I don't get it. What's the problem? It seems absolutely fine. Not as good as the first game but perfectly satisfactory
>>729064910If they just named it anything other than Bloodlines 2 it’d be much better received
>>729064910i dont know what game that is but based on the UI it looks like prime time slop
>>729064910>Not as good as the first game but perfectly satisfactoryWhy would I play something that claims to be a sequel but is actively shittier in every way?
>>729064910It's a perfectly fine 6/10 non-Bloodlines game.
>>729064910>It seems absolutely fineyeah but if you actually tried playing (unfortunately, i did), it's a fake game. there is no real save system just bad checkpointing, but you have consumable items like potions that are on like, a persistent state. IE you go into combat, use your potions, if you fail and go back to previous checkpoint, the potions are still gone. hilarious little fumble that tells you chinese room don't make real games.the NPC dialogue bits, they look good in trailers, its the part that appealed to me. well, they only exist as mannequins in "safe" areas and not activated unless they are part of a quest step. it's really immersion breaking not to mention adds to the "fake game" chinese room speciality feeling. it also has the dialogue reaction thing like "X was intimidated by that" which is supposed to be for RPG games with branching story, faction reputations, etc. instead in VTM2 it's literally just a graphic, it does nothing.combat is weird your camera gets pulled hard by autoaim even on M+KB which is disorientating, but also it's not even matched up well so a lunge attack will fly right past an enemy and attack 5 meters behind them. there is also no block, and parry is only on a weird forward dash mechanic. which might be ok but you get swarmed by fast combo attacking goons, it's not like a clear "telegraph and parry" type game, but that's your only defence apart from spamming dash.the open world is really dead apart from random gangs of goons and collectable markers on rooftops, if feels like the tiniest slice of throwaway content from an BamHam Arkham game but it's 90% on the content here. you get dull "collect 10 wolf pelts" MMORPG quests within an hour, and it's the main quests. it's a gross parody of a video game but not in an intentional way, this was literally their best attempt at making a real game. fucking pathetic.
>>729065740>combat is weird your camera gets pulled hard by autoaim even on M+KB which is disorientatingYou can fix that I think, there's an option.I agree with your assessment but I feel like VTMB 2 may have succeeded if it was just a visual novel because the story seems reasonable. Fabien's voice helps a lot.
i would love to see the big pitch that tcr made to paradox that convinced them to keep throwing money at this game
>>729065740>it also has the dialogue reaction thing like "X was intimidated by that" which is supposed to be for RPG games with branching story, faction reputations, etc. instead in VTM2 it's literally just a graphic, it does nothing.It does actually do stuff. Every character has a set of reputation stats and it affects how they interact with you throughout the game. For example, act like a dick towards Ryong and she'll never have heart to hearts with you later. The game even chooses the music in certain scenes based on whether you are seen as "empathetic" "bully" "sage" and so on.>combat is weird your camera gets pulled hard by autoaim even on M+KB which is disorientatingThe new patch added some settings for that. You can disable aim lock, disable the fish-eye lens thing during combat, adjust the FOV, all that stuff.I'm still not a huge fan of how kicking and parrying works. It just never feels as good as it should.
The Christmas update broke some stuff. Side quests straight up aren't working for a lot of people. Seems tied to a problem where characters completely forget their relationship status with you. All the vent covers are rendering wrong now, which is weird. On the flipside, the other fixes are nice.
>>729064910I wanted Bloodlines 2, I wasn't very interested in this other VTM themed non-Bloodlines game, especially since it means that I won't get an actual Bloodlines 2.
>>729067484The Bloodlines 2 we got is probably a lot more like the Bloodlines 2 that was cancelled than most people realize. But until someone leaks the narrative material from the canned version, we just don't know. But a lot of things point towards it being the case. There are missions in the game that are either clearly based on a Hardsuit Mission or reused jump scares and stuff. The whole "go meet these NPCs around town in any order" mission structure from the Hardsuit Labs demo is found in the final game almost verbatim.The primary issue, IMO, is that Bloodlines 2 feels like a movie set. It feels like a facade. It's very strange. I've never played a game quite like it. It's so strange how you can't interact with anyone. How it so ruthlessly compartmentalizes the game world into "walk and talk" and "jump and fight". When you revist the weaver tower you can't enter the vents because all actions except walk, talk, and use are disabled in the lobby. You can't even crouch. There's this brutal combination of minimum viable product and an understaffed team trying to plug every possible bug by constraining the list of possible actions.
