Vampire: The Masquerade® - Bloodlines™ 2

[LemonDemonGirl]

Does Phyre reach Golconda in the game or no?

[Vergil]

I pirated the game day one and unfortunately like all games made on this engine it has atrocious optimization to the point its essentially unplayable for me. Even with a mod thay essentially decimated all the shadows and other effects to make it runnable once you get out of dark interiors there's really no way to play the game at a reasonable framerate.

This game is not a looker. It looks like a game from the middle of the PS4's lifespan but it runs so incredibly worse. There's no real reason for things to be this way. Bloodhunt manages to run perfect fine while looking visually identical and yet this chugs even on decent hardware.

I put up with a lot to mess around with the Oblivion remaster but this simply doesn't offer anything to make such a thing feel worth the effort.

[Demonic Fate]

Pirated it too. Things I liked:

- Phyre's dialogue and male VA are appropriate enough for a young-ish Elder aware of his power but still feeling around for who can be dominated and who needs to be manipulated. I'm roleplaying as a ruthless Lasombra survivor and I've never felt like I gave an out-of-character response, even without save-scumming.

- Fabien, as a character (NOT gameplay), is great. Non-cliché Malkavian, solid personality, and exploring the same city and characters across many decades is one of my favourite parts of vampire stories.

Things that were kind of a mixed bag:

- NPCs are played incredibly safe and boring but they are also mostly inoffensive. Tremere nerd, Brujah brute, Nosferatu flaming ***, etc. ******* and ****** are acceptable in 2024 Seattle, and I appreciated that in the 1920s flashbacks everyone was white so far.

- The outfits all look like *** (why oh why not just steal the assets from Bloodhunt), but the part where mortals react differently based on what you're wearing is at least implemented, even if it's super basic (intimidating clothes terrify scared humans but they cause angry humans to calm down, etc.). Might improve if any of the vampires ever also react to your clothing.

Things I didn't like:

- everything else lol
- Combat is absolute **** in every way and I'm 80% of the way to just DGAF and turning on game journo mode
- The city is horrible, everything being covered in snow makes it look even more empty and featureless, zero unique NPCs in the streets, zero points of interest
- Hunting blood resonance is fun exactly three times and then becomes a pointless chore. Hope I can just cheat the extra points needed to unlock other disciplines.
- I'm ok with not having a classic 1:1 tabletop character sheet in a videogame adaptation... but no ******* blood pool? Masquerade that regenerates like a Call of Duty health bar? I don't need to have Humanity and Willpower and Conscience and Blood Potency and Bane Severity and everything else as separate stats, but one mechanic for how well you're dealing with the Beast is needed to make it feel VtM at all.
- The story is hilariously on rails, but I'm not actually docking many points for this one because the original VTMB was also pretty railroady and few sidequests had meaningful choices beyond "kill target / let target go"
- Technical it's a 4/10, it didn't crash or lag on 4k/60 but I see minor glitches in corners and scene transitions have that classic UE5 loading stutter.

If it didn't have the Bloodlines name, if it was presented as a one-shot experiment (The Case of the Lost Elder or whatever) I'd rank as a 4/10 or 5/10, "if you really want as much VtM as possible in your life, this is technically playable and it's quite possible to tolerate all the low-effort stuff to get to the occasional nice parts". But calling it Bloodlines 2 is a bad joke.

[Vergil]

Fabien did the "If I were a betting man, and I am" joss whedon quip joke twice in the span of 2 minutes and I almost deleted the game right there.

[logincrash]

Fabien did the "If I were a betting man, and I am" joss whedon quip joke twice in the span of 2 minutes and I almost deleted the game right there.

Some ****** writer was really proud of that one.

[Ilovecheezecake]

Hahahah

[Roguey]

- Combat is absolute **** in every way and I'm 80% of the way to just DGAF and turning on game journo mode

I recommend getting good.

[Atlantico]

I don't hate the game, it's surprisingly not nearly as bad as I thought it could have been. As I said before, it runs on a potato which is impressive considering this is basically just UE5 with some assets. It's not like this was assembled by a team of elite programmers or experts at optimizing.

Anyway. It seems to me the gameplay is a lot like the Batman series. That's the idea they based the gameplay on. Those were successful games, it's a solid foundation to build on and it works well enough here.

