By Jim Rossignol on April 6th, 2009 at 7:30 am.
A while back I posted about the tragedy of games like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Following that one of the original Troika team, writer Brian Mitsoda, got in touch to talk about the project. A veteran of Troika and RPG-devs Obsidian, he’s had plenty of experience in the words that make up videogames. What follows is a discussion of Bloodlines, Troika, dialogue, character design, and inaccurate porn geographies.
RPS: Let’s start with a quick breakdown of your professional career: what have you worked on, and what did you contribute to those games?
Mitsoda: Real quick-like and to the best of my memory, I started in QA at Interplay way, way back, testing a couple of games that no one remembers and a couple they do, like Icewind Dale. Then I got promoted to designer/writer at Black Isle and worked with a bunch of great people on a game called Black Isle’s TORN (yes, it was all caps – thanks, marketing) which was never released due to some good ideas being married to bad tech. ONE YEAR LATER… joined Troika on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I then spent three years working at Obsidian on one fantastic cancelled project and a version of Alpha Protocol.
RPS: Let’s talk about Troika: how did you become involved in the Bloodlines project?
Mitsoda: Bloodlines was already into production when I joined Troika. The Half-Life 2 engine wasn’t finished. There was some preliminary design and some levels built, but most of the work that was there was revamped and, for the most part, the design was started from scratch. Quite a few people were new to the company. This basically meant we had to hit the floor sprinting and juggling plates. It was all very exciting, fueled in some part by equal parts enthusiasm/naiveté on my part.
RPS: Did the scope of the game just seem too big to you?
Mitsoda: Yes. It made me coin the phrase “kitchen sink design” – which isn’t that an impressive phrase I know, but I was too busy turning out stuff for the game. Kitchen sink design just means your game has everything AND the kitchen sink, and we literally did have kitchen sinks in that game. When a game tries to do everything, it will most likely fail at most of them.
A lot of this is due to designers (including myself) shooting too high within the scope. Sometimes overpromising features to the publisher causes it. Adapting one type of gameplay for a different interface – like sneaking and melee, for instance, which pose a lot different animation, design, and AI challenges in an FPS – and not realizing how long it takes to prototype and refine those systems, can cause problems. A simple refusal to cut or lock content generation is also a culprit in bloated scope. I think Bloodlines suffered from all of these, but despite its flaws, I think we managed to do some things exceedingly well.
Nowadays, if I have any say over it, I eliminate anything that I think can’t be finished in the estimated time to completion. Designers should cut not only to spend time on polish, but because it ends up creating a lot of work for everyone else on the team too. Unfortunately, it is my experience that too many people in the game industry cannot learn this lesson. It’s especially bad on RPGs since publishers and fans have this expectation that the game should be fifty to a million hours long, which is almost impossible to polish.
RPS: How did you go about creating the plot and dialog? Can you describe the overall process? There’s a number of writers credited, plus the design team, what influence did you have in that wider creative circle?
Mitsoda: The basic plot was kind of there – there’s a new prince in town, there’s a group of anarchs that are pissed, ties to Gehenna event, and Jack and the sarcophagus being a major story point. The designers (about five people) discussed some ways to tie everything into the hubs and levels. With the broader elements agreed upon, we had a lot of control over our sections of the game. Keep in mind, it was a small team doing everything – two writer/designers, one modeler/senior designer, and two owners/producers/designers. With just a few people overseeing every aspect, it doesn’t take as long to reach a consensus or keep plot straight.
Over time, I became primarily tasked with writing the majority of the characters and dialogue, and that helped with consistency. I probably had to argue points a few times, but because of time constraints or faith in my abilities, I was given a lot of freedom with characters and their quests.
RPS: What were the best and worst things about that game from a writing standpoint?
Mitsoda: The Best – Freedom to do what I wanted with the writing. Not having to sanitize the language or content, which meant I got to work with some more mature elements outside of casually slipping f-bombs into the script. Working with Margaret Tang, an amazing voice director who did us solids left and right to get the right voices for the parts. Writing comedy, tragedy, drama, and a Frankenstein bit all in the same game. Getting to rewrite a few characters (like Damsel) after I felt my first draft was weak. The radio script. Some of the insignificant bits like computer text or spam emails, which were great fun after spending a day setting up cameras or tracking down a scripting bug.
The Worst – Scope. Pushing myself too hard to do too much, burning me out for a couple of months after the project was over. Writing a project like Bloodlines and realizing that, for the rest of your career, you probably won’t get to write anything like Bloodlines.
RPS: How comfortable was the team with the adult themes in the game?
Mitsoda: I don’t think there were any problems. Most game developers aren’t terribly sensitive to “salty” language or mature subject matter. If anything, you have to watch out or it quickly develops into immature.
RPS: Was there ever a moment when you thought that porn dungeons might have been too risky?
Mitsoda: Not really. Wasn’t there a zebra in there? If anything, it was inaccurate – porn is shot in the Valley, not Hollywood.
RPS: Any research needed in that area?
Mitsoda: Not really, but I did run around in a cape for a few weeks to get the vampire thing down.
RPS: The character design in Bloodlines is what really stands out for me, can you elucidate the process of creating some of these characters a little?
Mitsoda: Sure. A lot of times they’re born out of necessity. You need a character to pose a problem or give out a quest or be a barrier of some kind. I don’t like to make the NPC outright say “I need you to do X, then I’ll give you Y” because I see it all the time in games and it shows the writer’s hand – it makes the character into an automated quest kiosk. I like the characters to come off like people actually do – they don’t say “hi” when strangers come knocking, they say “who the hell are you?” or they’re expecting you and know more then they let on, or they don’t care. I don’t like my NPCs to be standing around as if their lives begin when the character starts talking to them and end when the player leaves. Characters are the protagonists of their own game, from their perspective.
Major characters that the player speaks to multiple times need to show progression based on your previous interactions or actions you’ve taken in the world. One-off characters that you talk to once, need to have hooks or personality traits that make them immediately fascinating, or they feel like just another quest item depository. It’s nothing but putting a little extra effort into it – thinking about who the character is, what they want, what they think of the player, why they’re standing around, and how they’re sizing up or trying to take advantage of the player. I generally find the character’s voice out loud to get an understanding of their speech pattern and tone. If I’ve got it, then the dialogue just comes naturally after that.
RPS: Did the malkavian player character pose any special problems for you?
Mitsoda: I generally did it last, when there wasn’t a whole lot of time left. So between lack of sleep, being overworked, and possessing an unhealthy state-of-mind, the conditions were ideal for writing the Malkavians. The one thing I wanted to do with them is illustrate madness without it being completely Looney Tunes. It’s too easy to play crazy for laughs.
