Taken from a post someone made over on Reddit, here is a list of details that have been mentioned about the game so far:
- Brian Mitsoda is lead writer (just like the original) alongside Chris Avellone and Cara Ellison
- Rik Schaffer is composing again
- Set in Seattle
- Seamless hub world
- Multiple hubs
- Direct sequel to 2004's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
- Takes place 15 years after Bloodlines
- Game starts off with a Mass Embrace at Pioneer Square where player is among the new vampires born from the event, you're captured and brought upon a court of prominent vampires like the first game to recount the events of the mass embrace before being sentenced to death, court is firebombed and you escape, thrust into Seattle to find out who's responsible
- In the trailer, the curly haired vampire with the blood bag is Dale Talley who is a recluse and is one of the first characters you meet. He is responsible for easing the player character into the World of Darkness.
- Player is a thin-blood at first, later on you can choose a clan.
- No quest markers
- First-person perspective only with contextual third-person actions just like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.
- Fan-favourite characters from Bloodlines returning
- At the start of the game you have a choice of three abilities; Chiropteran which allows you to summon bats in combat and fly briefly, Nebulation which allows you to transform into mist to choke enemies and enter vents, Mentalism which allows you grab and move objects from a distance. In the 5th edition of the tabletop game these abilities would be gained through alchemy by thin-bloods, however it is currently unconfirmed whether or not those mechanics have crossed over to Bloodlines 2.
- You can scale buildings, there's an emphasis on verticality
- Level design is very reminiscent of the original Deus Ex in the sense that you're offered many different pathways to approach a particular scenario
- The protagonist is not voiced
- Way more dialogue than Bloodlines
- Huge emphasis on character creation. You can choose your background, gender pronoun, employment history, body type and fashion
- NPCs can react to you depending on what background you chose for your character in character creation
- Loads of secrets and hidden pathways to find
- Seattle as a hub world is described as "very active", crowds gather outside clubs and muggers prey on victims in side allies, all seamlessly done.
- Main side-questline involves hunting down and finding all the other thin-bloods created from the Mass Embrace, each will have their own story about entering into their new life e.g you might find a married thin-blood struggling to deal with their newfound powers
- Blood resonance from the 5th edition will appear in this game. Using your enhanced vampire senses, you can see when NPCs are experiencing an intense emotion like fear, desire, pain, joy and anger. Humans give off a bright aura. Drinking a person with a strong resonance will give you an immediate bonus to things like melee power or seduction. If you drink a particular resonance constantly, you will acquire a taste for it and this will give you permanent buffs called "merits".
- If you continuously suck on people's blood in full view of the public, they'll be more wary of going to those areas and you'll see less citizens wandering the streets
- Emphasis on fluid combat, using vampiric speed to slide in and out of melee range and slash people and execute them with melee weapons. You can get special cinematic finishers in combat when you execute people a la Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Counters are in. Guns exist and are treated as temporary opportunities, you pick em up, use it, then discard it and move on.
- It is not confirmed whether or not you can carry weapons like in the original, pre-order skins for weapons point to being able to do so.
- More clans will be added after launch for free
- Game has modding support, available Day 1
Some of these sound quite interesting like being able to scale buildings, larger human crowds and modding support. I also like the sound of secret and hidden areas and NPCs reacting to your background, though that last one reminds me of other games that do that by a few characters early on with a lot of these smaller details tapering off towards the end, VtMB1 being an example here funnily enough.
I suppose part of this would be determined by how long the game has been in development before it was announced. Preferably 2 years otherwise we might see some of these items listed drop off towards release.
There should be some interesting stuff for them to draw from 5th Edition. One thing I read was that there was a large Masquerade break and a lot of the more powerful people in the world now know that vampires and such exist. This could lead to the player having to deal with anti-vampire equipped military squads which would be neat, or dealing with humans who are in the know beyond ghouls or vampire hunters.
Another thing that people are discussing is how exactly they're going to have the player go from being a Thinblood to being of a clan.
My understanding was that Thinbloods were already part of a clan, they just had really weak powers and traits (going off the guys on the beach in the first game). Diablerie is one possible solution but that has quite a lot of taboo issues within the Camarilla and other groups, not mentioning it marks your characters aura with black veins and other potential side affects.
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Topic: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (Read 16017 times)