Junior Adventurer's Guild - June: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

[Crowned Puppet]

So far I do not think I can recommend the antitribu mod

Wait until you fight common Hunters equipped with AK-47s that deal almost half your health in couple of shots, and

► Show Spoiler

Grout's wife. Yes, his actual wife you see at the end of mansion.

[Jordy]

In Downtown, there is a key in the Skylines 6th apartment behind a vase. I can't grab it and when I grabbed the vase, the key falls behind the cabinet. Is this intentional or bad luck? My last save was before I entered the building and went through all the floors.

Edit: Nevermind, just watched a video and someone managed to pick it up without moving the vase. Not sure why it wouldn't let me.

[logincrash]

Asides from rubbing yourself along the wall, you can gain a little speed boost while strafing left and right while going forward. Changing the direction and moving diagonally will speed you up a tiny bit. Not as fast as the wall hugging method, but it is noticeable enough.

Also, I didn't take the screenshot, but there's a guy getting a BJ in a corner right outside the Confession club.

Took the screenshot this time.

[Oyster Sauce]

Almost done KotOR and then I can get into VTMB!

[Finarfin]

So far I do not think I can recommend the antitribu mod

>an alien corpse
Unimmersive piece of **** mod.

[Finarfin]

Well, I got the itch again. Time to play VTM:B again.

[Finarfin]

Obviously answered the questionnaire and got the Tremere.
Went straight to the astrolite, killed them and went back to Mercurio and did a little detour to get Heather.

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Jeez lady it's just the ankaran sarcophagus

[logincrash]

Which ever ******* ****** did the library quest for the Unofficial Patch Plus deserves to get his arms wrenched out of the sockets and kneecaps stabbed through with a screwdriver. The boss fight sucks major **** with the ***** boss teleporting around after 1-2 melee hits and peppering you with an Uzi. And then the ******* elevator jumpscare is a rotten and mold-covered cherry on top of the **** cake.

[1998]

Which ever ******* ****** did the library quest for the Unofficial Patch Plus deserves to get his arms wrenched out of the sockets and kneecaps stabbed through with a screwdriver. The boss fight sucks major **** with the ***** boss teleporting around after 1-2 melee hits and peppering you with an Uzi. And then the ******* elevator jumpscare is a rotten and mold-covered cherry on top of the **** cake.

Wasn't that part added by wesp5?

[Vergil]

Which ever ******* ****** did the library quest for the Unofficial Patch Plus deserves to get his arms wrenched out of the sockets and kneecaps stabbed through with a screwdriver. The boss fight sucks major **** with the ***** boss teleporting around after 1-2 melee hits and peppering you with an Uzi. And then the ******* elevator jumpscare is a rotten and mold-covered cherry on top of the **** cake.

I warned you bro it's pure ***.

[logincrash]

Melee weapons have different move sets for every directional key you're holding when you press the attack button. If you're wielding a katana, don't button mash. Keep moving forward and press the attack in intervals after the tiniest of delays. That way you'll only trigger the first attack animation, which just happens to be the quickest one. Your melee DPS will go through the roof.

Took the screenshot this time.

Another one in Chinatown, but this one might be added by the UP+.

[logincrash]

Oy vey, never forget.

Reminds me of that one time I was reading the 5th or the 6th Dune book and there were suddenly plot important ****. In a universe 14000 years older than ours. In which Christianity is gone completely and Buddhism and Islam have changed beyond recognition. But the **** somehow managed to keep their religion intact and in fact have an unbroken matrilineal line all the way back to Earth.

[Vergil]

Pisha is a hecking wholesome **** cannibal you nazi chud!!!

[Vergil]

They changed the boss fight in Gallery Noir to a mummy that reflects 100% of damage until you shoot 3 inconspicuous urns around the room.

[logincrash]

Finished the game as a Tremere and got the Raiders of the Lost Ark ending. Lost the screenshots because I saved them in the root folder that I then deleted to do a clean install for a new mod version.
Doing a Malkavian playthrough now. Will try the bigger mods for the Nosferatu playthrough.

► BAOW BAOW BAOW BAOW

[logincrash]

UP+ put invisible walls on the stairs in the Ocean House Hotel. Now you can't jump over the falling stairs and have to explore the basement. Lame.

[1998]

They changed the boss fight in Gallery Noir to a mummy that reflects 100% of damage until you shoot 3 inconspicuous urns around the room.

That's not vanilla? **** I had no idea, don't know when I last played vanilla. I assumed patch w/o extra content was only bug fixes

[logincrash]

That's not vanilla? **** I had no idea, don't know when I last played vanilla. I assumed patch w/o extra content was only bug fixes

I think Vergil's doing the Antitribu mod playthrough, the one with the xenomorph in it.
Unofficial Path Basic just fixes bugs, the Plus version allows to turn off the lights in the gallery for easier stealth takedown. The guardian is still the Tremere Blood Shield monster.

[SpellSword]

Made it through the sewers now I'm onto Chinatown.

