Vampire: The Masquerade Games, Warning - Spoilers Ahead! Options

[TheCheshireKhajiit]

With V:TM-B 2 just announced, Khajiit thought we could use a thread devoted to the series! Please post any news on the new game you find interesting (or disappointing should that happen) or stuff related to the old game. Doing a new play through as a Nosferatu? Tell us about it here! This one will probably pick back up where he left off with the Malkavian he started last year in the next few weeks.

[Darkness Eternal]

Ventrue: the silver tongued devils! Khajiit’s first V:TM-B character was a Ventrue because their in game description reminded this one of Imperials from TES.

Please post your story if/when you get it finished!

For sure. Ventrue is like that vampire clan from Cyrodiil; all about secrecy, manipulation, suave . . . and I like their suits!

I'm playing the first game right now and the story is pretty good. I'm glad the writer and composer are back for the second game. Just the interviews alone give me some high hopes. The recent interview sheds light on it.

They have the perfect setting for it:

There’s been a big change in the last 30 years. Seattle is trying to figure out its identity. It’s a mix of the old, where originally it’s known for arts and music and the environment, and now we’re going into the tech space where everything’s being built up. How much do you change before the city kind of loses its identity? It’s something we deal with on a daily basis, to be honest. We encounter it everywhere we go in Seattle.

Kipling: It’s constantly changing.

Obviously vampires are attracted to power and politics. Seattle has a lot of power in that respect, on a global basis. It was really the perfect setting, not just speaking to the city of Seattle as a character, but also the political nuance of vampire society, the dark underground, the noir. It fit.

While Vampyr was a decent game, it did have numerous flaws in story and choices. I think the direction they're going makes lots of sense, especially for a vampire-centric game.

GamesBeat: For people who haven’t played the Masquerade before, what makes a vampire in Vampire: The Masquerade different from other bloodsuckers in media?

Mitsoda: Vampire the Masquerade is generally about the vampires staying secret. Unlike True Blood or even Buffy, I would argue, they are not out in the open. People do not know about them. They cannot know about them. Even now, as Dale [a character from Bloodlines II] says, it’s harder than ever to be a vampire. There are camera phones everywhere. Vampires have to be especially careful. There’s that element of your identity, keeping your identity secret. No one can know about what you are. And yet you’re a social creature. You have to go out there. You have to do business. You have to seduce people. You have to drink blood. You have to walk among mortals, but they cannot know who you are. The other thing that makes the Vampire setting different is, obviously, with the first game as well, it’s a much more mature universe. It’s not just in what we show as far as gore or anything that, but it’s about mature themes. As far as the dialogue goes, we’re exploring characters that are very nuanced and different from your average RPG, where it’s about good and evil. In the world of Vampire, you’re a monster. You’re struggling against the beast inside you. You’re constantly not only struggling to keep your identity secret, but you’re struggling with the thing that you are.

GamesBeat: Thing I’ve always associated with World of Darkness vampires is that they’re social creatures. But they can’t be social in the way we can be social. That paradox, if you’ll forgive me — do you play that up in this game?

Mitsoda: Oh, yeah. A whole lot of the game is just going out in the world and getting involved with the people there. Going to the bar and socializing, making contacts, figuring out how you can play people to your benefit. That’s what you do as a vampire. You’re not just skulking in the sewers. You’re not in a dungeon or something like that. You’re in the world, around people. Mostly you’re around humans. There aren’t nearly as many vampires as there are people.

Schlütter: Also, the idea of starting out as a thin-blood is more like—you’re being thrown into this world. It’s a very sudden experience. You still have a human background. You still need to figure out how to go about in this new world that’s been opened to you, as the character you were in life. You still carry that with you. That includes social connections and social traits as well. That’s something we play with a lot.

Kipling: It also empowers the player’s own agency, too, in terms of how they want to move through the world and interact with the world in terms of being that monstrous vampire, or playing more to the human, social side of it, engaging.

GamesBeat: Dale was talking about bagged blood. I assume he gets it from blood banks or distributors. Can you do that and not actually feed on people, if you want to go that way?

Mitsoda: The thing about bag blood — yes, you can get it. But bag blood just helps you get blood. The big thing for vampires in our game is to get resonance, which comes from feeding on people. It’s getting the emotional rush from feeding on people. Bag blood is like if all your food was Cheetos. You can technically get by on that, but it’s really not what you want to eat.

Kipling: Also, Dale as a character, his entire motivation is to remain cooped up in his apartment and not be involved in anything in the World of Darkness. It’s obviously a slightly different motivation than what we want the player to engage with as they progress through the world and try to figure out their place in it.

Mitsoda: It’d be a pretty boring game if you just played like Dale.

