Vampire: The Masquerade® - Bloodlines™ 2

[Oyster Sauce]

I have a sneaking suspicion that this game won't allow you to roleplay a Muslim from the 1600s very well.

[GhostCow]

Third clan choice is the only good thing they've done so far imo

[Atlantico]

Before I ever played vtmb I thought the idea of roleplaying as a vampire or werewolf or whatever sounded unappealing. I played some AD&D and it had some vampires in it, but a whole setting just about that. Isn't that Ravenloft?

So the PC game was and still is my only introduction into this world, and I quite liked it. It put a sinister and mysterious blanket over our world. Underneath everything we take for granted there could be a very dark secret known to selected few. There were secrets within secrets, factions fighting in the background. At times, it was soapy drama.

The point is that this is an RPG of sorts, but it lives and dies by the presentation of the setting, characters, intrigue, drama, interactivity and sense of mystery. The original vtmb almost lost me completely when I attacked and wiped out the lair of super-Vampire hunters, it felt like nothing I am describing. Very stupid level — so even people who do things right are still following a very narrow path.

[Goth-Girl-Supremacy]

Not a single hot goth girl presented. Looking grim.

[Lich]

There has been a resurgence of interest in goth culture (mostly the fashion aspect, but the music also), which I expect the devs would benefit from featuring prominently in their game. But that's not happening since the game needs to be trite and ugly.

[The_Mask]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/de ... k.1620877/



Development Diary #6: Mission Scripting And Ink

This week we have Technical Director Nick Slaven joining us. He’s going to share his thoughts on the important tools we’ve developed to build all the things we need for our narratives, like cutscenes, missions and dialogue:

Quests and princesses and chat, oh my.
Here at the Chinese Room we are all about storytelling. Our games are rich in narrative and the way we tell them, and for the story to make sense, we need to give the player something to do, other than just walking.

My name is Nick and I make sure that our team are able to tell stories and give the player things to do.

As a studio working on two large projects, we have to be smart about how we use our technology. We’re building systems that are used on both Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 and Still Wakes the Deep and fits the needs for both those teams and makes everyone’s work easier. As a narrative studio, that means tools for storytelling.

Storytelling involves more than just the spoken word. We may want to travel across the land to obtain the magical artefact that unlocks the door to the princess’ castle. I’ll stop here before I embarrass myself more with my lack of narrative ability. The point remains, in a few words I can describe something of a story and it materialises in your imagination.

Let’s back up a bit, it’s easy for us to interpret, but how do we get the game to recognise that you have got the magical artefact and how does picking it up then unlock a door to allow you to progress in your quest. How do we do that?
Our answer was to develop a way of describing the story as a sequence of events that the game engine can interpret, we call this mission scripting.

Mission scripting is a high level way of representing a sequence of events that the player may need to solve in order for the story to progress. For instance, you may need to find a key to open a door. We do this by representing the state of the game story and the event that will drive the story forward. In this case, opening the door; we look for a key, and only once we’ve found the key can we open the door, and face whatever is in the room.

Here's a screenshot of how this might look in our mission scripting system.

Example mission in the scripting system.

In a proper game story, there will be hundreds of states, on many story paths, here’s a small snippet of one of the missions in one of our current games.



There’s a lot happening, but having a simple way of defining the mission structure allows our design team to quickly iterate on the missions and get them as good as they can be.

That’s the doing bit, but what about the talking?
Branching narrative is complex. From each decision point the story can go many ways. Rather than write our own tech for this we decided to use Ink, an open source narrative scripting language created by Inkle studios. We needed to port this from C# to C++ to get it working with Unreal, but this was way quicker than writing our own narrative scripting system from scratch.


Visual example of a text in Ink. Not part of Bloodlines 2.

Ink allows our narrative team to create the spoken word that accompanies the mission scripting to tell the story of the game. This is written as a narrative script, much in the same way that screenplays are written for film and tv.

