Horizon Broadening Project #2 - Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines_Vampire the Masquerade

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Horizon Broadening Project #2 - Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines

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bombsfall 2009-03-02 19:43:15 Publish:

Goths are funny. I remember back in my high school days in the mid 90s, goths comprised a sizable wedge of the teen subculture pie-chart. I dated more than one girl who un-ironically painted her nails black everyday and listened to Type O Negative. The Crow was a big huge movie then and Hot Topic was just that cool new store in the mall that sold The Smashing Pumpkins "Zero" shirt. Interview With A Vampire was made into a movie and Anne Rice was actually pretty huge. Even manically goofy punk 15 year old me found the whole thing intriguing.

So it was this latent enthusiasm that steered me recently to tracking down a copy of Trioka's 2004 PC action RPG, Vampire The Masquerade : Bloodlines. There's a huge amount to say about the game's source material, but I'll keep it short. Vampire - The Masquerade is a pen & paper RPG with an adjoining card game. Players are vampires attempting to blend in with the world of mortals and navigate the turbulent political waters of Vampirdom. For you true crime show fans, the name may ring a bell.

When first you boot the game, you are tasked with a creating a character from one of several clans, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Will you belong to clan Ventrue - the aristocracy of the vampire world or clan Nosferatu - vile-looking beings shunned even by other vampires? Will you be Malkavian - a clan whose every member inherits a unique and severe lunacy? I chose clan Brujah, based upon the fact that they were anarchist idealists. Anarchist vampires! I couldn't even imagine what kind of bizarre conflicts that might lead to! I even narrowed my character's focus by choosing a specific back story - mine was "True Brujah". A True Brujah apparently is not so much a knee-jerk rabble-rouser, but a studied intellectual who thought much and acted in measured doses. Sadly, the game doesn't allow one to debate the finer points when a group of vampire ne'er-do-wells has one cornered in a diner and are unloading round upon round in one's direction. In fact, all stats relating to debate, persuasion, intelligence and perception are able to be individually raised upon gaining XP. This left me, many hours in, wishing I had picked a clan with special features more flashy than, say, having read Bakunin. Also, the anarchs are all bikers. Bikers are lame.

Also, my character looked like an idiot.
The main conflict of Bloodlines is the battle between the Anarchs (the name is self-explanatory) and the Camarilla (a kind of vampire government ruled by a council of clan leaders and a handful of Ventrue). California had been a vampire free state and the intrusion of this kind of order is upsetting the intricate rivalries and fiefdoms.

Call me a purist, but vampires shouldn't use guns. They should use their vampire wiles and hyper-extended canines.
Soldiering on into my unlife, I quickly found Bloodlines to be a wildly uneven mix of truly inspired moments and long stretches during which it became obvious that Troika had attempted something a bit beyond their means and abilities. In fact, the last half of the game is barely worth playing as it lacks the brilliance of some of the early segments... but good lord are those early moments great.

An early quest line puts you in negotiations with a pair of sisters who (giggle) own a goth night club. The skanky younger sister hangs out down on the dance floor and flirts hilariously with patrons (though I think her advances are supposed to be alluring). The older sister can be found in her apartment upstairs and is quite the power player, leading her to be named the Baron of Santa Monica by the Camarilla. The two sisters are locked into some kind of severe sibling rivalry, a fight between the rebellious younger sister and the ambitious older sister. You need some info from the older sister, so she sends you to a haunted hotel she would like to redevelop to retrieve an item of sentimental importance to the ghost that has been raising hell and stopping renovation efforts. Thus begins one of the most delightfully terrifying levels I've ever played. The hotel is filled with every haunted house cliche you can imagine, with distant figures, unexplained noises, flying objects and whatever else you can think of. I was playing this late at night, after Bethany had gone to bed. My exploratory tip-toeing around the ground floor of the hotel was going fine and then THIS happened. (Skip to the 3:00 mark and watch till 4:00 with the sound on and preferably in high quality).

I jumped. My cat jumped. I quit playing for the night.

Upon returning from the hotel, you find that the sibling rivalry has taken a sour turn and now the older sister is holding the younger at gunpoint. You find them in her office... and see that they are the same person. You see, the sisters are a single Malkavian vampire and her unique madness is a split personality that masks the guilt of murdering her father who may or may not have molested her over a period of years. It's a tired film trope, but it's handled in a way that is strikingly sophisticated for games and I honestly didn't see it coming even though I had never seen them in the same room together... that should have seemed suspicious. It was a high point in a game full of great characters.

What's great about the sisters and their hotel mission is that you never fire one bullet or swing one sword - it's all investigation, survival and dialogue. This is the strong suit of the game - drawing on it's extensive source lore and mostly great writing. It paints such an interesting picture and drives home this notion that even after death, people long for structure, belonging, identity and community. They can also be just as petty, political, selfish and conniving as their still-breathing counterparts. I haven't even mentioned some of the other great moments of the game, such as the moral ambiguity of how you treat a human who is devoted to you or whether you will kill to keep the general public unaware of vampires. It's sad then, when the game devolves in the latter half into a corridor-running action game. The combat is terrible and the enemies are bland. The few boss encounters are memorable, but not for the actual fights. The final two segments are just god-awful. The wheels come right off of the plot cart as the game invents reasons to spend a few hours in dull sewers, another posh and vaguely gothic mansion or, unbelievably enough, fighting SWAT cops in a high rise under construction.

This game came out right in the heart of Matrix-chic, and it is poorer for it. Overall, the feeling that I take from this game is one of fond sadness. It would be amazing to see someone like Bethesda take this franchise, bring on some of the original writers and make an open-world Masquerade game. That may happen at some point in the future, but for now we can only dream.

Next time on the Horizon Broadening Project - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the World. I promise I'll play something happy and sunny after that.

Post-script on the subject of the fairer sex in Bloodlines - This game was apparently designed by 15 year olds whose sole exposure to womankind was pornography. You have been warned.

posted by bombsfall at 5:31 PM

Comments:

dude, i busted out laughing when you said, "Also, my character looked like an idiot." ... i cried a bit!

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