GamesBeat: Can you make friends with humans who willingly give you their blood and feed off the emotions of altruism and friendship that way? Or is that just too lovey-dovey for this game?

Mitsoda: I will say, you’ll definitely build some relationships in the game. I can’t go into specifics right now. But I mean, you—part of your core as a vampire is to make connections, to fool people, to get close to them in a way that you can use to get blood from them. Generally, vampires can be romantic, they can be nice, but at the end of the day they’re parasitic. They need blood, and they’ll do whatever it takes.

Kipling: The question itself is somewhat insidious, because it suggests that the motivation to become friends is to be able to drink their blood, which then questions the motivation for that relationship. It’s not the case that you meet somebody, you just happen to like them and become friends, and then consequently you also might be able to get blood from them. There’s definitely a motivation in blood for the player. That drives a lot of their actions and choices.

GameBeat: What’s the hardest thing about writing a vampire character?

Mitsoda: I have some experience now, so it does come a bit naturally. [Laughs]

I will say, the difficult thing in any character is just trying to figure out their voice and who they are, what they want. As far as vampires go, the way that I approach vampires is that, ultimately, they are locked in at death. There’s this idea for them that they can change, that they can become better, that they can retain their humanity, but ultimately, their biggest weakness is that they can’t really change when they’re a vampire. They’re whoever they were when they died. That’s how I approach vampires. But there are so many places that can be taken as far as where characters go. Vampires themselves, and especially in the Masquerade—there are so many different archetypes of vampires. You have the Anne Rice seductive type of inspiration. You have the corporate vampire, the one that latches on to a business and uses money because money is power. You have vampires that are on the street getting involved in organized crime, because they can hide there. No one talks in that world anyway. It’s always just figuring out how vampires would infiltrate various parts of society, and then what is their experience like when they’re there?

So far here are some facts about the game:

-Brian Mitsoda is lead writer (just like the original) alongside Chris Avellone and Cara Ellison

-Rik Schaffer is composing again

-Set in Seattle

-Seamless hub world

-Multiple hubs

-Direct sequel to 2004's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

-Takes place 15 years after Bloodlines

-Game starts off with a Mass Embrace at Pioneer Square where player is among the new vampires born from the event, you're captured and brought upon a court of prominent vampires like the first game to recount the events of the mass embrace before being sentenced to death, court is firebombed and you escape, thrust into Seattle to find out who's responsible

-In the trailer, the curly haired vampire with the blood bag is Dale Talley who is a recluse and is one of the first characters you meet. He is responsible for easing the player character into the World of Darkness.

-Player is a thin-blood at first, later on you can choose a clan.

-No quest markers

-First-person with contextual third-person actions just like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.

-Fan-favourite characters from Bloodlines returning

-You can use telekinesis, turn into mist to go through vents and glide

-You can scale buildings, there's an emphasis on verticality

-Level design is very reminiscent of the original Deus Ex in the sense that you're offered many different pathways to approach a particular scenario

-The protagonist is not voiced

-Way more dialogue than Bloodlines

-Huge emphasis on character creation. You can choose your background, gender pronoun, employment history, body type and fashion

-NPCs can react to you depending on what background you chose for your character in character creation

-Loads of secrets and hidden pathways to find

-Seattle as a hub world is described as "very active", crowds gather outside clubs and muggers prey on victims in side allies, all seamlessly done.

-Main side-questline involves hunting down and finding all the other thin-blood created from the Mass Embrace, each will have their own story about entering into their new life e.g you might find a married thin-blood struggling to deal with their newfound powers

-Blood resonance from the 5th edition will appear in this game. Using your enhanced vampire senses, you can see when NPCs are experiencing an intense emotion like fear, desire, pain, joy and anger. Humans give off a bright aura. Drinking a person with a strong resonance will give you an immediate bonus to things like melee power or seduction. If you drink a particular resonance constantly, you will acquire a taste for it and this will give you permanent buffs called "merits".

-If you continuously suck on people's blood in full view of the public, they'll be more wary of going to those areas and you'll see less citizens wandering the streets

-Emphasis on fluid combat, using vampiric speed to slide in and out of melee range and slash people and execute them with melee weapons. You can get special cinematic finishers in combat when you execute people a la Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Counters are in. Guns exist and are treated as temporary opportunities, you pick em up, use it, then discard it and move on.

-It is not confirmed whether or not you can carry weapons like in the original, pre-order skins for weapons point to being able to do so.

-Game has modding support, available Day 1.

-Sleep ingame. "We do have ways to push you through the story. You can go to sleep…and sometimes things will happen while you’re sleeping. Other times, you’ll need to sleep, vampires need rest too."

This post has been edited by Darkness Eternal: Mar 27 2019, 12:57 AM

[TheCheshireKhajiit]

*snip*

Ooh, this is sounding good!!