A million years ago, I talked about how Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was the greatest game ever. A few years later, I attempted to define “Good” art and came up with something like this: Good art will inspire viewers to create art. A Good artist inspires other people to become artists. This led me to a place where I called Bob Ross one of the greatest artists of all time and I guess I can see how that’s a little absurd… but not a lot absurd. It’s a bullet I’m still willing to bite.
When it comes to games, I’d say that a great game is a game that inspires you to play. Not in the skinner box way, but to actually find friends and say “we should play this game”.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was that for me. I got friends to play it. I got together with friends and we played Vampire: The Masquerade. We started playing other games. We started playing board games. I have a gaming group on Saturday nights because Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines was JUST THAT GOOD OF A GAME.
Well, back in 2019, they announced that it was getting a sequel.
I was so excited. Bloodlines was an amazing game and I wanted more. It had been years. Of course I wanted more. It was like being in 1999 and seeing The Matrix and then hearing that they were coming out with The Matrix: Reloaded.
Wow! How awesome is Reloaded going to be! We’ve advanced so far technologically since 1999, surely it’ll be even *MORE* awesome!!!
And so I got excited that Bloodlines was getting a sequel but I also saw The Matrix Reloaded in the theater. So I said: “if they played the original and said “we need to come out with a sequel to this” rather than saw the original’s license and said “we can make money off of putting a 2 at the end of that title”, I’m a Day One Season Pass buyer.”
Man, a lot has happened since 2019, hasn’t it?
By the time that 2021 rolled around and the devs said “we’re not releasing it at our previously announced release date, we’re going back to working on it indefinitely”, my initial response was a sigh of relief rather than disappointment. It was the sigh after that one that was a sigh of disappointment.
The old announcement trailers have been removed from Youtube. Not relevant anymore, I guess. Here’s the official Gameplay trailer:
In there we see a handful of things.
1. The walking through a creepy atmospheric place while we hear dialog between our own character and another character
2. Stealth gameplay that goes pear-shaped and turns into combat gameplay
3. The dialog wheel
And seeing it, I’m not getting the vibes that they played the original and said “we need to make a sequel to this” as much as I’m getting the vibes that a corporation saw that games like Dishonored did really well and games like Dragon Age 2 did really well and maybe there’d be a way to take the combat from Dishonored and the dialog choices from Dragon Age 2 and attach them to a license that still has a large cult following decades later.
And if you do that without understanding why the original game still has a large cult following decades later, you’re likely to come up with a game that doesn’t please the cultists who have been praying for a sequel, won’t please the people who want Dishonored gameplay because it’s constantly cluttered up with long walking simulator scenes full of chatterboxes, and won’t please the Dragon Age 2 dialog fans because the conversations are too far between because there’s all of this going for a stroll punctuated by stealth combat.
The game looks good, sure… but… I don’t know how to put this… GTA VI released a trailer the other day and one of the people who scours such things found that the bottles of beer in the bar had little bubbles in them and the bubbles would float up to the top as you looked at them. On one level, what amazing physics! On another level, I don’t think I’m going to be spending a whole lot of time with beer in the game.
It looks great! It’s an amazing tech demo! But it’s not, you know, particularly “fun”. It says “look what I can do!”, which is great, but it doesn’t get me to say “I want to do that”.
And that’s the definition of good. Inspiring me to want to do it too.
As such, I’m worried.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is a screenshot from the original Bloodlines. Taken by the author.)
Creeping toward the end of Baldur’s Gate 3 at last (I want to actually FINISH it so I can go back and replay it a million times with no expectation that I still have to finish it). I’ve been on a roll lately of finding and eliminating the “big bads” and that led me to the fight against Sarevok (speaking of it being 1999 again). Easily–EASILY–the toughest of the “boss” fights to this point. I won it by “accidentally” cheesing it, but in talking to my youngest afterwards it seems I’m not the only one that cheesed that fight. Anyway, I thought I might finish it this weekend but other entertainments intruded and, well…Orin and the Elder Brain will just have to wait.