VtM: Bloodlines - Retrospective @ RPS

Bloodlines treats characters as much more complex than we have a right to expect from games, though I think there could be huge improvement in its treatment of women and sexuality, and its treatment of people of colour is very poor. It still manages to stand out from other games in the way it welcomes sexual themes, and doesn’t end up being hamfisted about the negotiations spurred on by them. The grimy, murky environmental art only serves to make the world somehow smokier, sexier too. The mood is an important reason you indulge the cartoonish character models. It’s hard to make NPCs into real, live people. It’s hard to make a player feel like they are a sexual being. Somehow Troika did it, by preserving a particular mood, by making characters bluster in with all their id and ego and a charming rapport. They made you understand that although the game wants you to fetishise others (namely goth chicks), that those goth chicks have agendas. And yes, the next time we visit, perhaps when my laptop is not so broken, we will talk more about Jeanette and her brash seduction techniques.

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Vindicator said:

I still plan on playing this game… someday.
I bought it on release day, played a couple of hours, thought it was a diamond in the rough and decided to wait for the patch… and it was buried and forgotten in a box somewhere. Now I think I'll just wait for the unofficial patch 10.0.

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Fluent said:

Seriously, I just finished it up for the first time ever the other day and I think it is the best game I've ever played. It's really good.

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SpoonFULL said:

You obviously have not played Fallout New Vegas yet!

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Fluent said:

Have played, actually. I even beat the game . However, I didn't give it my usual thorough open-world exploration apparently, because I seem to have missed a lot of the game because people are saying it took them hundreds of hours to get through where it took me like 40-60 (can't remember).

My honest feelings of New Vegas was there wasn't much to see in the world. I'll have to pick it up again sometime and give it another look.

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Fluent said:

Seriously, I just finished it up for the first time ever the other day and I think it is the best game I've ever played. It's really good.

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Vindicator said:

I still plan on playing this game… someday.
I bought it on release day, played a couple of hours, thought it was a diamond in the rough and decided to wait for the patch… and it was buried and forgotten in a box somewhere. Now I think I'll just wait for the unofficial patch 10.0.

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pseudonymous said:

I would suggest ignoring the unofficial patch and going with the true patch. Nothing against We5p's dedication, but the number of crashes his patch caused are incredibly off putting to the point that I rage-uninstalled the game.

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pseudonymous said:

I would suggest ignoring the unofficial patch and going with the true patch. Nothing against We5p's dedication, but the number of crashes his patch caused are incredibly off putting to the point that I rage-uninstalled the game.

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Vindicator said:

So, it sounds like it might be a good idea for me to wait for patch 10.0 after all… In any case, it's an excuse to put off playing it for another year while I wade through the upcoming flood of RPGs.

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JDR13 said:

It runs just fine the way it is now.

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Vindicator said:

Good to know… I'll give it a try if I can find it (buried in a box somewhere, among dozens of other forgotten games).

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