Review GameSpot somewhat more critical of Bloodlines

[Spazmo]

Tags: Troika Games; Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

<a href="http://www.gamespot.com/pc">Gamespot PC</a> are the next site to offer their opinion on Troika's Bloodlines. Their <a href=http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/vtmb/review.html>review</a> gives the Vampire RPG a less impressive <b>7.7 out of 10</b>.<blockquote>Where Bloodlines stumbles is in its combat system, which simply feels clumsy and unsatisfactory. The combat mechanics are a blend of twitch-based action and role-playing stats, and it's an awkward compromise. You can battle it out from a first-person perspective using firearms, or you can switch to a third-person viewpoint to use melee weapons, such as knives and swords. However, while Bloodlines is built on a first-person shooter engine, the gunplay is nowhere near as smooth and natural as it should be. Your firearm abilities depend heavily on your characters stats; it's not as simple as placing the cursor over a target. Unless you invest heavily in improving your firearm skills, your aim will veer wildly. Meanwhile, melee weapons are simply overpowering, and combat is skewed heavily toward knife and swordplay. To give you some perspective, we attempted a certain boss battle with a character specializing in firearms and lost repeatedly, but we beat it on the first time that we used a knife instead of a gun.</blockquote>That's more or less the only thing they take issue with, although a brief mention of the odd crash is made. Given how integral to the average RPG experience combat is, I guess it makes sense--assuming the combat is as bad as they say.
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Thanks once more to <b>butsomuch</b>--because why shouldn't someone do my job for me?
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<b>Exitium's Update</b>: Check out the <b>Community Lowdown</b> score for Bloodlines. It reads: 9.4 from over 200 votes and 2 reader reviews. That's where the real score is at, baby.
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Gamespot sucks.

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

Gamespot sucks.

I said that already.

 

[kumquatq3]

They tend to be harder on games than IGN or Gamespy, and since those two kiss ass, Gamespot is usually closer to the truth. IMO.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Not in this case. The guy wanted an FPS but got an RPG in its stead. Woopdedoo.

 

[dipdipdip]

The combat's no better/worse than what's in Gothic. I don't mind it. It was neat slamming Sabbat scum up against walls with potence activated.

I've yet to use ranged weapons extensively (though I plan to with my Toreador), so I can't really comment, but I can't imagine them being more useless than they were in KotOR (now that, sir, was a game with balance problems).

The game really shines where it counts, in my opinion. There's tons of dialogue, all of which is affected by your stats and skills and such. The different clans seem different enough. Playing as a Nosferatu, you have to lurk in the sewers, never to show your hideous face in public. People are pretty much dumbstruck when speaking to you. The Nosferatu has neat stealth-oriented disciplines as well. I particularly like being able to summon a swarm of hornets to distract a baddie whilst you sneak up behind him for a feeding.

Playing as a Toreador, though, I haven't run into many (if any) instances where characters refer to me as being such outside of the tutorial. There was one time where a cop implied that I looked well-to-do, but that's about it.

I hope it's not just the Malkavians and Nosferatu that get all the clan-specific reactions.

The quests have been neat. The second quest involves you running through a haunted hotel. It's very Clive Barker's Undying-esque, and although a bit tacky, very refreshing for an RPG quest.

Overall, I'm really enjoying the game. It's definitely rough around the edges, but even so, I'm actually putting more time in with Bloodlines than I am Half-Life 2. It beats the pants off of Invisible War, and I suspect I'll like it more than o.g. Deus Ex as well.

 

[King of Creation]

Your firearm abilities depend heavily on your characters stats; it's not as simple as placing the cursor over a target.

Holy crap! You mean its not supposed to rely on stats in a role playing game?

combat is skewed heavily toward knife and swordplay. To give you some perspective, we attempted a certain boss battle with a character specializing in firearms and lost repeatedly, but we beat it on the first time that we used a knife instead of a gun.

Well, there are characters right in the begining of the game who make a point to go out of their way to explain that using guns, except the big ones, on Vamps and such is pretty useless. Guns work fine on regular humans, though.