---

Sewer didn't seem to bad at first until after what I assumed was the area's end boss was defeated... and it just kept going even spawning more of the boss enemy I'd just fought this time as normal combatants. I'm hoping that was the worst section of the game because everything else so far has been pretty interesting. On a more positive note Heather is providing additional dialogue so even though I never got the bathroom door to open it seems her quest is unstuck... although now the computer in my apartment won't respond when I click on it.

The ranged combat has been pretty unsatisfying which is a real shame as the rest of the game is proving to be rather fun. The voice acting is surprisingly good and exploring the city looking for new quests has been keeping me entertained.

I noticed something that isn't a bug but should be avoided:
If you have a full inventory and accept a new quest that involves that NPC giving you an item it will be dropped on the ground instead. (This includes keys or other necessary quest items.)

[1998]

Made it through the sewers now I'm onto Chinatown.

---

Sewer didn't seem to bad at first until after what I assumed was the area's end boss was defeated... and it just kept going even spawning more of the boss enemy I'd just fought this time as normal combatants. I'm hoping that was the worst section of the game because everything else so far has been pretty interesting.

It's the worst, especially with range builds

[gerey]

Finally summoned up the energy to trudge through the endgame. Ignore the wacky character sheet, it's because of the Clan Quest Mod. Though, for all its faults, being able to gain Celerity as a Tremere is a godsend.

[Irenaeus]

The voice acting is surprisingly good

Nice that you lived under a rock since 2004.

[gerey]

A few thoughts on the Clan Quest Mod that I used for the first time in this playthrough:

The best way to describe CQM is "good in theory, questionable in execution". Also, kudos to the mod author for putting in the effort to mod additional content into the game, which I imagine was no small task.

The Treme clan quest:

► Show Spoiler

The Tremere clan quest is interesting - Strauss tasks you with doing some research into Malkavian insanity and tells you to go visit Jeanette/Therese. Why he (or the mod author) though poking at a 6th gen Malkavian was a good idea is beyond me, but the tables are turned on you and you are cast into your own mindscape, where you are confronted with a vestige of your master (with an okay voice) and are tasked to figure out who you are. You do this by talking with various Santa Monica NPCs (as stand-ins for your psyche) ultimately deciding whether to cast off your human past entirely, or keep parts of it. For completing this task you are gifted a Discipline and stat bonuses, which one you get dependant on your choice.

The premise of the quest is interesting, but the execution is bad, since the NPCs are scattered around an empty Santa Monica, forcing you to go through lots of pointless backtracking and loading screens. The mod authors should really have just plopped you in a room (say, the theater from the intro, with all the NPCs on stage) to expedite the process.

The mod also tries to introduce ways to skip a bunch of the more annoying parts of the game (Hollywood sewers and Fu Syndicate), but the way these are structured, it's very difficult to pull them off without a guide. Again, good in theory, questionable in execution.

There's a few non-clan specific mods, chief among them the assassination "questline", where you are the hitman for a gang. It reuses a lot of the locations found in the game, and has some really awful voice acting and, I feel, adds very little to the game besides an additional way to get more experience and money.

The added Kuei-jin NPC:

► Show Spoiler

The ***** Kuei-jin is, again, good in theory. An independent ***** vampire that isn't trying to manipulate your to further their encroachment of LA and gives insight into what they are, where they come from, how they are crated and what their goals in (un)life are.

The execution is awful, since the character feels like a donutsteal. You're forced into a night of "revelry" around town where you go kill a bunch of hookers, get into a shootout with the Inquisition (in the streets, among civilian mortals), and at no point is your character allowed to put his foot down and say no, or else the quest fails. The idea of going around town with a "friend" and talking about your different perspectives sounded cool, but the way the quest pans out is not particularly good.

East LA and the Sabbat:

► Show Spoiler

The meat of the CQM is East LA and the associated Sabbat questline. Kudos for the author for giving you a reason to visit even if you stay loyal to the Camarilla (as I did). You're sent there by LaCroix as a double-agent to find out what they're up to.

The East LA as a hub looks visually distinctive, the skyline of downtown LA in the background is a great point of reference and helps establish the hub as part of the game. The map itself is expansive (almost too much, making walking around a chore), but the issue is that there's almost nothing to do. I assume the author had intended to make the map a proper hub at one point, with additional side quests and encounters, but gave up once he realized the sheer scale of the project. I say this because in its current iteration there are a grand total of 4 "quests" in it, and they all involve just walking from one point to the next and talking to NPCs. The voice acting is, mercifully, tolerable, though not nearly as good as talent that voices the extra lines for the existing cast - which are almost indistinguishable from the original VAs unless you're listening to both side by side.

It's actually cool that you can pick a side here, though both Sabbat potentates are morally repugnant, and it's even cooler that you can manipulate events as a Camarilla/Anarch loyalist so that they end up destroying themselves, but I just think the mod author could have spent his time and energy improving the already existing hub areas instead of making a new one from scratch and then barely using it.