RPS: Do you feel that good writing in games gets overlooked, while bad writing gets trashed?
Mitsoda: I feel like bad writing is tolerated, while mediocre writing gets spooned. I don’t think good games necessarily need good writing, but I would really enjoy it if games that sell their story first and foremost did a better job of delivering. Certain studios and writers, I think, get a pass (and work) no matter what they turn out, while a few veterans (like Tim Schafer) continue to turn out excellent work. I think if critics are going to focus on a game’s writing, they should analyze not only the marriage of the narrative to the gameplay, but set some higher standards for what they expect from characters, plot, and dialogue.
A good scene, a good line, and/or a decent character do not make a game’s story great. Bad writing is bad writing – it might not matter if the game is fun, but don’t score the story higher because the game mechanics were tight or the setting was novel. Ultimately, the writing really isn’t that key to a fantastic game, but for those that do make it a crucial part of their game and hype it as such, those are the games the gaming press should be a lot more critical of. And for those that identify themselves as game writers, critics and fans should absolutely hold feet to flames ad infinitum, myself included.
RPS: Why do games journalists always seem to end up complaining about voice acting in games?
Mitsoda: It generally tends to be sub-SciFi Channel original, intrusive, or comfortably mundane.
RPS: So is it overlooked by developers, or is it just too hard to do well?
Mitsoda: It’s not difficult, I don’t think, but it requires the right people and a bit of forethought. I’ve always found it easier to put together, because I’ve got some screenwriting and acting background. Essentially, what you need is:
-A writer that knows how to write spoken dialogue for actors, and knows how they want the voice and character mannerisms to sound before the script goes to the studio.
-A voice director that wants to work with the writers in getting them the voices and direction they want.
-The right actors for the parts, given enough context and direction to bring the character to life without telling them “say it like this” after every take.
Too often dialogue writers have long, unwieldy, cluttered dialogue that would sound fine if it was being read, but sounds preposterous and maybe even stupid if being read dramatically. I know for a fact that a lot of actors can’t stand doing games because most of the stuff they have to read is:
“[Urgent and relieved]Lo, it is very fortuitous that you have arrived in Gremalkenvale [Gray-molk-in-vail], in the most dire time of our cataclysmic confrontation with the Shadoouins [Shadoo-we-ins]! [Surprised, chewing on waffles]I see you are bearing the sword of Icthmhaloaxen [Bos-ton], the Moss Knight of the Fsxirtuinox [Fsxirtuinox] Caverns, which means that [ominous and loud and a little obsequious with a hint of Gary Coleman] you are the chosen hero prophesized to defeat the evil demon king, [Swahili accent, as Grendar is learned in the ways of the Bark people] Gflxxx4mrazormkkxzzz!sss and his grim followers with your trusty friends, [need a version of this line to cover all the companions].”
That’s how one line of some game dialogue (not mine) looks – you try doing ten pages of that, three takes apiece, with a roomful of producers and writers all adding their own clever notes on how it could be read better. That is if the writer is there or the actor has been given anything in advance. It all comes down to the people involved, but a good writing lead should be able to get the dialogue up to snuff, get a competent director and actors, and be sure the recording process goes smoothly.
RPS: How did you feel about the game after launch?
Mitsoda: Well, I was proud of the work that the team and I did. On the other hand, I knew it could have used a few more weeks of polish. Couple the state of the release with the fact that we were launching against Halo, Metal Gear Solid, and Half-Life sequels, it felt one step up from being sold at a yard sale.
RPS: Were you still at Troika for the closure?
Mitsoda: Yup, and then some. We tried to get some other projects going, including creating a prototype that was fun and put together in almost no time.
RPS: How did you feel about that?
Mitsoda: The game industry constantly gives you reasons to rethink your career decisions. That said, I’m still glad I worked on Bloodlines.
RPS: How do you feel about the community patches that followed to fix Vampire up?
Mitsoda: I’m always surprised when I see new patches or content for the game, but I’m glad there’s still interest in it.
RPS: Do you have any residual bitterness about the game shipping unfinished?
Mitsoda: Whether you’re creating books, films, movies, anything, there’s probably something the creators want to change about it. The technical problems should have been fixed, no question. I suppose if I’m bitter about anything, it’s that even if our initial sales numbers weren’t that solid, I know the game has sold well over the years through digital distribution, and it illustrates just how short-sighted this industry can be. I’d love to know what the numbers are these days to find out just how successful the game was over time. Some residuals would be nice too.
RPS: Yes, that would be interesting. Thanks.
Bloodlines is quite a few hours of excellence, once patched up. You can get it for cheap in boxed versions all over the place, or on Steam for £15/$20. And yeah, the money from your purchase won’t get back to the original team.
06/04/2009 at 07:47 Turin Turambar says:
“and it illustrates just how short-sighted this industry can be”
Activision can go to hell. They should have delay the game by four months, and with only that they could release a much better game, both in bugs and in overall polish. But no, they had to rush the game out the door, just in the release day of HalfLife 2, when they could release the game legally, not one day later.
06/04/2009 at 08:28 unclelou says:
A great read. I especially like what he says about NPC design and “quest kiosks”. This is what all the big RPG devs like Bioware and Bethesda never seem to get right. It’s really just (at least partly) the Gothic series and Vampire that solve this more elegantly.
One question, what does this mean:
“I then spent three years working at Obsidian on one fantastic cancelled project and a version of Alpha Protocol. ”
“A version” of Alpha Protocol? So he is not a writer for AP?
06/04/2009 at 08:46 Stromko says:
I rather enjoyed Bloodlines anyway, mainly for the first half of the game. Really quite incredible stuff, immersive, a lot of excellent characters that really stick in your mind. The rough edges and lack of mastery over the UI / engine were clear throughout, the second half really wasn’t worth playing at all (things started to fly off the rails entirely mid-Chinatown, and the sewers before that were bulls**t third-rate FPSing for way too long), but I still must say that the first half of Bloodlines makes it a true classic for me.
I actually liked Bloodlines better than Deus Ex. I know that’s got to be an unpopular opinion, but I really mean it. No accounting for taste I suppose.
06/04/2009 at 08:55 Jonathanstrange says:
Extremely interesting interview. I’ve always thought one of the biggest gaming ‘tragedies’ for lack of better words, was Troika’s closure. They only made three games, and to be fair all three were buggy as hell upon release, but all three also were spectacular and ambitious in ways most other developers can’t even dream of, and for that I salute them.
By the by, wonder if this is the prototype he was talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X8Z14ExYxo
06/04/2009 at 09:20 Subject 706 says:
I’d say that few (if any) games have had as interesting and complex characters as those found in VtMB. Not to mention that they managed to do proper facial expressions on their NPCs too, something which is rather lacking even these days.