Arone, our principal narrative designer, had this to say about using Ink for narrative creation.

Arone Le Bray: “It's interesting... There are definitely a bunch of things that I like about it and I think those are mostly from the point of view of how we have integrated it. We can use the basic scripting language inside it to make scenes that are non-linear and have reactivity without having to re-write the same scene multiple times.

Then, being able to put a single conversation file into a block that fires in-game, without needing to be fiddly with a lot of scripting there? Also lovely.
But yes, it doesn't have a huge barrier to entry for using it as newbies, or even sharing our work with other teams. At its base, it's a word document, but the fact that the Ink formatting is present lets us make that word document (which most people already understand) into a functional, nearly-live game development tool? That's a HUGE win.”

How do we then make that into animation and audio?
Our solution was to introduce the ‘dope sheet’. We stole this name from the animation industry, but essentially for each line of dialogue the authors create, we can specify an audio event, along with animations for the face and body and a bunch of other things. The dope sheet is like a spreadsheet in excel, but with bells and whistles that allow us to preview audio and animation as we set up the scenes for dialogue in the game.



When the player makes a text choice in the game, the system presents that choice to the Ink runtime, in return we get a text response which we cross reference via the dope sheet to get the animations and audio to play to show back to the player.

Combining mission scripting and Ink have given us a very flexible and powerful system in which we can tell stories. We are using these systems on all the titles we are creating.

As we’ve had so much of a step up from using ink, we thought it only right to give something back, and so we have created Inkpot, which is a lightweight blueprint friendly wrapper of our C++ port of the Ink runtime. This is now freely available from our GitHub site. You can download this tool and use it in Unreal for yourselves. If you do, let us know! We’d love to see what people create.

[J1M]

"We thought using a scripting language was too much work, so we ported a scripting language to C++. For some reason the level designers are only capable of understanding the keywords in a scripting language when they are represented by whitespace and punctuation characters."

[gerey]

I'm torn between wanting this game to come out so I can laugh at it and wanting it to be canceled so it doesn't taint my memories of Bloodlines 1.

[Goblin_Hammer]

It'll be funny if this comes out and immediately bombs. Then the devs come out crying about we're woke, even more woke than Larian and wondering why it didn't sell as well as BG3. Everything I seen of Bloodlines 2 reeks like every street in India, it's not going to be good and they'll deserve what's coming too them when they fail.

[NEG]

The androgynous protagonist already told me this wasn't a game for me.

Imagine going from "jiggle physics" and Jeanette to this.

[Vergil]

>give a set protagonist
>make it a nasty poopoo **** dangerhair
>include the muslim clan as an option
Bravo!

[Oyster Sauce]

Once again I am forced to remember that the protagonist is named "Phyre"

[Anon]

And I read that Phyre (stupid name) is supposed to be armenian.

Armenians are conservative, ancient orthodox christians. They would never use such a ridiculous, manly haircut being a woman. Much less one born in the 1700s...

[Oyster Sauce]

And I read that Phyre (stupid name) is supposed to be armenian.

Pretty sure it's just a made up name. No connection to Arm*nia.

[Goblin_Hammer]

And I read that Phyre (stupid name) is supposed to be armenian.

Armenians are conservative, ancient orthodox christians. They would never use such a ridiculous, manly haircut being a woman. Much less one born in the 1700s...

I remember years ago they put in a gay black muslim vampire into the source books, Paradox ruined everything after they took over.

[Anon]

And I read that Phyre (stupid name) is supposed to be armenian.

Pretty sure it's just a made up name. No connection to Arm*nia.

Sure but my point was more about her haircut and other senseless design choices. But honestly, a 1700s vampire coming up with "Phyre" as a reasonable codiname is just stupid. You can tell that this name came up from a woke design director in their 20s or early 30s.

I remember years ago they put in a gay black muslim vampire into the source books, Paradox ruined everything after they took over.

