Resurrection: Bloodlines

Format: PC
Genre: RPG
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Troika
Released: 2004
Why now? Because there’s nothing else like it…

When I first decided to write about Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, I had only played the game once before, back when it first came out almost five years ago. And I’d never actually finished it. It’s testament to how good the first three-quarters are that I could remember it so clearly in my head so many years after, but for the sake of the article and for a bit of good old nostalgia I decided to return to the world of Bloodlines and finish it once and for all.

Vampire: Bloodlines was developed by Troika and released prematurely in late 2004, the exact same day as Half-Life 2. Not exactly marketing genius, Valve being one of the most successful developers of all time and Troika… well, Troika went bust shortly after. As usual, it was a case of a greedy, money-grabbing publisher who couldn’t wait any longer to get a few more gold coins on the pile of wealth in their Scrooge Mc Duck-style vaults. As such, the game was released unfinished, and this becomes tragically apparent as you attempt to endure the final third.

It’s a unique RPG in that you play a vampire in present-day Los Angeles – an incredibly refreshing change to goblins, swords and magic. You choose which vampire clan you’d like to belong to and which skills you’d like to start with. There are seven different clans, each of which gives you a different physical look – from the debonair, Gucci model look of the Toreador, to the hideous visage of the Nosferatu. While all the clans have different blood magic abilities, some clans play very differently indeed – such as the Nosferatu, who generally have to hide in the shadows and get around town using the sewers, lest they be seen and break the Masquerade; or the Malkavians, who due to their unique blood heritage are completely insane, with dialogue choices that reflect this madness and the ability to have conversations with signposts and TVs.

The Malkavian dialogue is particularly amusing…

The Masquerade is the rule of the vampire society, about keeping the veil of secrecy over the community and fooling the human population into believing that there’s no such thing as vampires. You can break this only a certain number of times before you start attracting the attention of vampire hunters who make travelling around town very difficult indeed. Break the masquerade six times and you’ll be judged by the vampire prince and executed, bringing the game to an end.

Fortunately, there are ways to redeem your current Masquerade level by completing certain quests and resolving certain situations. One such situation is where you are recognised in the street by an old friend before you were ‘turned’; she insists on getting you help and wants to phone your other friends to come pick you up. You can either kill her to keep the secret, or if you have a high enough persuasion skill you can talk her into believing everything is okay so she leaves you alone. Either way, you’ll regain one Masquerade point, but if you kill her you will lose humanity – vital in retaining some sense of connection to the human you once were. The lower your humanity, the more chance you have of going into a bloodlust frenzy.

It’s a system of rules that works very well, and is like nothing I’ve ever played before. You’re a real vampire, living in a world of eternal night, stalking people down dark alleyways so you can drink their blood. Not too much, though – you don’t want to kill them and lose any more of your humanity.

Anyway – blah, blah, blah, enough of the technicalities. Let’s talk about the Ocean House.

Ocean House Hotel – one of gaming’s scariest levels…

Very early in the game, you’re given a mission in which you have to deal with a haunting of an old hotel, which is holding up its redevelopment and therefore putting your client out of pocket. It’s one of the most frightening gaming experiences around. Are you ever in the house on your own, watching something on telly about ghosts and hauntings, or reading a book about them, and you really wind yourself up to the point where going upstairs to the toilet becomes scary? Where you end up running back downstairs because you think there’s something following you? Well that’s the Ocean House. Troika’s stroke of brilliance here is that nothing can really kill you. There are no bad guys to attack you or spikes falling from the ceiling, yet it’s terrifying. The hotel itself becomes the enemy, an enemy that you just want to get as far away from as possible. A story unfolds which bears a resemblance to The Shining and turns out to be a tragic tale in the end, one that stays with you long after you leave the cursed place.

There’s a ton of interesting little stories as you make your way through the various districts of L.A. – Santa Monica, Downtown, Hollywood and Chinatown – all with various ways to resolve them, some negative and some positive, all interesting. Personally I love the quests that give you difficult choices to make, such as one I mentioned earlier with the friend from the past. There’s a quest in Hollywood where you come across a man living in a house in the middle of a graveyard, who’s been given the task of stopping the undead from rising up and breaking down the gates every night – although quite why this is happening is never explained. Anyway, this guy asks you if you’ll watch the place for five minutes while he pops out to grab a hooker to bring back and have his way with. There are three ways to deal with this. You can grab a gun and make sure none of the risen dead escape from either gate in the cemetery (this is nigh on impossible); you can go grab a hooker for the guy and bring her back so he doesn’t have to leave the graveyard unattended; or, if you are playing a female character, you can seduce and have sex with him. A great deal of quests in the game have multiple solutions like this, and real depth to the fiction, and creating a story you’ll want to return to again and again.

Bloodlines presents some truly memorable characters…

So, five years after my first play-through, I was back in L.A. Everything was going well – apart from the myriad of graphical and audio bugs which really ruin some of the more dramatic scenes. How can you take dramatic cut scenes seriously when your character is running along with both legs akimbo as if he is doing the splits but still running all the same? A security guard calls for backup with a walkie-talkie, which disappears one minute and reappears the next. Nearly every cut-scene is ruined in some way due to shoddy animation and timing. You can forgive it for this, though, because the core game is so entertaining. What cannot be forgiven, ever, is the entire final third of the game.

As soon as you arrive in Chinatown, the whole game turns to complete shit. It’s like a different team of developers took over at that point, a team of developers that only know how to make bland first-person shooters… back in 1998. Some of the environments look so ropey you could be convinced it was using the Quake 2 engine. Every one of these awful missions overstays its welcome to an infuriating degree. I played a character that specialised in firearms – big bloody mistake. It doesn’t tell you that towards the end of the game normal human enemies can take about six shots to the head with a .44 magnum – the most powerful handgun in the world, one that would blow your head clean off. That’s a full clip, and each clip costs a fair whack. On one level I had to actually cheat. I had to put in the code for full ammo twice. On one single level. That’s more ammo than what you would use for entire first-person shooter games. So how are you supposed to do this without the cheats? Maybe I could forgive it if the combat was actually fun, but quite frankly that’s shit as well. Oh, it’s bad, so very, very bad. And I’m not even going to start talking about the Hollywood sewers. The doctors told me I need to keep my blood pressure down.

The sewer levels aren’t as interesting as this makes them look…

It’s so upsetting that the game ends this way. It’s like God creating the most beautiful woman in the world and then splashing acid in her face, and laughing, while frolicking in a pit of money. I blame Activision. If they’d just left Troika alone to develop Bloodlines properly, this could have been that elusive “Citizen Kane of videogames”.

I don’t think I’ll ever play Bloodlines again. It made me too angry. And my advice to you, if you are intending a revisit or to play it for the first time, is to skip the whole last third of the game with a cheat as soon as you hear the word ‘Chinatown’ – for you cannot un-see what you have seen, and you cannot un-play what you have played.

What you really play this game for are the subtle characterisations and the clever, interesting dialogue; the choices and consequences; the many tales that bring this nocturnal L.A. to life. Delving into the world of vampires and the macabre has never been so meaningful and interesting in videogames before or since.

This article resulted in a nostalgia fatality.