Chamomile wrote:That being said, Mitsoda hasn't really done much since (I've never gotten around to playing Dead State, but it didn't seem to make a huge splash).
Dead State was... pretty good. It won't change your life but it might change your next few weeks. It had some pretty interesting characters and mechanics and it was cool how your leader's abilities mattered even though he was just one of twenty or so people who eventually ended up joining you.
Making interesting characters and having a good skill system are things BLoodlines 2 has to do very well indeed to be able to hold a candle to the original. I find this mildly encouraging.
RelentlessImp wrote:It's going to be more combat-focused than VTMB was. Which is a neat feat considering that 90% of the missions in VTMB were "Go here, kill people" or in one case, "Hang out in the cemetery and kill the risen dead".
Not even close. Let's take the quests in the first hub.
Astrolite - You can persuade, sneak, or fight some thugs to get the astrolite. Or you can just bust a window, grab it, and run. Can be maybe 60% combat by length if you only fight.
McGee - You follow the trail of a bounty hunter, and the last 3% or so of the quest by length is a fight against some normal human who can't put up a real fight.
Lily - Figure out where Lily went. Follow her trail, do some persuasion, do some exploring. No combat at all.
Knox - Go to some places and investigate some things. Culminates with a semi-boss fight which makes up maybe 2% of the quest length.
Ocean House - Go through an awesome hotel. Rather long mission, no fighting at all.
Slashterpiece - Getting into the building somehow, solve a simple puzzle, fight a thing. 10% combat by length.
Werewolf Blood/Trip - Persuade, sleuth, hack, or sneak your way into a hospital's off-limit places. If you suck at doing both of those things you'll get shot at and actually killing the one guy who can fight you is pointless, and if you want to kill him anyway you can take him down in seconds. 0-2% combat by length.
Diner - Ambush fight. Short mission but almost all fighting. Follows up with a dialogue section much longer than the diner mission itself.
Warehouse - Big mission, all fighting or sneaking.
And now let's go Downtown.
Hospital - Go through a spooky scary hospital to meet a spooky scary thing who tells you to do mean things. No combat unless you want to pick a fight with the mean thing because you don't like it, and it gets you nothing. Lets you trade some stuff after doing an errand. Unless you kill it, then you don't have that opportunity.
Meeting NPCs - Talk to some important leaders and listen to them. Or don't, and tell them they talk too much.
Patty - Find and kill a ghoul. Either OHKO or trick her into leaving.
Confession - First, talk to some assholes. Kill them or persuade them. Then, kill a more important asshole. You need to fight a bunch of goons if you want to get a nice item, but you can just assassinate the important asshole if you want. Realistically going to be 80% fighting probably, but it can be none if you really don't want to hurt the poor innocent Russian mobsters.
Plaguebearers - A very long quest that has some investigation and some boss fights. 20% fighting by length.
Elizabeth Dane - Go to a place to investigate a thing. Need some persuasion and sneakiness, you can fight but that's a waste of time and you get penalized for it. For lulz, realize that you can use the wonders of modern technology to look at stuff via cameras and skip almost all of the fighting/sneaking.
Traffik - Fight or sneak. You get a bonus for sneaking.
Grout - Medium length, almost all fighting.
Museum - Sneak around to get keys to get to places to get a thing. Don't kill anybody, because they're just beat cops and you'll get penalized for it. If you do want to kill them, at this point these regular cops are about the same threat level as the fossils on display.
~fin
Granted, player agency literally goes to shit when you have to swim around in the sewers and go through a terrible sewer dungeon to save some absolute asshole Nosferatu. And the whole end-game marathon of Leopold->Hallowbrook->Temple->Tower wears out it's welcome by the end of the Leopold segment.
Come to think of it, the only part of the game which I consider to not be great is the combat-heavy part at the end. If you have a reasonably well-built character nothing in the Temple or Tower is going to be any kind of credible threat to you at all. Point in case, the first form of the final boss makes a show of jumping down from a balcony theatrically before starting the fight... and if you have maxed firearms, celerity, and a Steyr Aug you can drop him to zero health
before he even reaches the ground, ending the fight before it begins. Even if you just have max firearms and literally no disciplines you can kill his giganto-bat form in maybe ten seconds if you have good aim.
Huh. I think maybe the reason I like combat in Bloodlines as much as I do is that there's not actually very much of it, and when suddenly there is a lot of it things get stale fast. Hopefully if they continue in the direction of more combat they also make it
better combat.