As for combat in general, I believe Troika handled it well.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Gun combat works fine in Bloodlines, really. Head shots don't matter because criticals are decided based on stat rolls, and the damage integer increases with the Ranged skill, so it doesn't matter if you're really good at CounterStrike.

It's truly an RPG, and not an FPS.

 

[plin]

It's truly an RPG, and not an FPS.

so troiaka liied? R00fles LOL


(I had to do it before he did)

 

[dojoteef]

Yeah, I find nothing wrong with the combat. I think the reviewers are smoking crack when it comes to that aspect of the game. It's not a shooter, it's an RPG. No need for twitch reflexes.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

What? So all my mad 'strafing' around the city has been for nothing? :wink:

 

[undead dolphin hacker]

Another thing I've heard: Guns don't come into their own until later in the game where you get some deadlier hardware.

I've heard the analogy that Ranged attacks in Bloodlines are akin to Energy Weapons in Fallout: Shit at the beginning, on par in the middle, godly in the end.

 

[undead dolphin hacker]

And one more thing:

The fuckwit (J Ocampo) that wrote this review is the same guy who gave the utterly ingenious Dominions 2 from the indie Illwinter devhouse a 6.2.

Which is to say, he not only lacks good taste in games, but a soul too.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Ocampo is a fucking chowderhead. He's one of the reasons I stopped trusting GameSpot for reviews. His 'reasons' for hating games are usually trite as all fuck. IGN has reviewers with higher standards of reviewing than him, and that's saying a lot.

 

[Trash]

If they don't like the combat, I wonder how they ever got through Deus EX. Maybe reviewers like that are the reason Deus Ex 2 was so fuckin simplified?

Vampire is an rpg, with stats and kick ass combat that is affected by those stats. Don't like it? Too bad, I'm having a blast with it. Doesn't feel laggy or anything to me, rather visceral and bloody (and very satisfying :twisted: )

About all the bugs, lagginess and crashes? Still haven't found any bugs, the game runs smooth on my dinosaur machine when I turn a few settings down (eax anyone?) and the fucker only once crashed on me.

So far it's the best rpg this year....hell, the best since fallout to me. Get deeper into the game, see how nasty and complicated vampire politics can be and see how your choices make a real impact on how this game plays. Troika was going down on my "respect" list after arcanum and Toee, but they're back on top again.

 

[chaedwards]

And one more thing:

The fuckwit (J Ocampo) that wrote this review is the same guy who gave the utterly ingenious Dominions 2 from the indie Illwinter devhouse a 6.2.

Which is to say, he not only lacks good taste in games, but a soul too.

Amen to that - D2 rocks.

 

[Trash]

Having played this game for 3 days, I still didn't find any bugs. Though my housemate came crying that he repeatedly lost all of his experience. Nasty bug I thought, till I saw he had auto level on. Methinks that a lot of these bugs are either little boys venting their teenage couch potatoe frustrations or people that didn't read the manual or were expecting an fps. That said, Troika has a bad record in QA. But personally, I haven't found a single bug (though a few instances of clipping occured) .

 

[Sol Invictus]

Vishbhume:

The bugs aren't significant for christ's sakes. They're very minor and none of them are gamestopping. I don't know where people get the idea that the game is 'unplayably buggy' based on some innocuous comment made by some reviewer or someone else about some issues he might be having with the game. I'd dare you to name a game that wasn't buggy. Folks, you have to realize that even though TOEE was buggy, that was mainly Atari's fault for not giving the game a proper amount of Quality Assurance. Activision isn't like that.

Stillmind, I'd indulge you to find me a real gamestopping bug.

As for Bloodlines, it's the best RPG since Fallout.

 

[DemonKing]

I can't comment on Bloodlines yet as my copy won't arrive until next week, but it is interesting to see that the actual community score at Gamespot was significantly higher than the reviewer's score...although that might simply be because the only people playing at the moment are Troika fanbois (the rest are still ploughing through HL2).

Generally I like Gamespot's reviews - the IGN/Gamespy reviews generally kiss too much ass for my liking (which makes sense, since a lot of games use Gamespy for multiplayer matching these days - you don't bite the hand that feeds you).

