Vampire the masquerade bloodlines free trial

Vampires are sorted by large groups known as bloodlines, clans which determine their powers and tendencies, and coteries, which represent the "chosen family" of the vampire and in the tabletop setting usually is the party of Player Characters.

All of this translated over to the first Bloodlines game and will no doubt make an appearance in the upcoming sequel as well. The original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines released in exclusively for PC, and featured a ton of really cool ideas. Unfortunately, Troika Games', the developer, ambition was far bigger than its resources and technology could account for, and the game was ultimately a flop.

When it finally did release, many things were left unfinished and unpolished, and the game sold a remarkably low number of copies at its release. All of that said, many consider it to be an amazing game despite its many technical flaws, and fans of the original still play and upkeep it themselves. Like the tabletop roleplaying variation, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines focuses heavily on choices , allowing players a huge array of gameplay styles to choose from.

Players can be violent and approach situations guns blazing or opt to instead use stealth. That same situation could also be handled with diplomacy or domination, or perhaps avoided altogether. The point is, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines had incredible ideas, but its scope was simply too great to be accommodated at the time.

That's what makes the upcoming next generation sequel so exciting. The trailer shown during the recent Inside Xbox , while creepy, gives a good sense of what kind of world the player will be in during their time with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

This is a dark setting in which morals are lacking and things are always a shade of grey rather than black and white, and even aspiring "good" characters are forced to face the reality of vampirism and what it makes them do.

If your vampire is strong enough, you'll be able to interact with the environment like never before - shifting crates, lifting small cars and generally making your presence felt. Meanwhile we shouldn't forget, as Leonard Boyarsky, joint CEO of Troica, himself points out, that physics objects blow apart real neat. They sure do.

For years mortal propaganda has been chipping away at us, hoodwinking us into balieving that it's not much fun being a empire. Damned lies! Well, maybe not, but you can be ur dead and still be hip, and Vampire: The Masquerade -Bloodlines is going to show you how. Put simply, if this til manages to pull off what it promises than the RPG world will be set on fire. It's still early days, but Bloodlines looks set tc intricately meld the traits of the traditic nal RPG with the intense shootery of the FPS.

Stuff like experience points, character groups, quests and NPC inters ction are still here, but so is an arse lai of weapons that covers knives, submachine guns, flamethrowers and 'stakeguns'. If you add to the mix your 12 different vampire powers supernatural speed, invisibility, mind control, superhuman strength and the like , then it becomes clear that we are looking at what might be described as a Deus Ex with pointy teeth.

And it uses Half-Life's Source Engine. Excited yet? So how does it work? We caught up with Troika bigwig Leonard Boyarsky and producer Thaine Lyman, and they told us all about it. For example, a Toreador clan member is suave and seductive - an Anne Rice style vampire - while the Nosferatu is a hideous beast stalking in the shadows. Each of these has multiple conflict areas associated with it. The player interacts with NPCs, receives quests and buys equipment in the safe areas of each hub before moving out to the action.

From what Zone has seen, the environments that you'll be battling through are vast and wide-ranging, covering all the grubby aspects of the seedy American underground: nightclubs, dodgy hotels, Hollywood Mansions and the more traditional gothic caverns and graveyards. What's more, these environments and the myriad characters that you meet in them will react to you according to the choices you make, your clan, your abilities and the reputation that you've developed through your mis deeds.

So if you've recently sucked the plasma out of someone's virgin younger sister, they are unlikely to welcome you with open arms let alone open veins. And of course, throbbing beautifully in the background, lies the Source Engine. When a character gets angry at you, you know it.

When they're happy with you, you know it. When they want to make you dinner, you know it. If Fallout is anything to go by, Troika is pretty much the best in the business when it comes to NPC chitchat.

Armed with this technology we could be in for encounters and characters that are so immersive you won't be able to tell the difference between playing the game and going down the shops for a pint of milk or a quart of type A-positive. By their own admission, the strong team behind Bloodlines found that "using somebody else's engine is like jumping into a cold pool. In most previous role-players, original designs and visions have had to be compressed into characters with pixels for faces, with even main characters being scrunched up into 2in-high models.

These days every fold, wrinkle and zit in the artwork can find their way to someone's face, and the team is clearly enjoying the freedom that this affords. The visuals may not match those we've seen in Half-Life 2, but they're still out of this world. We added our own lighting system too, because a game that takes place at night has very different demands from a game that plays out during daylight. We had to incorporate a lot more shadows and moody lighting.