Isn't it on whitewolf?

[Vergil]

It looks like a ****** and was probably made by a ****** and they love ******** made up fake names like that.

[Goblin_Hammer]

Isn't it on whitewolf?

Paradox bought out Whitewolf in 2015, I can't remember what year I heard about the gay black muslim vampire.

[Anon]

Kinda surprising to know the company that makes hearts of iron, crusader kings, europa universalis, cities skylines, all non-woke games AFAIK, is also plagued with wokeism this way.

[DagothGeas5]

It breaks my heart to see that this "game" is still in development and is only getting worse. The worst when I see these things is feeling how they clash with the potential that was there and was either purposefully ignored or hanged in the square to be spat upon by people so full of hate.

[Anon]

It breaks my heart to see that this "game" is still in development and is only getting worse. The worst when I see these things is feeling how they clash with the potential that was there and was either purposefully ignored or hanged in the square to be spat upon by people so full of hate.

Worth remembering it DID have a lot of potential under Hardsuit Labs. They hired a lot of OGs, had a completely woke-free staff as far as I remember, and looked after nuanced writing and compelling characters. We went from Elif Parmak to Phyre, lol.

[wndrbr]

it DID have a lot of potential under Hardsuit Labs.

had a completely woke-free staff as far as I remember

Hardsuit was woke too. Brian Mitsoda went full woke, he groveled and apologized for being a shitlord in the past, shat on his own older works, said that VTMB was "problematic" because it made fun of people with mental health issues by having ****** characters talking to lamp posts, etc. Hardsuit also had Cara Ellison (previously known for writing RPS articles about Skyrim sex mods) helping Mitsoda, and she said the game may feature "trigger warnings" for quests with offensive content such as r*pe or misogyny. There was also a bunch of ****** game designers who all dunked on Avellone after he got cancelled.

[J1M]

it DID have a lot of potential under Hardsuit Labs.

had a completely woke-free staff as far as I remember

Hardsuit was woke too. Brian Mitsoda went full woke, he groveled and apologized for being a shitlord in the past, shat on his own older works, said that VTMB was "problematic" because it made fun of people with mental health issues by having ****** characters talking to lamp posts, etc. Hardsuit also had Cara Ellison (previously known for writing RPS articles about Skyrim sex mods) helping Mitsoda, and she said the game may feature "trigger warnings" for quests with offensive content such as r*pe or misogyny. There was also a bunch of ****** game designers who all dunked on Avellone after he got cancelled.

Yeah, that made him look like a ****, but then we learned he had parlayed that and his bloodlines cred into sleeping with Cara and the rest of the female narrative designers.

Truly the only one involved in Bloodlines 2 to come out on top.

[gerey]

Paradox ruined everything after they took over

Paradox actually had to fire all the White Wolf writers because they were too woke and ******** even for them. In fact, they were so woke they caused an international incident with the Chechen government. Paradox, wisely not wanting to get beheaded by Chechens, fired all the White Wolf writers and replaced them with new ones. Sadly, this does not seem to have done any good for World of Darkness.

Even if the devs were competent, the mere fact they are using nWoD as basis for the game has doomed the project from the start.

[Roguey]

You can tell that this name came up from a woke design director in their 20s or early 30s.

It came from Dr. Dan Pinchbeck himself. https://www.danpinchbeck.co.uk/vampire

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 (tba 2024)

Pitch creation and creative leadership, concept adaptation to fit publisher and IP requirements, gameplay vision (including mechanics, tone, player experience), Creative Direction (prototype, pre-production & production, until Alpha (spring 2023)), Narrative Direction (including story and character creation, overseeing writing and level design team, establishing narrative architecture, style guides, working with Kate Saxon/SIDE on casting, voice direction and editing), Publisher liaison (specifically IP/Branding teams).

Like with Deep, this game is still in production so I don’t want to say too much about it here, so let’s keep this one brief.