>>729067484>>729067760Also, the initial version of The Chinese Room's game had Fabien as the villain. (Possibly the Baron?) He was working with Elif (who evolved into Cemile, and then into Safia) to carry out some master plan that involved him being diablierized by you.Elif was very blatantly the final boss of the Hardsuit Labs version. There's a model where she is naked and covered in blood, just like Safia. So... it really makes you wonder how much of The Chinese Room's story, in the broad strokes, survived. Like watching a movie where it's pretty obvious a cancelled version was used as a reference.
>>729064964This. And I just want to add. For some reason my masquarade stopped working with the latest patch. Like I could embrace in the open and no one would notice. Game became infinitely better. But I realised I was playing an FPS version of Batman Arkham Origins. They should have dropped any delusions of being an RPG as well. No character customisation and no real choice matters except for two.
>>729067913Patch added New Game+ where you can adjust masquerade intensity, so something likely broke in your save. TCR's QA pipeline seems to be kind of dogshit. That, or the game is held together with string.
>>729067230>It does actually do stuff. Every character has a set of reputation stats and it affects how they interact with you throughout the game. For example, act like a dick towards Ryong and she'll never have heart to hearts with you later. The game even chooses the music in certain scenes based on whether you are seen as "empathetic" "bully" "sage" and so on.Thats not what he meant. When you do a game with a dialogue system there should be reprecussions. The first game understood this. This game however decieves the player into thinking anything they say has an impact. Only one choice will give you "a bad ending" in the entire game. The rest just depends on how many quests you do for a character and if you do ALL quests (all FOURTEEN side quests) it defaults to one ending. So you cuck yourself out of content either way.
The texture quality in VTMB2 is easily the most inconsistent I've seen since Resident Evil 6. High quality assets sitting right next to utterly terrible ones. It speaks to something being very wrong with the studio's art-tech department. The box where the Nomad's body was stored, a hero asset seen in close-up in multiple scenes, has some of the lowest resolution textures I've ever seen in a AAA game. The whole game is like this. It's baffling.
Whats the top 3 worst moments you had in this game?>lifeless world The only thing this game has in common with the first. But it's twenty twenty five. Just add a few moving cars. >Damsel showing up for literally no reason other than to tell you to return to the Prince. Hey remember that character? There she is! You can talk to her but its completely pointless!>autosave is such dogshitI. Hate. This. Have a manual save. We should be able to test out powers and see if we like it. Not be sent to the start of the night. And this is a personal thing but the fucking nerve of them to an achievement for finishing the game for each fucking clan. You got me fucked up if you think I'm playing this shit 5 more times.
>>729064910Unironically this. I enjoyed the game a lot. It was really fun and had fun charactersdeal w/it
>>729068078Because of the scope limitations, they decided not to have branching, and instead built the whole dialogue system around "Safia thinks you're a bully, so says something pissy here" and "Safia thinks you're very empathetic, so tries to suck up here" instead.>The rest just depends on how many quests you do for a character and if you do ALL quests (all FOURTEEN side quests) it defaults to one ending.No, it's far more complex than that. For example, the City of Kindred ending where all the factions agree to work together requires you to be constantly agreeable, constantly passive, show no ambitions to rule the city, and never push the balance of power in any particular direction. It's very hard to get.
>>729065071But enough about Vampyr.
>>729064910I hate this modern soulless UI that every game has nowadaysI heard they do it because its much easier to scale to different resolutions
Is Safia attractive? I don't think a single fucking character in this game looks... cute. I know its subjective but everyone just looks ugly. I only ask about Safia because of spoiler for the end. I guess Patience is kind of cute but apparently its a troon.
>>729067852>Like watching a movie where it's pretty obvious a cancelled version was used as a reference.
>>729068604Speaking of. How fucking lazy are these people that instead of having sex scenes they just cut to black and have one or two lines of pleasure? Is this amatuer hour? Even fucking GTA San Andreas had this shit down.
>>729068604Cutest girl was cut from the game
>>729067230i appreciate they've patched some basic stuff in like FOV and i think manual saves, and i would like to eventually play it again in the future and be able to have a reasonable time. i like the characters and dialogue. but this is what they launched with after such a long development time so i think it's only fair my impression and criticisms are based on the terrible product they delivered.
>>729068357>Just add a few moving cars.It's the middle of the night and the city is under lockdown because of the storm. I don't entirely disagree, though.>Hey remember that character? There she is! You can talk to her but its completely pointless!I imagine they had grander plans for her that were left on the cutting room floor. She shows up in the Benny DLC at least.>>729068357>I. Hate. This. Have a manual save.I think that's being added early next year. It was meant to be ready by now but got pushed back.