So there is almost a film quality to it. Those of you with above-average memory will be aware that it wasn't always like this. V:tM - Redemption was an isometric party-based affair that started its story back in the dark ages: it was old school that's old school with a beard rather than a tub of drugs and a whistle. So why the sudden shift in gears? The stats affect the gameplay, but the player is the one who is actually responsible.

This is clearly a far cry from the games in which you click on a beasty and back while your character cleaves mea from its ribcage. They'll search you out. They'll throw things at you. We used a lot of the Half-Life 2 combat Al, and a lot of their scripted stuff, but we had to add a lot of the RPG-specific stuff ourselves.

There are multiple ways to get through our game, so we have to accommodate the fact that the player can have different experiences getting to a certain area. If you've seen the E3 Bloodlines video you'll have noticed that it has a number of similarities with what we've seen of its ginger, radioactive step-brother, Half-Life 2. One notable scene has a monster picking up corpses and lobbing them at you, while elsewhere the physics engine shows off with an enthusiastic jiggle of an NPC's over-sized breasts.

Bloodlines will also have extensive Modding capabilities and epic vampire vs vampire hunter multiplayer battles. For us, Bloodlines carries with it big expectations. The right people are making the right game with the right source material. They are also using the most incredible game engine ever made. The colour of next season is undoubtedly going to be black.

No Game has ever come close to recreating the feeling of playing Deus Ex - no game has even come within a bio-modded sniff.

The first time we saw Bloodlines though, well we wondered if it was possible Some among our number have expressed doubts on exactly how free-form the final game will be, while others have wondered whether the stat-spliced combat is going to be fulfilling enough. However, we still have faith that this is going to be special.

Plus, there are powers that let you boil an enemy's blood until they explode, or conjure up a giant spectral wolf to disembowel your fellow vampires. All of which means there's still a hell of a lot to hope for, even if it must have been a task and a half for isometric-roleplayer stalwarts Troika to stretch themselves into shooter territory. What is certain though, is that there's going to be more swearing, blood-letting and mammoth breasts on show than we've seen in many a month.

And for that, at least, we're very glad And what a sense of humour too The amputation-fetishist attacking you with a severed mannequin limb; the Evil Dead mini-game in the graveyard; the werewolf, golem and Chinese-monster scenes where you realise you're not the nastiest thing this world has to offer; the four-way split-ending; the crazy combat and the multiple paths through every level; the enormously varied character classes; the endless moral and political content expressed through the exposition of the world.

This is Deus Ex with vampires, and each time you play it rewards you. It was rushed out on the same day as Half-Life 2 was released! Duh, Activision! Also, developers Troika were shut down on the same day, so patches were left to the fans. Which was a problem because you couldn't finish the released version, due to a bug halfway through the game.

The old hotel in Santa Monica. This turns out to be a near-perfect in-game version of The Shining, full of poltergeists, kids' toys and a flashback that ends with you running through flames and plummeting through the vanishing ghostly floor of the hotel. Steve: "It's got that one with the big tits who looks like Britney Spears in it! The reason that Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is picking up a lot of steam despite being 15 years old is quite simple.

Combat in the game is action-based. The protagonist can fight unarmed, use melee weapons and firearms, or employ special vampire abilities. Melee combat is viewed from third-person perspective, but the view switches to first-person if the main character is using a gun.

Blood is used to activate the vampire disciplines, working similarly to magic points in other games. It can be replenished by feeding on certain types of enemies. The protagonist can also feed on innocent humans, though there are repercussions for that. The rules of the Masquerade forbid vampires to reveal their true nature to the humans. Openly feeding on humans violate the Masquerade; five Masquerade violations lead to an instant Game Over.

Feeding on humans with no witnesses present does not violate the Masquerade; however, killing an innocent human in process alerts the authorities and causes the player character to lose some of his or her humanity. Losing too much humanity results in the protagonist becoming more and more susceptible to frenzy, eventually turning into an uncontrolled beast. Many quests can be completed in different ways - brute force, stealth, diplomacy, intimidation, etc.

The player will also have to decide which faction the protagonist should side with throughout the game. Eventually, the player's choices will branch the storyline, leading it to one of the five possible endings. There are no reviews yet.