Makes me hope for the demise of all large publishers…
06/04/2009 at 09:29 Jazmeister says:
This is great. This is the article I’ve always wanted to read. This is an interesting person talking to an interesting person about an interesting process behind an interesting game. I hereby score this article eleven bananas.
06/04/2009 at 09:33 Levictus says:
Thanks you for releasing this wonderful game. I’ve never really played a game that immersed you into the gaming world to such a high degree. I also loved the RPG/FPS combo, it was so well executed. Very few RPGs manage to do this most, most of them tend to hack and slash or Oblivion style games. I wish we could have another sequel to Vampire: Masquerade, set in Barcelona. I guess it never hurts to dream!
06/04/2009 at 09:35 Kieron Gillen says:
Good work, Jim.
KG
06/04/2009 at 09:40 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
He wins the Bestest Friend of the Malkavians Award in my book.
06/04/2009 at 09:46 Hümmelgümpf says:
@unclelou:
Alpha Protocol got an overhaul somewhere along the road. I think some writers wanted to make a realistic game, others wanted to do camp. I don’t know who ultimately won, but Mitsoda decided to leave the company. Chris “Let’s put KotOR 2 instead of Torment here for a change” Avellone is the lead writer now.
06/04/2009 at 09:47 Schmung says:
His comments RE voice direction etc should be required reading. Take note bethesda
06/04/2009 at 09:57 Whelp says:
Man I love Bloodlines. I replayed it just 2 weeks ago, awesome game (although a bit buggy, I should try the unofficial patch next time).
06/04/2009 at 10:04 Garg says:
“I then spent three years working at Obsidian on one fantastic cancelled project and a version of Alpha Protocol”
Anyone know what the cancelled project was?
06/04/2009 at 10:09 Hümmelgümpf says:
@Garg:
Only the codename is known: Project New Jersey.
06/04/2009 at 10:17 Pavel says:
Garg – Aliens, maybe?
Anyway, Bloodlines is exactly the fourth best game of all time (after Fallout1, 2 and Deus Ex) and in no small part thanks to Brian.I wish we could get him to work on another awesome vampire RPG, but I guess is no-go.
06/04/2009 at 10:25 pilouuuu says:
Great interview. It’s sad that Troika is no more… I would love a new Vampire. Maybe someday…
I liked the bit where he talks about NPC and how they should be real characters and not quest kiosks. Brilliant idea for developers. Are you taking notice, Bethesda?
06/04/2009 at 10:34 Wurzel says:
Heh, replaying it at the moment (as a malkavian, ofc). It’s a really very good rpg, at least before you reach chinatown and it becomes bugged to hell. Reading the bit about ‘quest kiosks’ really drove home for me what was different about it; no people stopping you in the street and being all “we need an outside opinion on whether I should carry my baby to term”. You can imagine that everyone has their own lives, wishes and responsibilities, and it brings the game to life where the engine might fail.
06/04/2009 at 10:40 danielcardigan says:
“Great interview. It’s sad that Troika is no more… I would love a new Vampire. ”
Don’t forget there was an OLD Vampire, before Bloodlines.
06/04/2009 at 10:57 H says:
I absolutely love the game, but I can’t get past the haunted house because it terrifies the hell out of me. Just like The Cradle.
06/04/2009 at 10:59 Bobsy says:
Random problem with Bloodlines: the foley is awful.
06/04/2009 at 11:08 Gnarl says:
This interview is significantly better written than most games. That pretend bit of script was great. Kudos to both interviewer and ee.
Bloodlines is probably the game I’ve enjoyed most. Just flat. And Mr. Mitsoda is probably why, so thank you. I have to disagree with the point that writing is not key to making a fantastic game though. I wouldn’t describe any game as more than ‘alright’ if it’s writing didn’t grab me. I won’t argue successful though.
06/04/2009 at 11:18 unclelou says:
Thanks, Hümmelgümpf.
06/04/2009 at 11:50 cheeba says:
Excellent work on the interview, thanks to all involved for bringing it our way.
Of course I’m going to sing Bloodlines’ praises too while I’m here. Yeah, it wasn’t perfect, but everything it got right it really nailed. Other developers should be fucking embarrassed that most of ‘em can’t even get facial animation and character performances to this level, never mind the writing.
06/04/2009 at 12:01 Rob says:
Huh, it’s obvious now you say it but I’m a bit miffed that my legitimate purchases of the game didn’t actually send any money back to the guys who made the thing.
Interesting interview about an overlooked game, thanks.
06/04/2009 at 12:15 Jockie says:
@H – try putting the camera into 3rd person and jumping around the hotel like a loon, it looks so ridiculous that any fears will soon evaporate.
Nice interview, Bloodlines with the unofficial patches turns into a great game without bugs marring the experience. There really are a phenominal number of great and memorable NPCs in the game when compared to most crpgs.
06/04/2009 at 13:13 Dave Gates says:
Probably not the place, but I just got my copy of PC Gamer through the post. BIOSHOCK 2 PEOPLE. Looks top drawer.
06/04/2009 at 13:21 clovus says:
I haven’t played the game yet, and would really like to. If I buy it on Steam, what exactly am I paying for then? I don’t want to bring up the p-word, but I’d feel much better directly sending a few bucks to the various people who actually worked on this game, then paying Steam for it. I’m guessing most of my $20 would just go to the people who screwed everything up. That makes it almost immoral to buy the thing.
Then there is the patch. So, I am paying some jerks for the right to play a game, but not paying the people who made it or the people who fixed it. Awesome.
06/04/2009 at 13:21 Heliocentric says:
I’d prefer it if bioshock looked top shelf. Barely leagal sister Rawr!
06/04/2009 at 13:45 Dave Gates says:
@ clovus :
I don’t really follow your point. If you buy it from steam then you are paying steam and the developers. The developers get some money for making it, Valve get some cash for bringing it to a wider audience. The patch made by modders is a labour of love, they knew they’d get no money for it and in all honesty some people get jobs at various developing house due to work on mods. The guys who made Portal for instance made Narbacular drop and Valve (ironicaly given the content of this conversation) employed them to make a game. Really, buy it off steam, and you will supporting independent game development as well as give the makers a few quid.
06/04/2009 at 13:50 Jim Rossignol says:
The development studio closed. They will make no money.
06/04/2009 at 13:53 Dave Gates says:
@ Jim.
To which end the argument is a bit redundant. Buy it off steam, enjoy the game, nobody benefits from the ‘p’ word.
06/04/2009 at 14:02 Lucas says:
Most games where the writing matters just need LESS writing altogether. Then making it not suck should be much easier.
