Oh yeah, I know what it is NOW, just when it was announced, everyone went omg and I was more wut
Me too.
Then I got around to playing
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and it all fell into place. That game is a mixed bag, but a bag worth rummaging through nonetheless. The early game is good, with flashes of brilliance. In particular, the section of the game where you have to explore an abandoned hotel was a fantastic piece of design that riffs on
The Shining to great effect. It rivals notorious Thief level
The Cradle (Warning: link to PDF). Sadly, the later stages of the game become a hack n' slash grindfest (particularly sinful when you are free to choose the way you play, à la
Deus Ex, and you can quite easily have happily focused your character on being a charming stealthy beast rather than a tough combat character and find it next to impossible to complete the game) that expose the hurried development of the game that was shoved out of the door by the publisher before it was ready.
In general, vampires don’t interest me, overwhelmed as we are with the glut of supernatural media these days.
V:TM-B though, that was an interesting game, and I think there is an awful lot of potential with the
World of Darkness setting. For me, as much as anything, it is refreshing to find anything set in the present day rather than in yet another yawnworthy sub-par sub-Tolkien clichéfest fantasy world. So, I am at least curious to see what CCP come up with on that basis alone.
I also wonder how ‘Eve-like’ the WoD game will be. Could we actually have the first MMO that will compete with Eve? Everyone else is still busy churning out their monotonous innovation-free WoW clones. As such, Eve’s bittervets have mostly never migrated to other games with any real enthusiasm – s’why they keep hanging round Eve like a bad smell.
The first time someone actually squeezes out an MMO that attempts some of the same things that Eve did, it’s going to get a lot of attention. It may make for an interesting dilemma for CCP: what if they do come up with the only competition for Eve? Would they water down WoD to avoid risking their precious cash cow?
