For those that aren't of that caliber: Vampire: The Masquerade is an RPG in which you play...a vampire. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, where the objective is killing monsters and getting loot, Vampire is more about the introspection on the nature of the feral side of vampires, known as "the Beast" and trying not to succumb to it. And while there is more to it than that, that's the basic roleplaying reason by it. The emphasis here is on the roleplaying, developing the character and, again, trying to stave off the Beast.
...unless you're playing the other side of it, but that's a whole other can of worms. But luckily, you can get a crash course in the lore of the setting, including the separate factions and the legends of Caine and the Antediluvians (read: really, really old vampires)...right, I said Caine, as in Cain and Abel, with the former being the original vampire cursed by God.
...unless you're one of the vampires that come from Asia, but again...another can of worms.
Perhaps it'd be better to just skip the background on the RPG (it's not really that important anyway, and you do get the cliff notes), and get to the game itself. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was released by Troika Games and Activision back in 2004. It was an unplayable, buggy mess of a game, largely because Troika had a very truncated development cycle and a deadline from Activision that saw it sent out basically unfinished by the development team, who were already using an engine they were unfamiliar with.
However, like in many endeavors, the desire of gamers to enjoy a game has seen them go to astoundingly insane lengths before and Bloodlines has gotten better than most thanks to fan efforts. Even to this day, there are still mods out there being made for it, as well as patches and fixes being done up. The one in particular I was told to get was the "official" patch, currently in version 9 when I got a hold of it. Otherwise, the game is, as I said, a buggy and unplayable mess. So, thanks a bunch, internet!
As for the game itself, you can begin by picking one of several different clans of vampires - each with their own abilities and drawbacks - and set your stats, or you can do a questionnaire and have the game pick for you based on your answers. Having some familiarity with the Old World of Darkness, thanks to my gaming group, I decided to go for two different characters for "serious" playthroughs - a low-Conscience Ventrue with a fondness for being all silver-tongued and using a bat when that didn't work, and a Brujah who didn't care much for politics and preferred to hit, stab, or shoot her way out of situations.
Needless to say, given that I was working on shifting to a computer interface from console, I died quite a few times with that playstyle before I got the hang of it. Still, having gone through a few different characters to check out the disciplines, I found them (mostly) to be rather workable and mostly balanced, given that the player has to give up blood in order to use them...which dries up quick if you're not paying attention...which can often happen in intense combat situations, which leads to a Frenzy mode where the player loses control as their avatar goes on a killing rampage.
Which leads into the Humanity and the Masquerade ratings. Humanity is how much the player is resisting the Beast, holding on to their humanity. If your Humanity drops to zero, it's game over. Same goes the the Masquerade - the rules of Camarilla society that try to keep humans from learning about vampires (in Camarilla lands, anyway). If your Masquerade rating drops to zero, the game is also over. Simply put, you have to be just human enough and just hidden enough in order to keep things going.
...which is funny when very visible events like blowing up a warehouse are directly caused by you in the plot...but whatever.
Speaking of the plot, it goes as follows. Your character has been seduced by a member of your future clan and Embraced - that is, turned into a vampire. Unfortunately, the laws of the Camarilla state that a vampire has to seek permission from the Prince (the ruler of the city) to sire anybody and it seems that your sire didn't do that in the least. You witness the Final Death of your sire before you are nearly put to death yourself...saved at the last minute by the Prince's "generosity". From there, you're given a mission to go find a man named Mercurio and given a craphole safehouse in an apartment building to work from.
From there, you're given Los Angeles to travel around performing various quests. You can join in on the Main Quest or you can delve into several hours of side questing, which is all pretty in-depth and rather enjoyable all on its own, which several enjoyable characters (voice acting aside), including a jive-talking weapons dealer, a ghoul med tech, and a Japanese demon hunter (that is a demon hunter who is Japanese, not a Japanese demon who hunts).
But the Main Quest involves your sudden throwing into vampirism at the time near Gehenna - the destined vampire apocalypse where Caine and the Antediluvians will rise up and kill off all of vampire kind in a bloody...well, apocalypse. It's the whole metaplot that was running through the Classic World of Darkness's Vampire setting and is one of the main reasons why Masquerade is superior to its follow up Requiem, but that's neither here nor there.
Over the course of the quest, the player learns about a mysterious McGuffin with possible deep significance to Kindred society that has been brought to Los Angeles by parties and for reasons unknown. As several factions vie for control of it, the player is in an optimal position to help or harm others depending on their choices. The Camarilla, the Anarchs (a group of anarchist vampires if the name didn't tip you off), the Kuei-Jin (those Eastern vampires I mentioned that aren't vampires at all...sort of), and the Sabbat (the really, really bad and scary vampires) are all valid and workable options depending on both actions and dialogue choices within the game.
Granted, some of them are better than others, but I'm not going to spoil which ones are which.
And, of course, there's the option to just flip everyone off and walk away after the fan has been hit...which is what my Brujah did after what was essentially her worst and most confusing night ever.
Oh, right, nights, sorry...because this totally doesn't all take place on the same night or something...nevermind there's no rest period or anything. I joke, and I know that it has been mentioned by other reviewers, but how exactly do they justify this taking place over several nights when you never have periods where you must return to your domain to rest from the punishing light of the sun? It rather bugs me, but not enough that it cuts out my enjoyment of the game.
Really, I'm not joking. The only other complaints I have are the lack of customization of the player character (in appearance, there are other outfits as my Ventrue was glad to find out) and the fact that you can't learn other vampire disciplines (they're all based on clan, which can be a pain in certain sections - like, say, the Elizabeth Dane). Other than that, there's the combat, which is more me adjusting to computer controls versus console so I'm not going to knock the game for that. I like the story, I like the crash course in how the Vampire game works and some of the lore without getting insanely intrusive.
You can go in with the basic understanding of "Oooh, vampires!" and just roll with it without losing too much in the process. After all, nobody needs a glossary when first stepping into a new world, they want to be immersed, and it's true to the RPG as many vampire characters can come and go without ever really knowing the whole truth of the Final Nights.
Mind you, it's not true in one respect - it's too combat-heavy. But a game where you go around doing nothing but contemplating existential dread and learning to quell the raging Beast that dwells inside of you would just get boring...so they pepper in a few combats and blowing up a warehouse (like one does in such a game). Though it is true in that it's not like D&D where you get experienced based on the bodies you've piled up, but strictly for completing quests and finding unique(ish) solutions to objectives...which carries its own issues, but for the game it works fine.
Not much to say other than, after playing it, I know why it's so beloved. It's got a few flaws that can't be worked out with patches (or can, given some of the mods I've seen), but I'm not going to knock it for that. Troika was trying to make an awesome game and it really does show, there was a lot of love in the room for what they were doing. The setting is good, the designs are pretty excellent all around, and it has more than a few healthy doses of humor sprinkled around (such as a call-in radio show of hilarious proportions and the chance for a Malkavian to get into an argument with a Stop Sign). And for a game like this, I can't really think of much more to ask for.
Oh, and a final note - Don't. Open. IT!
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is now available from Troika Games and Activision for Microsoft Windows.
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