No ******** in the game afaik, some ******* (but this is Vampire so duh of course there's plenty of *******), women are pleasing to look at more often than not, amount of ******* is perhaps a tad more than I'd like but in (((current year))) it's less than expected - I found nothing that triggers me so far.

Where I have a problem with the game is writing and characterization and agency.

Writing vampires like they're larping being a vampire is not good. Half of the entire setting is the existential question and how the vampire sees itself within this heard of mortal cattle. How the different clans approach this. And so on. .. but in this game, there's nothing like that. It feels like it's all humans larping as vampires. And that is really unfortunate.

Characterization of the world and the lead character is also unfortunately off. The world itself seems completely unaffected by vampires and is itself quite "nice". Gone is the corruption, seething degeneracy, and general wickedness of the world itself that we saw in the original VtMB. In that game it seemed that even if vampires did not exist, the world would still be a degenerate and cruel place and that's not the case here.

The lead character is an elder vampire, which demands more profound conversation pieces, insights, quips, snarls.. an elder vampire brooks no insolence and has proven to be way smarter, wiser, and of course ultimately more powerful than any other vampire. Granted our character has lost his powers, but he shouldn't have lost anything else. He is an adult in a world of children. But he doesn't act his part, which is unfortunate.

Finally agency. There isn't much of it. The game is set in (((current year))) but computers are not a thing in this game. No email, no communication, no phones, no cellphones, no mail, no couriers, no carrier pigeons, nothing. It makes everything feel smaller, lesser, more confined. And that's odd because adding messages and/or email like in the original game, is a low hanging fruit.

There's also no exploring to be done, you won't find anything. You can't break doors, even though you are inhumanly strong. You can't turn lights off or on. You can't open cupboards. You have no inventory. .. I'm almost ok with having no weapons, being an elder vampire weapons are really rather pointless. Or should be, but as we aren't as powerful as a proper elder vampire it seems that we should have weapons.

We should have the agency to use weapons while we are weak, and when we gain our strength these weapons will become completely redundant and we get to experience the power of being an elder in the late game and feel how we just don't give a **** about weapons anymore. We are on the top of the food-chain. But that's not how this game is. Here we are ok at brawling, and dodging and such things, but we are weak. So I think while weak, we should be allowed to use weapons.

Anyway, I have not finished the game, not going to rate it but I am enjoying it more than I expected, so I will finish it.

[Roguey]

The camarilla started forbidding the use of computers and smartphones after Schrecknet got infiltrated by the feds. In one of the backrooms you come across a ~forbidden phone~ that a bunch of vamps use to play Snake.

And hey, Mrs. Thorn's phoned-in Ubislop sidequests are all about hand-delivering packages to people. You come across letters from vamps written to other vamps quite often.

[DemoGraph]

The camarilla started forbidding the use of computers and smartphones after Schrecknet got infiltrated by the feds.

Is it real current lore?

[KOS-MOS]

Some says it runs like ****, other says it runs on a potato. Where is the truth?

[logincrash]

The camarilla started forbidding the use of computers and smartphones after Schrecknet got infiltrated by the feds.

Is it real current lore?

Yeah. The "playing Snake" part is silly, since they're allowed to use regular burner phones to make calls. And Snake is an old *** game that can run on an ancient Nokia.

[Valter]

Some says it runs like ****, other says it runs on a potato. Where is the truth?

On my Ryzen 1600 CPU/RTX 3060 GPU PC I got a moderately consistent 60fps on 1080p Medium Preset with DLSS Quality enabled.
There are the usual UE5 frame dips of course. These usually happen after I boot up the game and load for the first time, as well as the first time you go outdoors.

[lucky-SVLLa]

Deserved, again. However, Paradox didn't even bribe those game journalists? Paradox also felt that this game didn't have much potential. We'll see if two DLCs can turn things around? Too naive.

[lucky-SVLLa]

Is it possible for this game to generate a lot of Internet-quarrel drama?

That would be great if possible, thanks, it's really helpful. Regarding Veilguard and Avowed, I prefer their Internet-quarrel dramas

[Atlantico]

The camarilla started forbidding the use of computers and smartphones after Schrecknet got infiltrated by the feds. In one of the backrooms you come across a ~forbidden phone~ that a bunch of vamps use to play Snake.

Right well, I mentioned other means of communication. Which are also not found in the game.

And why don't Anarchs use computers. Or Sabbat. Do they use the Camarilla IT department? And sometimes things just don't make over from the pen and paper to computer game, because they'd make the computer game boring. This sounds like one of those rules that really should make it over to the game because it makes the game boring.