The VTM franchise is a really amazing one. I grew up on paper-based RPGs, even if I’ve got fairly basic tastes when it comes to video games (I’ve got more hours clocked up on Far Cry and Just Cause than is healthy). VTM is special even for an RPG. It’s incredibly rich and deep, it’s morally and ethically complex, it combines modern politics with ancient supernatural evil, it’s biblical, it’s personal, it’s *****. It just screams TCR and everything we’d always tried to embed in our games. When the opportunity to pitch for it came up, it was Dan Pinchbeck catnip. I was confident we could deliver - we’d been scaling up and bringing on more and more people with serious development chops and history. I knew I wanted to write the story too, we’d never been a studio that were going to finish someone else’s work.

As it turns out, that dovetailed with what Paradox wanted and the state of the project. The inspirations were clear for me: dark US dramas like Succession, The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards. Anchor the gothic in the contemporary. Know that monsters exist in boardrooms and bars everywhere. Know that we live in a world that pretends it’s slick and sophisticated but where we’re still beating each other to death with the jawbones of asses. Know that you could get knifed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but you’re as likely to die from the poison dumped into your water in the pursuit of profit. Know that immortality is a curse as well as a blessing and that too much power strips humanity away like acid. One of my favourite lines from a novel comes from William Gibson’s Count Zero:

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

As a writer, working in that space is just bloody inspirational.

And until more about the game drops, that’s pretty much all you get. The central character, Phyre, encapsulates everything that VTM means to me and it was a blast writing her and the rest of the gang . Once I’d put together the story and background, characters and context, I worked with a great narrative team - Sarah Longthorne, Arone Le Bray and Frances Wakefield-Harrey on putting flesh onto those bones - and again worked with Kate and SIDE to put together a fantastic cast.

I led the project from inception through until alpha in spring this year, then handed the narrative reins over to Ian Thomas and the creative leadership to Alex Skidmore, both hugely experienced devs. If you love VTM as much as me, then I reckon you’re in good hands. And I hope the dark heart that I started beating at the centre of this thing does it justice.

[Atlantico]

Roguey taking self-penned CVs/commercial blurb at their word since forever it seems.

Have you ever written a CV/blurb Roguey?

You won't find facts there. Only aspirations and wishful thinking, because that's what they're selling.

[rusty_shackleford]

I read "cover letter" as "submit resume twice"

[Roguey]

Roguey taking self-penned CVs/commercial blurb at their word since forever it seems.

Have you ever written a CV/blurb Roguey?

You won't find facts there. Only aspirations and wishful thinking, because that's what they're selling.

What are you even responding to? The guy outright says "Yeah I came up with the narrative direction and the character of Phyre." That's not "aspirations" or "wishful thinking."

[Atlantico]

Roguey taking self-penned CVs/commercial blurb at their word since forever it seems.

Have you ever written a CV/blurb Roguey?

You won't find facts there. Only aspirations and wishful thinking, because that's what they're selling.

What are you even responding to? The guy outright says "Yeah I came up with the narrative direction and the character of Phyre." That's not "aspirations" or "wishful thinking."

It's a CV. That's an advertisement. Literally.

It is a collection of the most self-congratulatory and embellished version of events a person can put on paper.

If you're still not getting it, here's a picture:

[Wretch]

Roguey taking self-penned CVs/commercial blurb at their word since forever it seems.

Have you ever written a CV/blurb Roguey?

You won't find facts there. Only aspirations and wishful thinking, because that's what they're selling.

What are you even responding to? The guy outright says "Yeah I came up with the narrative direction and the character of Phyre." That's not "aspirations" or "wishful thinking."

It's a CV. That's an advertisement. Literally.

It is a collection of the most self-congratulatory and embellished version of events a person can put on paper.

If you're still not getting it, here's a picture:

I love this forum. Such a high concentration of good-faith and quality posters.