Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

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It's pretty similiar to Deus Ex.

 

So how does the RPG combat work in an FPS engine? Real time with special attacks working as weapons? Something else entirely?

 

Can anyone give me a link to the site that makes this game? I'd like to check out some screen shots and info before I consider buying it, from the sound of it it's pretty cool.

 

http://www.troikagames.com/

 

unless you've got a fast computer I wouldn't recommend it. The loading times are impossible I figure I'll just leave it around til I finally get an upgrade and play it then back to KotOR for me

 

Ive just brought this and Ive only just bothered to look at the suggested specs, and let me tell you Im kind of worried that it will work on my PC (piece of crap) at all, fingers crossed hey...

 

I have a GeForce FX5600, 1024 Mb Ram and a P4 2.4 Ghz processor with the 1.2 patch installed and the game runs like a friggin charm. Load times are totally acceptable. Up your RAM, guys.

 

Ive got a 5200, 512 and a 2ghz AMD, think ram would be a good thing to get...

 

ive finished it i dont have too many probs
cept it will lock up on me after an 8 hour shift on it(man i need a life)
anyone try to edit anything on this game yet i noticed the maps are bsp and the scripts open with notepad ill have to get the python compiler
ill try to open a map with hl2 editor and let you guys know if it works

 

hmm... I have

AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+
2.19 gHZ
512 MB RAM

I have no idea what any of that means, but it looks like it is smaller than a lot of other folks computers, but it still runs VtM smoothly and the load times are pretty short.

 

If your running an oldish system, heres what you have... (bear in mind I have limited knowledge on computers but have been doing a bit of research to build my own )

You've got an Athlon XP which runs at 2.2ghz but because AMD's processers are similar in performance with Inels higher clock speed processors AMD changed their marketing strategy to call the chips things like Athlon XP 3200 (because performence is similar to Intels 3.2 ghz processor). This , from what I can tell, happened because AMD concentrated on increasing its clock cyles the prcessors work at, whilst Intel worked on increasing clock speeds. So you have the equivilant of a 2.9ghz - 3ghz Pentium. AMD have relesed the Athloin 64's now though and they are slightly better than Intel's similarly priced chips for gaming purposes but Pentiums are better for vidio editing.

If you have SD RAM usually found in old systems... it won't be as good as new DDR memory. If your using SD RAM it might be worth buying another 512 stick as its very cheap now.

And the 3rd most important gaming componant... your graphics card, but you haven't mentioned it

If i'm wrong on any of that, sonmebody tell me because I may need to rethink some of my decisions before I buy.

I got Bloodlines the other day in the sale for £10.. total bargain.... have to wait till I can play it though

 

You have got it wrong!
Video card should be first!
Also you need to have a ballanced system, I mean 32mb of ram in a 3.4 Ghz system with a X800 is seriously going to weigh everything else down. likewise a cheap old graphics card won't even be able to run DX9 games.

 

Yeah we know that, but what were trying to get at is that if you had to choose between 512 ram and a 5900, or a 1052 of ram and a 5200, you would probably end up going for the more ram than the bigger gfx card...

 

I wouldn't. I would think that for ingame play (not loading, etc) the better graphics card would make a much more significant difference. Though I imagine an extra 512 of ram is cheaper than that graphics card upgrade.

 

Well, I've played it decently at a 2.4 G processor with 512 MB DDR ram and a 64MB video. The load times were normal. First time I played it was on a laptop with 1.3 Ghz, 256 ram and 32 MB video. Bad idea, loads a city for 5-7 minutes. At leasts helps with your reading

Anyway, I played Brujah, too. Plain and Simple. Only Ming was a bit of a problem... you'll see.
Actually, as a friend of mine showed, even relatively weaker clans can be decent fighters. A toreador, for example, can easily do a lot of damage from range, and has celerity to get out of bad situations. With an Anaconda they can start dishing out good damage, too...

I don't remember who asked for a site on the game, www.vampirebloodlines is the standard one, but for one closer to the P&P version that might help with the roleplaying, try http://spillklubben.samfunnet.no/vampireclans.htm

 

I think it's the RAM that makes the difference. Usually is. Anyway, you can just take the visual details down if that's the problem, but the aforementioned 10-minute loading time sounds just ridiculous. I have a P4 3000Mhz+, 1gb RAM, and Radeon 9800 PRO (128). Full details, shadows etc and runs like a dream. Loading times are a minor nuisance but they're rarely longer than some 15 seconds.

