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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 announced for March 2020
Official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYvWfDxhm_s
Website: https://www.bloodlines2.com
Up until the announcement an hour ago, Paradox Interactive were doing a fake "Tender" app teaser/promo thing. There was some kind of countdown involved which ended with this announcement, entertaining to watch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/399100804?t=03h52m54s
Hmm, I have never actually played the originals and they're on sale on GOG for $2 and $7 right now.... so can anyone who has let me know; Nostalgia aside, are they really worth playing and do they hold up (or are they super janky)?
Both. Like many games of the era it is pretty janky, and worth playing. Thankfully there's an overhaul patch that helps with a lot of the issues.
Bloodlines definitely. It's a classic often compared with Deus Ex but with vampires. Great atmosphere and direction and player agency. There are definitely some annoying/janky parts but the unofficial patch fixes a lot of stuff.
Redemption not really worth playing IMO.
The must-have unofficial patch for Bloodlines: https://www.moddb.com/mods/vtmb-unofficial-patch (Wow! Updated as recently as a month ago!)
The original Deus Ex is one of my all-time favorite games and I have played it dozens of times over the years. So if people are comparing it to that then it's in excellent company. And I definitely don't mind some oldschool game jank so long as everything else makes it worth playing... so I picked up Bloodlines on all your recommendations and will make sure to check out the various patches/mods before playing (GOG's forums are pretty good for that).
Thanks (@MimicSquid and @Thrabalen too).
VtM: Bloodlines is a great game with a fantastic story that suffers from 2000s Graphics. What's that? That's when animators decided that a character standing still looked like it wasn't animated, so everybody sways and moves all the time.
That's fantastic news! Especially since both the tabletop and digital sides of Vampire have been in an awful state since the mid-2000s.
Hopefully the tabletop game also has some good news coming its way. White Wolf was resurrected to put out a new edition, and it was such a dumpster fire that I actually agreed when Paradox shut them down again. Now they're being outsourced to Modiphius, which will hopefully handle it better. (Though Onyx Path has been trucking along with the old editions just fine, as far as I can tell.)
I look forward to this being randomly taken off Steam and made an Epic Game Store exclusive a month before release.
I know that Epic snark is the cool fad of the week, but Paradox is deeply tied into the Steam ecosystem, using it for their multiplayer and modding support. I'd be very surprised to see them go with a different platform.
Paradox also has their own storefront and launcher too, so if they ever do decide to do exclusives (not that I think they ever would) it would most likely be through that and not EPIC.
I didn't care about Epic pushing their own digital storefront with exclusives until they snagged The Outer Worlds. Now I'm mad on the inside and still indifferent on the outside.