>>729068789>How fucking lazy are these people that instead of having sex scenes they just cut to black and have one or two lines of pleasure?The sex scenes were added really, really late in development. So late they don't show up in the ESRB rating. Everything about the game seems kind of fucked in terms of resource allocation and scoping. Until the last few months of dev there were no character romances at all.
>>729069108Safia became Cemile who became Safia. I do miss the party girl incarnation, though. As mentioned before, during early development Elif and Fabien were working together and Fabien was the game's villain.I find myself wondering how much time/money was wasted on rewrites. Like, there was a version of Safia where you had extensive conversations with her in ancient Turkish, completely cut from the final product.
>>729069756The game's dev priorities seem kind of wrong-headed in a lot of ways, unfortunately. Hard to say whether it was Paradox or the devs to blame. Paradox are definitely responsible to some degree, though. Devs have repeatedly made allusions to certain decisions being pushed on them from above.
>>729070365>Paradox are definitely responsible to some degreeThey picked a shitty studio twice in a row to create this abomination, instead of paying Obsidian (which has many ex-Troika employees) to create a true sequel.Hell, Obsidian is basically only creating BL1 style games for a while now.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don't really blame The Chinese Room. I feel like the whole thing was such a clusterfuck that they had to cobble together whatever bullshit they could for the cheapest price in order to make some money back from the dumpsterfire.It's not like Hardsuit labs made good games. Their best game is a pay-to-win mid as fuck FPS game that my friend used to play. I doubt their version would have been any good either.
>>729070612Obsidian hasn't made a good game since New Vegas.
>>729070612Obsidian literally just released The Outer Worlds 2, a game that I guarantee Bloodlines 2 is absolutely going to outlive in terms of cultural significance. TOW2 is bland as shit.
>>729070932I think The Chinese Room made the best out of a bad situation. But every time someone from the studio talks about the game it's always couched in this careful talk about how games are made up of compromises. I think that a lot of the people who worked on Bloodlines 2 are not really happy with what released. There are definitely some dumb choices made on purpose, and it boggles the mind how inefficient modern game devs are. But a lot of problems seem to boil down to "That would have cost more money, so we didn't do it".Although nobody seems willing to blame him, I think that Dan Pinchbeck leaving in 2023 was a huge problem. He couldn't handle the strain and they lost the lead writer, creative lead, and studio head in one blow. That disrupts a project. If he hadn't left Bloodlines 2 might have made it out the other side a bit more coherent, a bit less compromised.Something that is worth touching on is how fragmented the final game is. It's this smashed together collection of storylines, with two parallel lead characters, one of whom was added in the last 1/3 of development. The lead writer (Sarah Longthorne) admitted she didn't know who the rebar killer was until she played the game because she had been isolated from that side of things. A different group of people was doing the rebar killer stuff, the Fabien stuff, while she worked on the Phyre side of the game. This is why plot points like Gideon = The Gardener are so strange and disjointed and seem to come from nowhere. Because they did come from nowhere.
Kill yourself, tranny freak.You will never uphold the Masquerade.
>>729072256The masquerade is completely fucked. They need to stop pretending it can be upheld.
>>729065740>you go into combat, use your potions, if you fail and go back to previous checkpoint, the potions are still gone. hilarious little fumble that tells you chinese room don't make real games.Demon's Souls isn't a real game?
Bloodlines 2 is a game where if you don't like the melee combat you're absolutely fucked because it is primarily a brawler. The game's codename is "Wrestler". Thing is, this fixation on hand to hand combat was something that the game always had. I don't know why.
An easy 6/10 that dropped down to a 3/10 because of Fabien
>>729064910>perfectly satisfactoryDo you ever wonder if your parents say that about you?Do you think they're liars too?
>>729072652Fabien is the glue that makes the story work.
I found some stuff in the files for the Benny DLC.Seems like the strange ring Benny gave to Max came from The Gardener's hand.There's a Damsel chase sequence.There's a sequence where Benny opens the box.There's very, very early stuff for the Ysabella DLC. Two locations have been set up. The interior of Atrium, and Safia's lab under the conservatory.
The lack of proper sidequests is a huge mistake.
>>729064910Very nice. Now let's see some gameplay.
It's not perfectly fine because it's called "Vampire the Masquerade 2".
I'm playing again with the new patch, and the Pandora killing doesn't make sense. Maybe it'll be explained more in the DLC, but it doesn't make sense the way the other killings do, where Fabien is almost certainly the modern rebar killer. Pandora clearly struggled. And numerous wine bottles were smashed on the floor, yet nobody heard anything.Fabien is a bit perplexed by multiple aspects of the scene. There's the footprints that seem to just randomly walk around the room. They kinda match Fabien's shoes, which is a huge red flag, but why don't the footprints lead to any of the doors?