06/04/2009 at 14:03 Torgen says:
Jim Rossignol says:
The development studio closed. They will make no money.
Which is why the publishers are so keen to keep title to all the old games- if the dev studio is defunct, the publisher keeps their share of the residuals too!
06/04/2009 at 14:19 flo says:
Yeah, really nice game, just started replaying all the clans … (Malkavian, Toreador, Gangrel, Tremere finished so far) If you get at least the 1.2 patch it really isn’t buggy anymore, I had no crashes, ever, and gamepla is very smooth. (the AI still feels retarded sometimes, but then again this might just be if your sneaking is high enough)
The only thing I don’t like about the game, that apart from xp you can’t get as a certain character (really doesn’t make sense to skill persuasion as a gangrel) there’s also lots of events where if you don’t know “i have to ask about/do this thing now, or the opportunity is gone” then you might be screwed in the endgame or at least have it a lot harder, especially when both come together. So you basically can’t play it w/o watching very carefully what you do, and for a first time player even then lots of things that can be important are not even apparent in any way, unless you know they are there.
06/04/2009 at 14:22 Rook says:
I hate to say this, but Troika really did deserve to die. The bugginess of their releases was 100% inexcusable.
06/04/2009 at 14:26 wcaypahwat says:
Does the steam version support the unnoficial patches, though?
06/04/2009 at 14:26 Markoff Chaney says:
Phenomenal Game. Excellent Interview. Thank you for digging and sharing with us. Always a pleasure to see what was going on in the heads of some of the people who write some of the best non-linear storytelling.
06/04/2009 at 14:27 Jim Rossignol says:
Rook: Yes, because PERFECT MECHANICAL FUNCTION is way more important than creativity or memorable experience. Yes, Bloodlines was a mess on release, but even in that state it was a superb thing to play through – the same is true of many bugged-to-shit games. I actually hit a show-stopping bug on my first play through Bloodlines, and that made me cry hot man tears. But the preceding ten hours, well, that was worthy.
wcaypahwat: I believe you can bodge the patches to work on the Steam version.
06/04/2009 at 14:38 clovus says:
@ Dave, Rook: From reading the wiki about the game (hey, look, Kieron Gillen of EuroGamer is in there), the bugginess was mainly due to Activision forcing them to release it before it was done. I don’t want to now give Activision money for screwing over Troika. So, now I will not pay for the game. I don’t feel I can justify pirating it either though, so I guess I’ll just not play it.
I’m definitely not giving money to Steam for “bringing it to a wider audience”. The umm… internet… has already made the game as available as it could be. Now, if Steam/Valve had actually updated the game (a la GOG) then I might consider it.
I’d also consider buying it if Activision (or anyone else that caused the problem) is no longer connected with the game.
I shouldn’t have mentioned the patch; it didn’t really contribute to my point. Maybe it is just that since the game wasn’t properly supported, it seems unfair to pay for it now. When the community finished the game, it sort of becomes the property of the community. Again, this isn’t a great argument.
06/04/2009 at 15:04 Dan (WR) says:
Thanks for the interview. I wub Bloodlines.
I think it would be a shame if designers shy away from kitchen-sink design. It’s a very PC-games sort of thing, and I’d much rather play through a seething buggy mess of ideas than a single set of ideas polished to a high sheen.
Boiling Point > Halo
(Also I would have thought that both System Shock and Deus Ex were born of Kitchen-sink approaches)
I like his attitude towards games writing – particularly that games with pretensions towards good writing should receive more scrutiny. I can’t help but think that when he says that certain studios and writers get a pass he’s referring to Bioware. Mass Effect recieved some absurdly hyperbolic praise for its story, but despite its impressive world-building it featured quite a few dull exposition-dump characters. Including your crew. I think such things need to be prodded with a point stick rather than us all sitting back and coo-ing in happiness that someone actually bothered to put some effort into writing a story.
06/04/2009 at 15:05 MeestaNob! says:
@Jim & wcaypahwat
I imagine if you set the game in Steam to ‘Do not automatically update this game’ it will ignore file discrepancies between your machine and the original version, allowing you to mod to your hearts content.
In other news, I’ve never played this game – and I just don’t have the heart to slog though yet another flawed genius of a game. That said, if someone reputable were to buy up the Vampire Bloodlines licence from whoever holds it these days (presumably still Activision) and fully re-create it in it’s intended glory, I’d be very happy to give it a go.
06/04/2009 at 15:12 Jazmeister says:
I bought Bloodlines after some dude at my college was raving about it, and it took over my life for a couple of weeks. It ended, for me, at this one bug when you’re returning from some castle, with some scientist, or…. well, I can’t remember which horrible bug it was, but I remember having to manually load the map, and then I didn’t have my stuff, and then I just watched my brother cheating through the rest of his game. I don’t know the ending, actually.
But although Bloodlines came out crashing and clipping you into walls and things, Oblivion had faults too. Not for everyone, but for me, that game would crash every five minutes, nomatter what. I still drop ancient important powerful lewt through floors in Oblivion. The one quest guy, the high-end thieves guild fence, just doesn’t work. The community released an excellent patch for that too. Bethesda get to make Fallout 3, with wooden, expressionless people pulling bottles of coke from their ass and saying the same shit to each other. Troika get to completely disintegrate and become this bad taste in the mouth of the games industry, like an example to all who’d dare to attempt to pitch a rough diamond instead of a polished turd.
So take what I just said, and pretend it wasn’t so venemous > that’s what I meant to say.
06/04/2009 at 15:25 Chis says:
Yesterday I happened upon the Fallout 3 page on IMDB. Go take a look. The rating is a few points away from The Wire, and similar to Deadwood. Both shows that, and I’m sure those that have seen them will agree, have truly outstanding writing, acting, screenplay, everything. I’d be tempted to put Bloodlines pretty close to this, but Fallout 3?
Bloody hell!
(Great interview, by the way! Now do an article on Pioneer, damnit.)
06/04/2009 at 15:31 jalf says:
How so? Bloodlines *with* the bugs was still a better game than most games that are released in a non-buggy state.
Isn’t the overall picture worth considering? Or do you *only* count bugs, and completely ignore the actual game?
06/04/2009 at 15:37 Okami says:
I hate to say this, but Rook really deserves to get flamed to hell and back again. The flame baitedness of his post was 100% inexcusable.
06/04/2009 at 15:40 markcocjin says:
When you buy the games on Steam, you could at least tell yourself that there is something good that would come out of it.
Redemption.
Although Activision may hide the long tail profits Bloodlines gets, at least Valve knows. And Valve knowing about how something done with the Source Engine outside of their development might inspire them to support other developers who value game elements like characterization through great acting and writing. In RPG, that is a forgotten virtue.