 

[Limorkil]

As I said after the GameSpy review, all these reviewers are looking at Bloodlines right after playing Half-Life 2. Bloodlines looks similar, because its the same engine, but it doesn't play the same because its not an FPS. But they are so stupid they cannot detach the two and Bloodlines suffers because it does not feel as smooth as Half-Life 2, which is hardly suprising since they are praising HL2 as the best FPS ever.

Its totally pathetic. There are not enough RPG games to warrant having a reviewer that focuses on RPGs, so all these reviews are written by people who have to, very reluctantly, give up playing the *coolest* action games to review a RPG that they are much less interested in. Its hard to be objective under those conditions.

Edit: I decided to read the stupid review and my assumptions were confirmed. All comments on the visual and combat aspects of the game compare it to Half-Life 2, a FPS made by the people that developed the graphics engine and know it inside and out. Basically, Bloodlines has issues because (a) the combat is not as good as Half-Life 2, (b) the character graphics are not as good as Half-Life 2, (c) the dialogue of Bloodlines is not as good as the monologues in Half-Life 2 and (d) the AI is not as good as Half-Life 2. The fact that it is not Half-Life 2 costs it at least 1.3 points out of 10 and if Half-Life 2 did not exist then it probably would have got >9 out of 10 (although technically there would be no Source engine in that case).

 

[Volourn]

": Check out the Community Lowdown score for Bloodlines. It reads: 9.4 from over 200 votes and 2 reader reviews. That's where the real score is at, baby.

Gamespot sucks."

Oh whatever. You ar ebeing stupid. The 'Codex has fun insulting the public for their 'stupid' opinions yet now because it is conviently a shared opinion; theya re now 'trustworthy'. That's ludicrous.


"The combat's no better/worse than what's in Gothic."

Horrible, horrible, horrible news.

 

[Spazmo]

Their approval of the game is very relevant insofar that if people like it, then it hopefully follows that many will buy it and give the game some solid sales, which would be nice for a Troika game to have.

 

[Volourn]

I'm nott alking about their elevance; but how people here are reacteing to their opinion. This is mainly Exitium of course. Remember, by and large, these are the same people who also liked NWN.

R00fles!

 

[Lomer]

Just for comparison have a look at some other Gamespot’s RPG ratings:

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: 9.2
Fable: 8.6
Neverwinter Nights - OC: 9.2
Neverwinter Nights - SoU:7.8
KOTOR: 8.8

It is now official that all of the above have better combat and roleplaying than Bloodlines :shock:

And, BTW, those bastards awarded Arcanum 7.3.

 

[dojoteef]

Having played this game for 3 days, I still didn't find any bugs. Though my housemate came crying that he repeatedly lost all of his experience. Nasty bug I thought, till I saw he had auto level on. Methinks that a lot of these bugs are either little boys venting their teenage couch potatoe frustrations or people that didn't read the manual or were expecting an fps. That said, Troika has a bad record in QA. But personally, I haven't found a single bug (though a few instances of clipping occured) .

You state that you haven't run into any bugs, yet you mention in an earlier post that the game crashed to desktop and here that you've seen clipping. I don't know what you think the definition of a bug is, but those are bugs. They are not meant to be part of the game (unless you think they put those in puprosefully so that you crash to desktop and remember that you actually have work that needs to be done). I don't think anyone who has the game is going to state that the RPGness of the game isn't stellar. The problem is in the minor annoyances that abound. I've mentioned a lot of the ones that I had in this thread. Mind you I didn't mention them all, and every single one of them was very obvious.

So whatever the reason, the game does have bugs. It detracts from the gameplay. That doesn't mean the game is shit, far from it. I'm having a blast playing it, but to say that the game has no bugs is a flat out lie, epsecially since numerous people have stated they have experienced the same ones that I pointed out.

 

[Volourn]

"It is now official that all of the above have better combat and roleplaying than Bloodlines"

Are you stupid? All that's official is that Gamespot liked those games more not they have better 'combat and role-playing". What an embicile.