You come across letters from vamps written to other vamps quite often.

Right and those newspapers which are really just letters to anyone who buys a copy!

No letters to the main character. Which is what I wrote. I did not write anything else about any vampire communication that isn't involving the main character, because what "happens" offscreen and to other characters isn't gameplay and isn't agency.

[logincrash]

Decided to give it a second go, out of morbid curiosity.
You know what I REALLY don't give a **** about? A walking simulator point-and-click adventure featuring some woke *******' interpretation of a noir detective - a quirky "fish Malk" pussy with all the real noir edges sanded off.

[rusty_shackleford]

Some says it runs like ****, other says it runs on a potato. Where is the truth?

runs like ****
people turn on 17 layers of AI blur and framegen then say "yeah runs great!"

[KOS-MOS]

Is it possible for this game to generate a lot of Internet-quarrel drama?

That would be great if possible, thanks, it's really helpful. Regarding Veilguard and Avowed, I prefer their Internet-quarrel dramas

I agree, I enjoyed veilguard internet drama a lot, it was fun. I felt like it was too soft for Avowed, or maybe I simply missed all the fun.

[ThulsaDoomer]

Is it possible for this game to generate a lot of Internet-quarrel drama?

That would be great if possible, thanks, it's really helpful. Regarding Veilguard and Avowed, I prefer their Internet-quarrel dramas

I agree, I enjoyed veilguard internet drama a lot, it was fun. I felt like it was too soft for Avowed, or maybe I simply missed all the fun.

What was there to say about Avowed ultimately? To have such intense drama, the work needs to be saying something outrageous, and Avowed was the epitome of boring, globalist media in all respects. It innovated in nothing, not even in its ideological rhetoric. Veilguard was, by all accounts, hyped up as a "return to form" for a dying franchise that many still held onto hope for since Origins was as good as it was (despite the progressivism) but crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion. It also showcased the true attitudes of ********, which was rare for gaming as usually we see feminist or minority worship in higher budget titles.

This game is just another Avowed, boring and terrible at doing anything to stand out. It will be forgotten as it rightly deserves to be.

[Marcus]

Probably need to wait until the weekend for a better idea but it's not a great start.

Looks like it actually peaked at release lmao:
_

peak.PNG

[logincrash]

shits phyre phr phr.jpg

[Finarfin]

[stormvermin]

Is it possible for this game to generate a lot of Internet-quarrel drama?

That would be great if possible, thanks, it's really helpful. Regarding Veilguard and Avowed, I prefer their Internet-quarrel dramas

TCR hasn't publicly made asses of themselves and there aren't any deranged belligerents out there running defense for the game which kind of nixes any potential drama. Everyone knew the game was going to be bad and it met expectations.

[Rand]

I'll never play it. I played the first real one. That was enough.
It was pretty stupid, but fun for a while.

[Roguey]

runs like ****
people turn on 17 layers of AI blur and framegen then say "yeah runs great!"

I have that off and It runs pretty well in the interior levels which UE5 was made for. Dips in the open world.

[Bertram_Tung]

...after Schrecknet got infiltrated by the feds....

1. it was an inside job
2. that's just what we want you to believe

[Vergil]

Stolen valor!

[logincrash]

This mod
https://www.nexusmods.com/vtmbloodlines2/mods/8
fixed the horrendous stuttering in the open world for me without impacting the visuals too much.
The BOOST version made the game look uglier, but it did give me a significant framerate boost. But, frankly, had I played the game with it on from the very beginning, I wouldn't have known the visual difference.

[Demonic Fate]

This mod
https://www.nexusmods.com/vtmbloodlines2/mods/8
fixed the horrendous stuttering in the open world for me without impacting the visuals too much.
The BOOST version made the game look uglier, but it did give me a significant framerate boost. But, frankly, had I played the game with it on from the very beginning, I wouldn't have known the visual difference.

Thanks. I had come back to this thread to post that I withdraw my previous "runs mostly fine" feedback - I had to clear out some anarchs in a wide open area and it suddenly got almost unplayable, like 20 FPS and half the combat actions got screwed up by the lag (try to feed on a dude right in front of you, doesn't register and grasps at the air instead).

I don't even care if it hurts the visuals since the world assets are completely unremarkable even with everything on Ultra.