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First Person Shooters (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Source Engine Vampire Title Explored 33

Posted by simoniker from the half-life's-fanged-little-brother dept.
Thanks to Eurogamer.net for their preview of Vampire:The Masquerade - Bloodlines, with new info and screenshots on the FPS/RPG hybrid from Troika, the creators of Fallout and Arcanum, and the first announced title apart from Half-Life 2 to use Valve's Source Engine. According to a Troika representative, "Bloodlines is the first game to combine the classic RPG feel with a first person shooter engine", and Eurogamer also single out the return of the classic RPG 'conversation tree' as providing fresh gameplay ideas: "For example, your character may have excellent seduction skills, or be part of a specific clan that allows you to ask questions or offer responses otherwise unavailable to you, and these 'special' branches of the conversation will be shown in a different font to indicate this."
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Source Engine Vampire Title Explored More

Source Engine Vampire Title Explored

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  • ""and these 'special' branches of the conversation will be shown in a different font to indicate this""

    Yep, and in real life, the text you hear after X special event is GREEN (!?).
    Oh, sorry. That's Neverwinter nights.

    But still, SOOOOOOOO REALISTIC for an rpg. I guess you gotta tell the (l)users what text is different. Cant actually use your head to figure it out yourself.

    • Realism is overrated (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Amit J. Patel ( 14049 ) <amitp@cs.stanford.edu> on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @03:47PM (#6688852) Homepage Journal

      I'm playing a game. I don't want it to be realistic. I don't want to deal with eating, bathroom breaks, or "that time of the month". I don't want to wait 8 hours while my characters sleep. I want to be able to pause the game. I don't want to deal with colds and flus and lyme disease. I don't want to deal with dying without being able to reload. I don't want to play the boring parts of the story.

      As far as special colors and fonts go, my random guess would be that for replayability, you want to help the player the second time through (as you're playing a different clan/race/class) by emphasizing the text that may change. You normally skip the long text the second time you play the game, so you need something to draw your eye to the things you need to pay attention to.

      Realism is overrated in games. The point of the game is to escape real life, not to emulate it.

      - Amit [stanford.edu]

      • Re:Realism is overrated (Score:5, Funny)

        by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @04:24PM (#6689179) Journal
        I don't want to deal with colds and flus and lyme disease.

        But for some reason you do want to deal with Lycanthropy? What, do you expect the game designers to anticipate your every whim? Jesus.
      • seems to me that it could be a dead gice-away to what you are supposed to do.

        But I will hold off judgement.

        because it could also be an indication that an option means you are using a power which has risks/costs in which case you need to know about it.

        In my opinion though, if one of your options is because someone with special access (friends in the paper RPG) is quitly pulling strings for you, you should not know that is a special thing for you if it is being treated normaly by the NPC. So I think could
    • Hmmmm. Underly realistic vampires. I'm real concerned.

      As a player, if I want a realistic game, I won't be playing one with vampires. As it is, this sounds like a pretty cool game.

  • First RPG to use an FPS engine? (Score:3, Informative)

    by skyknytnowhere ( 469520 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @02:59PM (#6688477)
    Haven't they heard of Deus Ex? System Shock 2? Please.

    RPGs and FPSs have been mixed many times, the first person RPG having been ignored lately. But games like Ultima Underworld, the Bard's Tale series, and numerous others that focus on exploring from a first person perspective.

    skye
    • Thankyou

      I like Troika, but comments like "we are the first" when they are very clearly not, do nothing but make if difficult to not like them less.
    • No kidding!

      Daggerfall was a first person RPG and it came out in, what, '96?

      That's the earliest one I can remember, but I doubt it was the first.

    • I'm trying to recall what engine each of those used. They didn't say they were the first to combine FPS and RPG genres, they said they were first to create an RPG using an FPS game engine (Namely the Half-Life 2 Source engine). Since I can't recall if any of those other games you mention used an FPS game engine or just used their own custom engines, I can't tell if they're right or wrong, but I thought the argument was based on an incorrect interpretation of their comment.

  • First person shooter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @03:05PM (#6688510)
    "...first game to combine the classic RPG feel with a first person shooter engine."

    Geez and I've been playing Morrowind these past couple years thinking I'd hit gold. Thanks for straightening me out guys!

  • Anachronox was. 3d game glossary [bluesnews.com] [http://www.bluesnews.com/guide/qe/games.htm]

  • Its using Valves Source engine features.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @03:48PM (#6688865) Journal
    Both the exterior and interior are on a par with anything you may have seen in Half-Life 2, but with a darker, grimier, nocturnal edge. Any NPC you happen to come across is not only rendered with immense attention to detail but talks to you with a level of facial animation and lip synching that can't fail to impress.

    This really is an Amazing engine. Valve has out did themselves with the features for character interaction and the enviroment. This engine will be the choice for games for the next 3-5 years.

    Also, I read that HL mods will be able to be imported with minimal code tweaking. I cant wait to see CS ported to this engine, or even Day of Defeat.

    As American Army was the first to use Unreal's 2003 engine, Bloodlines is the first to use the "Source" HL2 engine.

  • The original Vampire: The Masquerade PC game (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mmdurrant ( 638055 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @03:59PM (#6688959)
    I played the first Vampire game and really enjoyed it. It was based on Quake3 technology somehow or at least it used Q3Radiant as the level editor.
    The coolest thing was that all the game logic was implemented in Java, making mods for it pretty darn easy. My friends and I had a good time creating quests and attributes/disciplines. I hope the new one is just as extensible.
  • I wonder if the creators of Vampire will be as open to mod and level creation as Valve is. With the use of the source engine, I think that there will be many tools available to the community but developer support is crucial too. I guess time will tell.
    • I wonder if the creators of Vampire will be as open to mod and level creation as Valve is. With the use of the source engine, I think that there will be many tools available to the community but developer support is crucial too.

      What exactly would it mean to you, to create a mod based on Vampire as opposed to HL2? If you were going to strip a game down to the engine and build your own unique gameplay and content, there aren't that many differences between what you'd have left of our stuff and what you'd ha
      • You bring up a good point, an engine is an engine, but there might be some game specific stuff that mod developers can use. I wouldn't expect much from Troika from an engine standpoint, but I think that a friendly attitude toward mod developers (ie not hassling them over using game content and being helpful when it comes to questions) would go a long way toward developing an active community around the game.

  • Time of Judgment (Score:2, Informative)

    by etherlad ( 410990 )
    Bloodlines will, Enter-the-Matrix-like, feature the Time of Judgment (i.e. Gehenna) prominently as part of its story. And there are some revelations about Gehenna which will only be revealed to those who play Bloodlines.
  • also single out the return of the classic RPG 'conversation tree' as providing fresh gameplay ideas: "For example, your character may have excellent seduction skills, or be part of a specific clan that allows you to ask questions or offer responses otherwise unavailable to you, and these 'special' branches of the conversation will be shown in a different font to indicate this."

    What, like KOTOR? Or, gee, Fallout?

    • Shh! You're revealing the unoriginality of everything they're hyping!

      I wish they'd just say something really cool, like "We're totally sticking to the rulebook" or "We're aiming for an entirely open-ended game."

      I mean, the things they are touting are akin to announcing a new RPG system and being like "We've got, like, 3 new types of dice and really cool paper in our books."

      You don't buy an RPG for the dice or the paper, you buy it for the content.

      skye

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