Buy the game. It’s longevity speaks volumes about how quality goes a long way. And here I thought an abandoned underwater city stuck in a bygone era would make a better story than a generic dark world full of vampires in hiding.
06/04/2009 at 15:54 TwistyMcNoggins says:
:(
It’s really disappointing to hear that the lesson they all learnt from Bloodlines was to do LESS work in the future.
06/04/2009 at 15:58 matte_k says:
@ Clovus: Look for a copy on ebay. Only person who profits from that is ebay and the seller.
@H: Play it with the sound off, a lot of the unsettling creepiness in that Hotel is from the whispered warnings, footsteps, etc.
Love Vampire. Mitsoda’s comments about “quest kiosks” rings so true, in Bloodlines it felt like less of that, most characters are aware of your lowly status, and treat you accordingly. It’s very much a case of “You want help? Ok, what’s in it for me? You going to work (i.e. Take their quest) to earn that help?” which feels a bit more realistic. Hell, some NPC’s insult the crap out of you on a frequent basis.
Would be interesting if Mitsoda did some writing for the forthcoming VTM MMO from CCP and White Wolf…speaking of which any further news on that?
06/04/2009 at 16:01 clovus says:
@Dan: I actually found myself thinking Mass Effect had great writing, but you are right. I will stick to my guns that it had really good voice acting though. The overall story was nice, but ya, I totally skipped my crew’s stories. Those were terrible. At some point I realized that I was only even talking to them in order to get get XP (and ummm… to see that one scene). It really was the world that was interesting. I liked listening to the various aliens talk about their cultures. Especially the ones that described their emotions in words and sounded like they were voiced by Keeanu Reeves.
@markcocjn: That’s a very reasonable line of thinking. Maybe I’ll buy it if it goes on sale again.
I’m agreeing with people on the internet; can I burn my AIM merit badge?
06/04/2009 at 16:01 Jason says:
Great interview. I think actually that the good writing for the “quest giver” NPCs continues through the whole game. My first play-through was as a Ventrue (because I like to win and why not pick the clan that wins?) I picked the “arrogant bitch” choices with everyone but the Prince and the “grovelling suckup” choices with the Prince and he gave me all kinds of crap just for being me. The next time through, as a Nosferatu, where you can’t even walk down the street without losing the game due to your ugly face, I was a crotch-punching blood-belching jackass to everyone in the world except people who started out nice to me, and what do you know, the Prince didn’t give me shit and damn near half the people I talked to freaked. If the end few quests had had just a bit more polish, it would have been brilliant. And actually the writing is much better than Deus Ex as it stands. Malkavian playthrough next.
06/04/2009 at 16:05 H says:
@Jockie
Hah, it works, thanks. Now to make Garrett jump like a double-dutch ho.
06/04/2009 at 16:25 Rook says:
Jim: I really haven’t heard of anyone that played the vanilla game on release that didn’t encounter a show stopping bug. (the guy on the boat right? – or was it the barred door later on, not nearly as prevalent I think).
I find it completely and utterly unacceptable to release a game for full retail price where a large number of people will not be able to finish it due to a crash to desktop that should have been caught in QA on day 1. And then leave people to fix it themselves. The entire mentality of release it now and patch it maybe was one of the worst things to ever hit gaming.
Troika especially had 3 successive releases that weren’t just mired with bugs, but unplayable for many people. I’m not sure how anyone can argue that something needed to change at Troika and unfortunately for them, they didn’t change and got stuck with the consequences.
06/04/2009 at 16:36 Paul Moloney says:
“So, now I will not pay for the game. I don’t feel I can justify pirating it either though, so I guess I’ll just not play it. ”
There is a chance – small, admittedly – that buying the game will encourage another developer to take a chance with such a game, or even with a “Vampires” sequel. So, hold your nose and buy it, is my advice.
P.
06/04/2009 at 16:36 Dave Gates says:
@ Clovus
The simple fact of the matter is that, not playing it, or pirating it will not achieve anything. We live in a time where the almighty pound (or dollar) is king, not buying a game will only have negative consequences. I know where you’re comming from and I agree that its unfair that the orginal makers of the game make no money, but on the flip side of the coin is unless somebody buys them, no matter who makes a profit, it is unlikely that any similar games like that will be made. It is a tragedy that people aren’t making monet from their own creations but that is the way of things at the moment. Hopefully thing will change.
06/04/2009 at 16:44 Nick says:
The writing in Bloodlines was utterly brilliant, it helped the gameworld become one of the most immersive I have ever played. It is one of the best games I have ever played, I just wish there had been more fleshing out of the later stages and a bit less flesh beast in sewer action. Loved it anyway, though.
06/04/2009 at 16:45 Paul Moloney says:
“The entire mentality of release it now and patch it maybe was one of the worst things to ever hit gaming”
Though I love VTM:B Bloodlines, I have to agree with Rook here. You wouldn’t be able to give a book, no matter how brilliant, a good review if it turned out that in the print run, they’d left out the last 3 chapters, and were only promising readers that might eventually send them out at a later date.
Behaviour is tolerated in the games industry that would be the cause of mass action suits in any other. In the case of Troika, I would love to know how many QA people they had, vs. developers.
I once installed Boiling Point on the say-so of people who said “never mind the bugs, it’s fun”, but just couldn’t get past how woefully buggy it was (a town entirely populated by people attempting to drive vehicles into walls and each other) and therefore, implying how much of a sucker its developers took me for.
P.
06/04/2009 at 16:55 MeestaNob! says:
Devils Advocate time:
Rook does NOT deserve to be flamed, because as customers it isn’t our fault a developer’s publisher forced them to release an unfinished game. It also isn’t our fault that Troika failed to finish three games. Whether or not they were unlucky three times becomes irrelevant as a pattern emerges (at this point I’d like to note that Bloodlines is by far the worst offender after limited research).
Whilst I commend Troika for their attention to story telling through immersion (animation, voice acting, quality of dialogue etc), I cant help but think that as a consumer we are better off without them. The romance of a story told well (or at least astronomically better than the dross of most Epic Story Masterpiece video games) loses all meaning when a game is so broken that it doesn’t work adequately and you have been separated with your hard earned.
Make no mistake, Troika had chances and in the end they didn’t make it. Let’s hope they are doing better in their new companies.
06/04/2009 at 17:24 Vorpal says:
Fantastic interview, Jim!Thank you for this.. what a unique game Bloodlines was.
And Rook.. i think that you deserve to burn in hell for what you said.
