It’s time for another Game Masters retrospective, and this time we’re taking a look at Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, released for Windows in November 2004.
Bloodlines didn’t manage to light up the sales charts for very long, nor did it receive universal acclaim from critics, but it quickly went on to achieve cult status.
Like Morrowind and Baldur’s Gate II, the subjects of our previous two retrospectives, it’s an RPG that’s so good that its dated graphics can’t spoil the experience.
Bloodlines has aged better in this regard than the other two, partly because it’s a little less old, partly because its graphics tech was state-of-the-art at the time of release, but mostly because of its brilliant art design.
The best games in this genre rely on gameplay to achieve immersion, with beautiful graphics just icing on the cake, which is why they often stand the test of time much better than games from other genres released in the same year.
That’s also why this probably won’t be the last RPG that ends up with a retrospective here.
Immersion is of course only valuable if what you’re getting immersed in is interesting, and there are few game worlds more interesting than the one on offer here.
Bloodlines is set in Los Angeles, or at least the version of it that is to be found in the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade by White Wolf Publishing.
Troika Games’ work here ranks right up there with the best depictions of a dark fantasy urban environment ever created in any form of media, a nocturnal playground pulsating with a palpable sense of mystery and sinister energy. It’s a setting that’s easy to get lost in and impossible to forget.
You play a male or female vampire belonging to one of seven clans, the choice of which affects not just your starting abilities, but also dialogue options and the rest of the story. There’s a lot of replay value here just thanks to this, with the insane Malkavian and monstrous Gangrel clans providing a completely different experience to the more “mainstream” ones.
How you decide to approach the many challenges you’ll come up against is up to you; do you want to go in guns blazing, or rely on melee attacks and special abilities? Are you the sort of vampire who follows the rules of vampire society and the “masquerade” which keeps ordinary humans unaware of the existence of the supernatural, or do you throw caution to the wind? Whatever your idea of the perfect vampire to play, be it inspired by Anne Rice or George A. Romero, Bloodlines will accommodate you (thankfully this was long before Twilight existed — sorry, fans of sparkly blood suckers).
Giving you so much choice would be meaningless without a good story and writing, but thankfully this is the area where Bloodlines is probably at its strongest. I’ve yet to play a game in any genre with better writing, not just in terms of the overall plot and dialogue, but even down to the attention paid to the junk email you might encounter on a PC you hack.
An RPG that gives you real choices and also makes those choices meaningful would be a very good one. So would one that has a very strong narrative with well fleshed-out, believable non-player characters. A game that manages to do both at the same time would be that rare masterpiece that keeps rewarding those who return to it again and again, and Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines is that game.
