those doors. Anyway I’m thinking that’s not an ideal solution, because again it knocks me right out. I supposedly can pick locks. (I must’ve been a starving artist who resorted to crime.) Except sometimes a door doesn’t even have a “handle.” Or the padlock icon comes up and you just can’t interact with it. So in-character, what am I supposed to be thinking when I come across this kind of thing? I think it would’ve been better to be able to attempt it and then get a feedback message (which already happens on unsuccessful lockpicking attempts anyway) that says something like, “This lock is so far beyond your abilities that you’ll need to practice for about ten years before you can even attempt it.” At least then there’d be consistency in how unopenable doors are handled.
There’s a lot of sneaking past humans as part of quests. The humans roam around within an area (and there’s an unlikely lot of them), they move faster than you, much faster if you’re sneaking, and if they spot you you’re blown. There are a ridiculous number of these guys in any location. Empty stupid one-room warehouse of nothing? Must be twelve guys there in the middle of the night, roaming back and forth between only three aisles! Flipping insane, and so very not-fun to try and sneak past. Oh, and how many of those quests include the stipulation “and don’t kill anyone,” as they anxiously clutch their pearls. Hell, I’m a VAMPIRE! This is another game activity I don’t enjoy, unless I can get past them with only a “reasonable” amount of effort. If I have to keep reloading and then the next guy spots me, I’m just over it. Believe me, after reloading six or eight times just to get to the next door, I’m disgusted and so not having fun. Fortunately a console command can get me past these hurdles, but I wish these sneak quests weren’t so difficult so I could play them through without hitting the bump in my gaming experience.
Was there even a “difficulty” setting? I don’t think so. Also, if I didn’t revert to god-mode, I don’t know how I could’ve been expected to survive all those combats against tons of opponents who are using serious firepower. I can think of one combat that you have no way of surviving without using god mode from the console. Another one where a melee specialist like me could conceivably need all night to re-load the fight and try, try again to survive. But I never want to re-load and try again sixteen times for a combat! For whom is that a design “feature” in a role-playing game?!
There are some quests that you’re just going to fail no matter what you do. It’s how they got themselves through when writing the overall story. I’m not sure I like that. After a while it gets annoying knowing that it doesn’t matter how hard you try. You know? They could’ve written it differently and still hit the same story beats in the arc.
Saved games. I had to go through my hard drive periodically and clear out excess save game files. If I just boot up the game I’d have to laboriously delete saves one at a time through a three-step process for each file, using their interface, instead of just highlighting a slew of them and deleting en mass. Idiots. That’s just a crap user interface. So off I go to File Explorer.
There are limitations to the overall experience, presumably based on the age of the game. Lots of NPCs look exactly the same. Some area details appear to be re-used. The art is of course dated. It’s not so bad, but it’s a shame. I know they did some work on the game after it was published, and a lot of that was fan-based. My version came with an “unofficial” patch. The game still could’ve used more work.
There is no “press ‘M’ for map” functionality. You can only see a street map if you find a bus stop, or a sewer map if you come across one bolted to the wall in the sewers. But none inside buildings. And none you can “take with you.” There’s not even a compass rose! I really, really feel this lack. Why the heck not? Do vampires not have a sense of direction?
Speaking of maps, there’s a huge, huge labyrinth of a multi-level “dungeon” that you have to go through without a map. And if you foolishly think that you can navigate your way through by, I dunno, trying to take this path and that until you get to the next thing, maybe with a sprinkle of logic, you are…foolish. You have to know that getting knocked down and swept away and leaping and finding things to bash that you normally can’t bash at all and getting stuck in dead ends and reloading saves (you did save, a lot, didn’t you?) and facing unexpected deadly encounters, all of which you get no character points for, is what it takes. Oh, and what walk-through guides there are online will often be out of date and thus inaccurate because hey, history, mods and patches.
I’ve been a gamer since the seventies, and I have NEVER seen such a non-intuitive grind as this labyrinth IN MY LIFE. You will have to research this and use the console to get through it. Gods in heaven, WHY?
I have the game on GOG. Interestingly, as the haven for “buyer freedom,” their game installation keeps launching their GOG Galaxy software when all you want to do is run the game you bought and installed. I had to search online for a work-around, delve into my hard drive, and pick a different -exe file out of a choice of several to launch the damned thing. Disappointed, GOG. Do better.
So how’s the game end up? You, as a neonate freshly-minted vampire, are supposed to be comparatively weak in the pecking order. And yet in that one night you manage to take on hordes of opponents and (presumably) survive to finish the story. Wow, does this strain credibility. Don’t get me wrong, it’s like reading a vampire comic book, so light amusement. As I said, the music is good. I got a kick out of the Los Angeles locations. But I wouldn’t expect anything particularly deep or surprising. And the fact that the game’s combats, puzzles, floorplans and sneak-requirements are so unrealistic just makes me shake my head. Thanks for the console, but I repeat, without it I would’ve quit.
As the game stands I can recommend it, given those caveats. If you have no issue with the items I critique, then go for it. Take a bite.
The Michlin Guide 