06/04/2009 at 17:28 Serondal says:
I pre-ordered this game along with Half Life 2. I beat half life 2 in a day and uninstalled it and didn’t play it again until Episode 2 came out and I got Orange box. I have NEVER uninstalled Bloodlines since I installed it and I still play it all the time. If there were bugs with the game I /never/ noticed. I’ve played through the game as ever race/sex combo and still play through it ever now and again just to enjoy being a F@#$#ing vampire! No other game I’ve ever played comes close to putting you into the game world so totally.
06/04/2009 at 17:41 markec says:
I played all Troika games on their release without any patches and neither Arcanum or ToEE had any major bugs.
Bloodlines on the other hand was buggy as hell with game stopping bug that was quickly fixed with 1.2 patch but there is a saying “Bugs can be fixed but shitty design is forever.”. I would rather play buggy masterpiece like Bloodlines then awful polished game like Oblivion or Fallout 3. Even today i often replay Bloodlines while almost all new RPGs are collecting dust after a single playtrough.
06/04/2009 at 17:57 Serondal says:
ToEE and Arcanum were two great games. Arcanum reminded me a lot of Fallout 1 and 2.
I dunno why I never had any bugs with Bloodlines, I guess I was just lucky enough to have a perfect set up or went through the game perfectly as designed and never set off any bugs :P
The instant my male vampire seduced a random MAN from the streets with his majesty I knew I’d love the game forever, what other game gives you the power to overcome a human’s sexual preference based on your vampiric powers!
06/04/2009 at 18:22 Lintman says:
For those blaming mean old Activision for forcing Troika to release a buggy game, let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute. Here’s how (I believe) game publishing works:
- Troika goes to Activision and says they need X dollars to create and complete their game which will take Y months/years of development time.
- Activision looks over the budget and the feature list and estimates how much money (Z) they can make selling the game at time frame Y. Is it worth the risk? If Z seems substantially likely to be greater than X (ie: profitable), Activision OK’s the project, signs a contract with Troika, and gives them the money.
- Troika takes the money and starts building their ambitious “kitchen sink design” game. Y months elapse, and the game is not “done” – the game is ambitious with great potential but unpolished and quite buggy.
- Troika asks Activision for more time and money to complete the game.
- Now Activision has to again decide if it’s worth the risk: Will the game still be profitable if they spend the extra money and the game is delayed further? If they do give the extra money and time, what’s the likelihood that Troika STILL might not be done at the end of that period? Does Troika have a good track record for meeting its commitments? Perhaps they’ve even already given Troika some extra time and money earlier in the process. Might they be throwing good money after bad?
- While Bloodlines certainly has had some legs and arguably would have been worth the extra costs, hindsight is 20/20. For every troubled game like Bloodlines that found some success, there is probably a “Daitakana” where the game flopped despite the long development time.
Now, we don’t know all the details of what went on there, and I do wish Bloodlines had gotten the extra time and that Troika survived, but I don’t think Activision is *necessarily* a villian in all this.
06/04/2009 at 18:52 Guhndahb says:
@Dan (WR): I love it. Boiling Point > Halo. So true and I agree with the rest of what you said.
@Rook: I think I can say you “know” one now. I bought V:tM:B when it first came out and did not encounter a show-stopping bug (which I define as a bug that requires me to start a new game). Deus Ex and Daggerfall are, to date, the only games that hit me with a bug requiring a restart of the game. And I still loved them too. That isn’t to say Bloodlines wasn’t buggy for me, but nothing show-stopping nor anything that kept me from loving the game as I played it.
And for those of you who are scared away from a first playthrough of Bloodlines NOW, please realize that the problems have been significantly reduced with Wesp’s patches.
And the older Vt:M game that was mentioned was V:tM Redemption, as markcocjin said. It was a very different game from Bloodlines but I quite liked it. I’ve replayed it twice over the years and I always find it very frustrating to play but remember it warmly after I’m done and look forward to the next play through. Good story and fun to have a coterie.
I think part of the credit for Bloodlines should also go to White Wolf/V:tM itself. While I’ve never played it P&P I still think it’s by far the best vampire “universe” ever made. Every incarnation of vampires in TV, books or film always seems to fall flat with me after my exposure to the Worlds of Darkness.
Anyways, I’ll take a buggy mess of an inspired game over most of the drivel I buy any day. All hail the kitchen sink!
06/04/2009 at 18:57 Serondal says:
Activision and EA and other big companies of that sort are out to make money and do whatever they can to make sure that is what happens even if they end up forcing the release of a game that isn’t done. I guess at some point they ask themselves. If we releaset the game now, it is likely X people will buy the game and won’t tell everyone else it is buggy until 2 or 3 days after the game goes on sale. If X is larger than Y (The cost of making the game) They’ll release it with hopes of making back the money they already spent and anything on top of that is just extra.
What they don’t seem to realize is that they are greating this massive well of bad will against them that is going to end up killing them in the end of they don’t do something soon to improve their standing with their customers. There is a list a mile long full of things they’ve done to hurt their customer relations but the REAL question is, are they just hurting their relationship with hardcore gamers or are they hurting their relationship with ALL gamers. I suspect most people don’t even realize what is going on, they buy the game play, if the patching is automated they get patches but if not they don’t even know what patch is. These brain dead gamers are probably what fills EA’s coffers eh ?
Still they’re not villians, just businessmen trying to turn a profit and you can’t fault them for that. This is why I love Stardock and Valve, they turn a profit AND serve the community, they’re the ones’ that are going to be around for a long long time because they are building a huge base of loyal customers.
06/04/2009 at 19:01 unclelou says:
Well, yeah, it kind of is unacceptable (athough you’ve now met two, Rook, I haven’t had a show-stoppin bug, either), but between a game like Vampire (buggy on release), a polished turd, and no game at all, I’ll take Vampire any day.
Games like Vampire will always have a smaller budget, and will never be polished to the degree of an AAA first-party console release. Devs like Troika going under won’t mean we’ll see more games of this kind, but with less bugs. Not living in cloud cuckoo land, that means I find bugs in ambitious games tolerable to a degree, as I don’t see an alternative.
06/04/2009 at 19:56 bhlaab says:
So far, it’s looking like the RPG died with Troika.
06/04/2009 at 19:59 Herbert says:
„Whilst I commend Troika for their attention to story telling through immersion (animation, voice acting, quality of dialogue etc), I cant help but think that as a consumer we are better off without them.“
When things like in the case of Bloodlines happen, it has nothing to do with your status as a consumer. This would otherwise imply that they didn’t care much for their own work either or that there was hardly solid ground left in the game.
It also ignores that the people at Troika had no other choice than to release the game too early or not at all. They didn’t even have time to wait for reactions to the game before the studio was officially closed.