Strangely enough, I didn't get to fight Andrei this playthrough. I assume it's due to some choices I made.

I didn't play through the Sabbat quest itself, since I think the faction is even more ******** than the Anarchs, but again, I think he should have focused his energy on improving the already existing parts of the game, instead of trying to force in such a drastic change to the storyline. Mind you, I think the player should have been given the choice of joining the Sabbat in the original, but that's a change that would have required a whole dev team to implement properly.

I did like that you can embrace Yukie and Heather, and even take them as your companions. However, the implementation is janky and they have little to say once they've joined. Not blaming the author for this one, but it still feels like a missed opportunity, especially with Yukie who is basically "blink and you miss her" in terms of content in the original game.

tl;dr - A+ for ambition and ideas, D for execution. I feel that many of the things that CQM tries to add should have been included with the shipped product but, alas, like so many things about Bloodlines, what we eventually got fails short of what we deserve.

I never looked too deep into why Bloodlines modding never took off, despite being based on the Source engine. I assume it's because Troika got an early version of it and had to extensively modify it, so the modding/dev tools Valve provided the community are unusable with it?

[Envergence]

Still not in the mood for the game, really, but the ennui has been setting in today. Started a new playthrough and got a game-breaking bug in the middle of the tutorial, lol. Haven't bothered updating the UP mod since I last played three or four years ago, so that is likely the culprit. Don't care enough to update it, but may if game-breaking bugs continue into the game proper.

Jack failed to appear both during and after the cutscene where the Sabbat gank you (imagine an invisible entity killing them), so I was left pacing around looking like the .gif of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction everyone likes to post. I figured I could brute-force tutorial progression, so I no-clipped through the locked gate. When I did the stealth segment, Jack finally appeared (so to speak—he talked to me through a wall) to prompt me to feed on the bum I already fed on. I tried it for the sake of advancing things properly, but the bum had so little health left that he just died immediately.

Maybe when I feel more in the mood for VTMB, I'll reload the initial autosave and try again. On that note, Tremere bros, how does my starting build look? Anything you'd do differently? I don't mind starting anew since I'm only at the tutorial anyway.

► Show Spoiler

[gerey]

Anything you'd do differently?

Not really. Tremere in the base game are broken anyway.

Just curious why you invested a point into Dominate? I used Trance in the early game to pin enemies in place so I could sneak up to them and bite them, but almost exclusively relied on Thaumaturgy as the game progressed.

Fights in the early game are sparse anyway, so it's better off to invest into social skills (chiefly to raise Persuade), as that will net you greater XP returns and help you avoid combat situations.

[Envergence]

Anything you'd do differently?

Not really. Treme in the base game are broken anyway.

Just curious why you invested a point into Dominate? I used Trance in the early game to pin enemies in place so I could sneak up to them and bite them, but almost exclusively relied on Thaumaturgy as the game progressed.

Fights in the early game are sparse anyway, so it's better off to invest into social skills (chiefly to raise Persuade), as that will net you greater XP returns and help you avoid combat situations.

I'd thought Dominate could be used in certain points in dialogue where other persuasion options might not be effective, for example I remembered it being necessary in the conversation with Samantha; but I looked it up, and it appears to be for Ventrue specifically. My memory was faulty for that one. That being said, I find myself over-reliant on the Sleep ability for those annoying no-kill stealth sections.

I had a hard time deciding whether to invest in Thaumaturgy first instead, as it is my favorite, but I figured its OP spells could wait until later in the game. I'll probably reroll and go with my gut on Thaumaturgy. I'll also see what else I can do to boost my persuade more; I do prefer avoiding combat where possible.

[gerey]

My memory was faulty for that one.

Might not be the case. The Unofficial Patch does grant you Dominate 1 dialogue options if you're playing as Tremere, though it's only really useful at the very beginning of the game.

I find myself over-reliant on the Sleep ability for those annoying no-kill stealth sections

As you should. Unless you have Obfuscate they're a pain.

I'll probably reroll and go with my gut on Thaumaturgy. I'll also see what else I can do to boost my persuade more; I do prefer avoiding combat where possible.

To be fair you only really start being forced into combat situations in the latter half of Downtown, and it really starts getting annoying by the end of the Hollywood questline. Before that you usually have plenty of ways to avoid combat (barring the nasty diner ambush).

[Zothique]

So far I do not think I can recommend the antitribu mod

The history behind this mod is The Big Gay.

[Vergil]

The history behind this mod is The Big Gay.

Share, I've given up on it. Too much silly **** and the difficulty has been cranked up without anything to offset it.

[Zothique]

The history behind this mod is The Big Gay.

Share, I've given up on it. Too much silly **** and the difficulty has been cranked up without anything to offset it.

Oh just a bunch of infighting/slap-fighting that ended with the mod being shelved b/c apparently the modding scene (of a lot of games, not just VTMB) is full of self-important homos/queers (esp as indicated by that GMDX discussion going on at the Codex right now...)