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Somebody give this man a parrot, por favor?
From the first seconds in the theatre, it was crap. Half the freaking game is overwraught, overly melodramatic and full of selfish complete idiots. That damned ex-actor what-his-name is a prime example.
There were some good moments, but many of the quests were pretty retarded and the actions of the main players completely inconsistent. LaCroix is a prime example. Strauss also has shades of it.
80% of the vampire population and their hanger-ons that you meet are needy little twerps but somehow, you, a newborn fledgling, can solve all their problems that they who out-experience and out-age you by hundreds are incapable of doing. Not even NWN2 does that. You actually have to work your way up to the truly world changing quests. Heck, you spend much of the first act in NWN2 running around and doing peon quests. Even the orc genocide run is because Casavir showed the way for you, not that NWN2 really kept track of the in-game number of days, unlike Bloodlines, which explicitly did. In Bloodlines, you are taking out stuff that has the primogen of entire clans quaking in their boots. As a one day old vampire.
Bloodlines can only wish it was half as well written as MotB, and it is deluded if it thinks it is anywhere near as good as Ultima 7.
Uhnn, where do I even begin? I suspect you may not understand people very well. If you don’t want overwrought and melodramatic characters, don’t buy a game about fucking vampires. It’s not a low-key, down-to-earth milieu.
The important badass vampires send you off to solve problems they could solve themselves? Let me ask you something: have you ever had a job? Seriously: you get these assignments because they are either risky or a pain in the ass. You play as the lowest man on the totem pole in the Camarilla. The important people get to tell you what to do. Of course they could solve this stuff on their own, but why would they want to when they can have a minion do it? Why would they take even the slightest risk when someone else will do their bidding? Worst case, you die and they have to do it themselves, or more likely, send a less disposable minion. You don’t get to be a powerful, ancient vampire by doing your own work.
Lacroix is an idiot? I think much of his too-clever-by-half nature was intentional. Certainly, there are many reasons why so many other vampires have no respect for the little prick.
It seems like many of your problems with Bloodlines would be solved if they simply forced you to go to sleep more often. Which is not an illegitimate complaint, but doesn’t seem that immersion breaking to me. And from a gameplay perspective, needing to go back to one of your apartments to rest all the time would’ve been a pain in the ass.
This is all petty stuff, though, that could’ve been fixed with a few lines of dialogue to explain that you had a badass progenitor or they’re transfusing you with the blood of Cain or a dozen other things. The game was rushed, sure. But if your objections could be fixed by Wesp adding a little dialogue or even a letter that explains your rapid rise in power in his next patch, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
To my mind, the biggest problem with Bloodlines is that there’s not enough of it. They should’ve added another couple of hubs to the end so that there wasn’t so much barely interrupted combat, but they didn’t have time.
This game was a buggy mess when it came out and it still sucked me in. Some of the best writing, best atmosphere, and best immersion of any game ever. When I got it on release, Bloodlines would crash every five or ten minutes. In nearly any other game I would have rage-quit after six or seven crashes in a row, but I could not fucking stop. Truly a mark of great content.
!. That was only Therese's paranoia! The same goes for Beckett who is a loner and wouldn't tell anyone about this. In contrary if you betray Strauss later on you'll miss one of the endings, so sometimes things do matter, but indeed not always...