06/04/2009 at 20:05 drewski says:
I’m not puzzled by the ripping of Bethesday here over both voice acting and quest kiosks but I have to say that, having spent a LOT of time in Fallout 3 lately, I think they are definitely learning. The difference between Morrowind’s NPCs and Fallout’s are marked – although even in Morrowind you’d trip over hilariously random NPCs with genuine motivations, the one that always sticks out in my mind is the low level quest giver in the Mage guild in Balmora, who is largely motivated by a fued with another guild member over who can progress the faster. And the Fighters Guild, with the battle for control – these, to me, are interesting quest givers with genuine motivations.
Fallout 3 – I’ve been doing a lot of the Wasteland Survival Guide quests and, once you give Moira a chance to explain why she wants to write it, it makes sense. And if you can’t figure out Lucas Simms’ motivation…er…
Obviously they’re better with some quests than others – even Oblivion had the Dark Brotherhood quest sequence – but I think too often they’re ripped for their mistakes and not given credit for when they get it right.
Now if we want to talk pointless quest kiosks, I have about 3000 MMOs to show you…
06/04/2009 at 20:29 eain says:
I worked on Bloodlines. I was a Production Tester from Activision on loan to Troika. It’s good to see that Brian’s doing well. :)
06/04/2009 at 20:36 eain says:
@Lintman- Yeah, that’s basically how it went down. ;)
06/04/2009 at 22:09 Paul Moloney says:
“I worked on Bloodlines. I was a Production Tester from Activision on loan to Troika. It’s good to see that Brian’s doing well. :)”
C’mon man, spill the beans; an accurate history of VTM:B would be great.
P.
06/04/2009 at 22:45 pilouuuu says:
@ drewski
Undoubtly Bethesda are learning. And they must because with all the money they are making it would be unmoral if they don’t hire better animators and script writers. Fallout 3 is a great, if not perfect experience. On the opposite side, I quite hated Oblivion and its stupid leveling, forgettable characters with no personality, stupid levelling system, ridiculous NPC behavior, bad AI, etc.
I hope Elder Scrolls 5 comes to be a really revolution of the genre and the equivalent to Vampire in terms of believable characters and quality role playing, but much more polished and well finished.
07/04/2009 at 03:43 Jetsetlemming says:
There is a huge amount of apologizing for Troika in these here comments, damn. The facts of the matter is that they did do a poor job overall on making videogames, and they absolutely could not survive with their behaviors for released games and timetables. A movie production company working with the greatest of scripts and most reknowned of actors and best director ever to walk the Earth would still go out of business with no sold tickets if their camera footage was all a collage of blurry, grainy pictures taken with $10 webcams edited together by lining the printed out shots (with a half dead black and white printer) then taking a cheap digital film camera and running down the line of pictures real fast to emulate animation. Art is all fine and dandy but it needs to be backed up by the technical end to be playable if you’re trying to make a videogame. VTMB + patches is a damn fine game, one of the best ever made, but Troika deserve no credit for work freely produced by fans that shouldn’t have been needed in the first place.
And Activision is not at fault with how VTMB turned out. If it wasn’t for them stepping in and directly taking control of development the game probably never would’ve been finished. Troika would’ve ran out of money before that game would’ve been finished, by the time Activision stepped in not even the first section of the game, Santa Monica, was playable, only a few months before the deadline for release. Yes, the game could’ve been delayed, at significant expense to the people funding the project, but the hypothetical need for that delay is in no way Activision’s fault nor are they horribly evil monsters for running short on patience to see a return when dealing with a group such as Troika.
07/04/2009 at 03:49 Jetsetlemming says:
To put it in a more realistic, and probably more relateable terms, Bloodlines is like a Sci-fi channel original movie that happened to score the best writers and actors known to man, with a first time camera crew and the footage outsourced to some guy in his basement using Windows Movie Maker because they ran overbudget. It may be potentially one of the greatest movies ever made. Maybe if someone competent got that stock footage and recut it it would absolutely be one of the greatest movies ever made.
But the final version aired at 7 PM on a weeknight on sci-fi is still a bad movie.
07/04/2009 at 03:51 Jetsetlemming says:
Actually, if you want something you can blame on Activision, as far as I remember VTMB got absolutely no advertising outside enthusiast gaming magazine ads as far as I can remember. It was basically being sold to a small select grouping of selective, well-informed gamers, exactly the sorts who warn each other about buggy messes and unplayable games.
07/04/2009 at 04:23 bhlaab says:
@Drewski, I think much of what Bethesda gets right can be attributed to the fact that when you throw a hundred thousand knives at the wall, two or three are bound to stick.
I’ve found Bethesda to be getting much much worse with, well, just about everything as time goes on. Since Oblivion in particular, their idea of storyline is to place vague visual cues in the world, hinting that there is a deep and fascinating world at your fingertips, and then they skimp where it really matters in dialogue and quests.
It’s as though they’ve rigged up masterful sets and pyrotechnics for the 5th Grade Christmas Play.
07/04/2009 at 04:27 bhlaab says:
Wow, I didn’t realize I was adding to a growing list of performance analogies.
I think the best way to say it is that Vampire Bloodlines is a great game that didn’t get a big enough budget or a realistic enough deadline from the publishers
And Fallout 3 is a shit game that had an overblown budget and for whatever unfair reason Bethesda has the industry wrapped around its finger and can afford to make such affronts to humanity.
07/04/2009 at 08:43 H says:
Someone mentioned Daggerfall up there, and that’s the game which, like Bloodlines, has given me the most thrills. No other game since has surprised me as much.
I became a vampire (by coincidence) and after running around butchering a town just to see if I could, I was approached by a child who represented a vampire chapter. This wasn’t in the rules, this wasn’t proclaimed from afar by the players, this was something totally unexpected and it blindsided me.
It’s the story and interaction and immersion in games like Daggerfall and Bloodlines I still hold out hope for the future of gaming, and yet it’s the bugs and appalling install and general friction of games like GTA IV that make me sigh and gnash my teeth.
I’d love to see the like of Daggerfall and Bloodlines again, but I doubt we ever will in this console age.
07/04/2009 at 09:16 lanster says:
This game is win, even without the patch. The end.
07/04/2009 at 11:12 aps says:
this is the best rpg i have played till date ,i have tried so har to search for similar games but there aren’t any.
the real experience come by playing it only.
great work
07/04/2009 at 11:49 Hümmelgümpf says:
@aps:
Try Deus Ex. Less RPG-ish and more FPS-ish, but it’s as close to Bloodlines as other video games get. Then there’s Alpha Protocol on the horizon, which, regardless of what delusional BioWare fanboys may say, looks much, much closer to DX and Bloodlines than to Mass Effect.