The latest patch obviously fixed all the bugs. I only got the game a week back but I certainly wouldn't call it overly buggy. You do run into them, but they don't really ruin the game. Using the console commands can oftentimes freeze the game. But a nice "save XXXX" -> "reload" trick will fix that. Other than that there have been the occasional stuck doors, computer or elevator suddenly going silent so you can't use them, scripts failing when you've saved in the middle of them (such as pressing a button to disable motion-detecting laser alarms, saving, then loading and finding the button being pressed but the lasers on again), etc. Not really a bother when you safe often enough. Even the quests are reliable, seeing as I've only encountered problems in two of them. Remembering what BG2 was like with all the buggy Jaheira romance variables and fan-made mods etc, that's nothing.

A warning for those who don't know, save BEFORE you do the quest for either Imalia in the Hollywood sewers, or for VV over at Vesuvius. In both cases you can do the quest just like you're supposed to, but still fail it when you return to the NPC that gave you the quest.

The game itself was amazing, and I do mean amazing. I've played only this game for the last week, like 8+ hours a day. Yes, that sick. I don't remember when I last put such a huge amount of time to a game per day, let alone so many days in a row. The musics, graphics, dialogue, combat, immersion... it's all perfect. The first time I played this, I played through with a Toreador. There I almost had a nervous breakthrough in the because of the huge imbalance in ability requirements. I hadn't even maxed out my seduction and persuasion yet, so I could hardly afford combat abilities above some 3 points in melee and unarmed and strength. Too bad, since the last 15-20% of the game is pure combat. Luckily though, this typical flaw doesn't ruin this game like it does many others. Afterall you don't need full points in social skills. With just 8 in seduction and persuasion, lockpicking and hacking etc, you can do everything. So during my second game through the combat was no problem at all.

I do recommend this game to anyone who isn't offended by harsh language and a whole lot of attitude. The plot might not be comparable to the legendary KOTOR 1, but the immersion, voiceacting etc is even better than it was there. The game is fairly linear, despite what others have said, since it's easy to do almost all of the quests the first time through unless you deliberately avoid them. But for some reason I didn't really mind going over the conversations again with different responses from the last time. And Nosferatu & Malkavian vampires are a different experience from the rest, giving the game some real nice replay value.

 

Cool! I just got my new comp (P4 3.2 ghz, 1024Mb ram, 6600GT, ASUS P4P800-E). And from what you've said it should run fine.

 

Ah yes I see I forgot to mention what I thought there. The "runs like a dream" has one exception: Obfuscation in sewers or one or two other parts in the game causes hyuuuge FPS drop. Like to 10 or less, totally unplayable. Luckily there really are only a few places where that happens. Besides which Obfuscation is a sort of "invisibility" ability that always gets disabled when you attack or are attacked, so it has no bearing on the combat whatsoever.

Anyway, I think that's just another ATI bug. But I definitely recommend the game. It's exactly like Deus Ex with updated graphics in a Vampire world. And with the ability to make more than one kind of protagonist (not talking about skills, but the actual character). Top 5 games for PC now would be BG2, Fallout 2, VTM-Bloodlines, KOTOR, something else I don't remember. It's that good.

 

I had a quick burst on it a couple of days ago. I'm on the level where you have to find a sarcophocus on a ship at harbour. Needless to say I got my ass kicked

 

Sure, it has pretty nice and detailed graphics, plus the story isn't that bad, but the combat is just plain clumsy and at times it feels like the character is walking in tar. I also found it annoying that although you could play in 1st person the camera forced you to 3rd person the moment you took out your weapon. This didn't stop me, though, but the too simple mechanics did: by the time I reached china town I had almost maxed out every important skill and all that was left to do was listen that typical "do-this-get-that" rant and proceed with the plot -if you can call that stub as such.

I have to say that Bloodlines is interesting for the first half of the game, but after the middle point it gets tedious. It has nothing new to offer, you already have everything, and the plot loses its charm. But for the first half it's pretty much fun if you can put up the somewhat clumsy combat.