Notes on V:tM - Bloodlines and Searching

Over the past few days, I’ve been playing Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, a 2004 CRPG from the now-defunct Troika Studios, (also known for their 2001 Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.) Bloodlines didn’t do very well commercially and has never received widespread recognition.  This is at least partly due to the fact that it released as an almost unplayably buggy kludge of in-house code jammed into an early alpha version of Valve’s Source engine (it was the first game not made by Valve to use Source) and never received adequate patching because Troika folded less than 3 months after it released.  Nevertheless, it somehow developed a fanatically devoted fan community, which, unlike most fan communities, continue to release not only mods, maps, and other extensions to the game, but also an extensive body of bug-fix patches.  (There are two major competing patches: Wesp5’s “Unofficial Patch” and Tessera’s “True Patch.”  Theological differences between the partisans of these patches have led to years of bloody fighting, including a moderately epic edit war on Wikipedia.)

So, six years later, thanks to the efforts of these extremely determined fans, Bloodlines is in a reasonably playable state, although there are still plenty of noticeable bugs and a lot of the game still feels incomplete. 

The game is interesting for a lot of reasons.  For one thing, it manages to really nail a big part of what I think of as the normative tone of tabletop Vampire: the Masquerade, and maybe even the Old World of Darkness  generally.  Besides a certain indefinable rightness about the whole thing, here are a just a few of the crucial elements:

• Large amounts of content in nightclubs and bars, almost all owned, if not patronized entirely by, vampires
• Taking the “darkness” in “World of Darkness” literally, so that you have to turn up your monitor brightness a lot to be able to see things in many areas
• Frantic and incongruous juxtapositions of a carnivalesque superfluity of supernatural beings
• The reflexive and unconsidered inclusion of extremely large amounts of material involving sexual assault and exploitation as proof of its “dark,” “adult,” and “serious” qualities, including one particularly onerous characterization built tooth-grindingly badly around a character’s response to sexual abuse
• Gameplay that centers around having the important vampires in the city, who are all not only more powerful but also more interesting and cooler-looking than you, with nicer apartments, order you around on a whole bunch of errands
• Evil deeds, especially violence, feed the Beast within you and risk your very sanity, except when it’s sort of an action scene and they don’t
• Similarly, obvious use of supernatural powers threatens the Masquerade and risks revealing your supernatural nature, except when it’s sort of an action scene and it doesn’t

So, as you can see, this faithfulness to the source material is not necessarily a good thing.  But it’s still a pretty impressive thing — most CRPGs based on licensed tabletop settings have not really nailed the feel of those settings, even if their mechanics were very faithful, they used lots of signature characters and places from the setting, and they were really excellent games.  The Baldur’s Gate games are great, but not much like normative Forgotten Realms play; the Sega Genesis Shadowrun is really good, but not much like normative Shadowrun play, and so on.

And, just in its own right, Bloodlines is a really good example of the genre of the “immersive sim” genre of CRPG, exemplified by games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, the kind of RPG that, as this excellent series of Rock, Paper Shotgun interviews discusses, looked like the future of videogames 10 years ago but is now a weird niche genre.

Bugginess and incompleteness aside, it’s also a pretty strong example of the genre, and explores a lot of material that canonical examples like SS2 and Deus Ex don’t, particularly with regards to character-differentiated dialogue, non-violent and other alternative conflict resolutions, and so on.  In general, though, Bloodlines is not very mechanically innovative — but it does have one element that I really like (although it doesn’t commit to it hard enough) that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and that’s how it deals with finding items. 

CRPG players tend to want the chance to do a lot of exploration, and they tend to want to be rewarded for that exploration.  I’m not against this tendency, but I think exploration should be meaningful, contextualized, and involve seeing genuinely novel and cool things.  Unfortunately, in practice, CRPG developers tend to replace a lot of their meaningful exploration with a superfluity of the activity of looking or searching.  This tends to involve hiding most of the game’s useful equipment in seemingly random, hard-to-see places around the game environments; in particularly serious examples, it involves heavily padding out the game’s environments with lots of self-similar, copy-pasted environments with useful equipment strewn about them.  Some of the popular CRPGs of recent years provide particularly egregious examples: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and the first Mass Effect all come to mind.  This tends to irritate me, because I usually get bored and become unwilling to search every shoebox and closet and side room about a quarter of the way into the game, and then I get very angry three-quarters of the way into the game when I discover that the game has punished me for not looking in every toilet by denying me the only person that can unlock doors, or my advanced character class, or the cosmic nuclear death sword.

Bloodlines tries to abstract a lot of this activity of looking away from player skill and endurance into character skill.  Along with social skills, and combat skills, and so on, characters also have an “Inspection” skill (Perception + Investigation).  This is the skill that lets you notice things.  Important items, secret entrances, and so on, send up bright blue bubbles that are noticeable even when they’re behind or under other objects; the better your Inspection, the higher the proportion of items that send up blue bubbles.

I was extremely excited about this at first, when I thought that these objects actually weren’t accessible at all without a good Inspection.  The thing that really excited me about this, I suppose, was not just that it offered a way to have a bunch of stuff in the game without having to obsessively search for it, but that it offered a way to make finding items a viable part of the aspect of CRPG play that involves differential character abilities and tactical options about overcoming challenges, rather than just an obsessive task that pads play-hours and feeds the aspect of CRPG play that involves inventory management. 

I discovered, though, that objects are still present in the environment when you have a low Inspection; they are just tiny and obnoxiously hard to find.  But the possibilities of really committing to this mechanic are pretty interesting: actually causing objects to not be accessible at all without a suitable Investigation score would be far better, would remove any incentive whatsoever to look under every trash can and in every sock drawer.  This could go even farther: perhaps contextual GUI elements pointing me towards everything interesting in my surroundings, via a vision mod (ala Batman: Arkham Asylum’s detective vision, but less  powerful and intrusive) or switchable compass flags?  And this doesn’t even remove the possibility of hardcore obsessive searching: achievement-granting items could still be hidden in every toilet, but taken away from the core of gameplay.  So many possibilities!