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| Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by FABIO 11/24/2004, 3:43pm PST | ||||
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Creexul :( wrote: I thought they were more Deus Ex 1; not huge, but they at least simulate a city better than fucking DE2 cubicles. Other than the other cool things of that nature, the graphics will probably result in the most stuttering and frameloss and chugging this game has to offer. :( Holy motherfuck this game skips. Both the visual and audio. A lot. Several cutscenes will play the audio well ahead of the video (in the intro you will hear a sword chopping someone's head off a good 5 seconds before it should). Tip: Turn all the details DOWN when you get to the plaguebearer crackhouse, or it will chug even more. Yeah in the end I'd say calling it Deus Ex meets Fallout meets Shadowrun is pretty dead on. Despite the major skipping it's still quite playable, probably because the combat isn't (usually) that heavy and doesn't require precision. I did think the way they handled combat is the weakest point of the game (I haven't gotten to the horrible sewer level yet though). There are a lot of quests where you can talk your way past, but also several (many of them mandatory) where you have to fight. So you'll be thinking no sweat my pussy diplomat/stealth character can just talk or sneak his way through anything when all of a sudden holy shit you're fighting a pretty tough boss. It doesn't sink anywhere near to the retarded levels of Arcanum's (fun fact: anyone that purchased Arcanum can feel okay about downloading this game (NOT THAT I DID THAT) because Troika owes them one) mandatory Diablo dungeons though. You also don't get NPC party members so you're stuck relying on your own character to fight it out. I guess Troika relized this though so they threw in a universal "blood buff" spell that any clan can use that temporarily buffs all your physical stats up to max. This makes putting points into those stats pretty pointless. It also makes it so you can handle pretty much any fight no matter how weak your character is. I have pretty much the worst possible stats for combat (zero in melee and 1 in every physical, dodge, and defense) but with blood buff so far I've been able to carve through every fight with the same crappy melee weapons I've had since the beginning (tire iron, knife, SEVERED ARM). I'm also able to sneak around virtually undetected with the lowest possible stealth rating. I guess if your stealth rating is above '1' you can sneak right in front of peoples' faces and they won't notice? So anyways the balance feels a bit off since they included mandatory fights you couldn't work around with other skills and instead of fixing this they just throw in a spell that makes you into a killing machine no matter how weak your combat stats are (even supposed pussies like the Toreador get an awesome bullet time ability that's actually one of the best combat spells in the game). They maybe could have used more special abilities. In Deus Ex you got all those different Biomods, in Bloodlines each clan only gets 3 predetermined "spells", one of which is always some useless crap you'll never use (auspex, the equivalent to aura view from Psi-ops, only about 1% as useful). I guess this is to promote replaying it as different clans, but some more variety or options would have been nice. In this sense I guess it's more like Deus Ex 2 where you only used 1 or 2 biomods the whole time. Technically you get more spells as you put more points into an ability, but each new one is pretty much just a more powerful version of the previoius one, only now you'll have to scroll through one more spell before you get to the one you want all in the heat of combat. One annoying problem is an RPG nuisance I thought we had seen the last of 10 years ago, NPC traffic jams. I guess everyone in the Vampire universe needs their personal space, because everyone gives off a 3 foot radius forcefield that blocks you; in a normal sized hallway someone standing in the middle of it will block you. NPC's will not automatically step out of your way to let you pass like in every other game for the past 10 years. Try to lure a hooker into an alley only to have her block you in and the only way out is to wait and hope she walks out of the way or kill her which will result in humanity and possible masquerade loss. If it happens while you're in elysium then you can't attack them and are forced to wait for them to move. p.s. If you're going to put any points into intimidate or seduction, do it with cheats, because they're useless. |
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 11/24/2004, 1:29am PST  Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 11/24/2004, 3:02am PST NWA ref: awesome. NT by 11/24/2004, 10:09am PST Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 11/24/2004, 11:07am PST Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 11/24/2004, 6:11pm PST Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 11/24/2004, 3:43pm PST Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 12/03/2004, 1:23am PST Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines by 12/03/2004, 10:35am PST |