07/04/2009 at 13:51 Wesp5 says:
As far as the release problems of Bloodlines go, I believe that Valve is to blame quite a bit as well, because they delivered a not fully working Source engine to Troika and also had that stupid clause in their contract that no Source engine game could be released before HL2. Which IMHO is the reason why Bloodlines was released on the very same day after the long delay of HL2 itself.
07/04/2009 at 14:40 MeestaNob! says:
Wesp5, that makes no sense.
The artificial delays imposed by their agreement with Valve would have meant that Troika would have had longer to fine tune their game in opposition to Activision’s desire to get it out into the public quickly. I cant begin to imagine the disaster Bloodlines would have been if they could have released ahead of HL2.
Using the same engine, Valve made the game of the decade, while Troika made an ambitions mess.
07/04/2009 at 14:58 Ninja Dodo says:
I’ll take an inspired mess over polished blandness any day. I like this game more every time I play it.
07/04/2009 at 17:20 Lintman says:
@eain: Thanks, I’m glad to know I wasn’t completely full of it!
07/04/2009 at 17:28 Serondal says:
Lets be honest, Valve could have released a box full of radioactive waste named HL2 and it would have been called “The Game of the Decade” I had a lot more fun for a lot longer with Vampires. Once you get over the phyics engine (and I have) Hl2 is just a bland generic shooter that has little or nothing to do with Half Life itself. You could take out all references to Black Mesa and Gorden Freeman and just have the main character be a random dood and the game would be the same.
07/04/2009 at 17:33 thumble says:
“You wouldn’t be able to give a book, no matter how brilliant, a good review if it turned out that in the print run, they’d left out the last 3 chapters, and were only promising readers that might eventually send them out at a later date”
Harry Potter? Wheel of Time? The Dark Tower? In book publishing it’s called serialisation. And readers pay for the end of the story.
A better book analogy would be if a brand new book randomly dropped pages out of the binding, and had a lot of typos or otherwise unreadable typography. Which is invariably the publishers fault that is hopefully fixed in the next print run – but the reader would pay for that too. I’ve never seen any such issues presented in any book review I’ve ever read, but I don’t read as many book reviews as I do for games.
Unfortunately the games industry appears to have found an equivalent to the film-makers dreaded “We’ll fix it in post production”. But the problem is that “We’ll fix it in post-release patching” means that the public perception of the product suffers.
Anyway I still prefer Planescape: Torment to Bloodlines so whatever. :P
07/04/2009 at 18:31 Guhndahb says:
I have a comment on the book analogies. The first analogy is, in my opinion, only barely apt if you hit a game-ending bug that required you to start over after playing most of the game. I’m honestly sorry if that’s what happened to you. As I mentioned above, that happened to me in Deus Ex and Daggerfall and was terribly painful. The second analogy is far better, but, at least to me, overcritical.
Even with the bugs (remember, my first play through was unpatched) it was a wonderful experience for me. Now when people complain about technical issues with games, you always have outliers who either had lots more troubles than the norm (perhaps you) or lots less troubles (perhaps me) each assuming that everyone had the same game play experience. I may have just been a fortunate outlier, but I hit plenty of bugs, I just found them trivial and ignorable due to my deep immersion into the game.
My Wheel of Time books perpetually dropped pages out of the binding! Drove me nuts! That didn’t detract from the story one bit (though I was careful to avoid losing any). I was, of course, pissed at the publisher and not Mr. Jordan for that, whereas blame in the case of Bloodlines, if there needs to be some, can be passed around between developers, publisher, nature, nurture, and probably Derek Smart :p and argued as long as we have the time to waste. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.
I’m not apologizing for Troika. I have no right to do so. But I am saying that, for me, I’d rather have their somewhat buggy, over-reaching games any day over most of what is released. Would I prefer quality AND polish? Of course. But if I have to choose I’ll take games inline with those Troika made. HL2 was polished, it was even good, but it didn’t enthrall or move me. Bloodlines did.
And if I had to choose I’d take PS:T over Bloodlines in a heartbeat, too. I’m glad I don’t have to!
I have a friend who hates any buggy game no matter how good it is. He and I have no common ground in situations like this. Neither of us is right, of course. I’m generally quite content to ignore bugs in games as long as the game merits my tolerance. But because of my friend’s intolerance to bugs, I understand that feelings on this subject are quite varied and mine are most certainly not shared by all.
07/04/2009 at 18:37 Pantsman says:
I really don’t think Half-Life 2 would have been so widely praised if it hadn’t been as fantastic as it was. It was far from a generic shooter, the degree of interactivity with the environment and utterly brilliant setpiece design saw to that.
Bloodlines was pretty sweet too.
07/04/2009 at 20:12 duouk2000 says:
Great interview, I do love me some Bloodlines.
08/04/2009 at 02:56 postx says:
I would’ve asked him if the B-Rated Writer at Lucky Stars is any reference to himself hehe.
@matte_k Was thinking the same, he would be great for the MMO. I wonder if he has any new projects going.
@markec “Bugs can be fixed but shitty design is forever.” True.
Fabulous dialogues… I’d like to buy this man a beer.
08/04/2009 at 03:16 Sleepless says:
For lo, on that day Troika was cast down, did the masses wail thou shalt Madden forever more, and never again did the enlightened ones reach for the brass ring, and the world was poorer for it.
08/04/2009 at 07:15 Anonymousity says:
“I then spent three years working at Obsidian on one fantastic cancelled project and a version of Alpha Protocol. ”
“A version” of Alpha Protocol? So he is not a writer for AP?
Mitsoda and Annie Carlson did a lot of work on Alpha Protocol in the early stages that didn’t make it to the final stages if you head to rpgcodex.net there’s a thread about it with more info.
08/04/2009 at 23:02 Jeremy says:
Have the fan patches ever completely fixed this ambitious mess of a game? I played it a couple of years ago with the 2.6 fan patch and it was an interesting novelty, but after about the midway point it became a bland, buggy mess.
09/04/2009 at 03:29 Hypocee says:
Brilliant interview, thanks. Good questions, an eloquent and articulate interviewee who answers head-on. Great ride.
09/04/2009 at 18:19 Serondal says:
I seriously beat the game without seeing a single bug . . . I have no idea what you guys are talking about any how . . .
Morrowind had it’s share of bugs as well when it was release. For example one of the people I needed for a quest just floated up into the air and disappeared through the ceiling. One time I started a new game and my character had no hands or feet and I coudln’t zoom out to look at the character (obviously because you can’t do this until you pick a race and face) The cursor was off so I couldn’t select or use anything that was in the center of my screen O.o This was all on the x-box version of the game, which prompted me to get the computer version lol. Morrowind was still a great game even though it had some of the most insane bugs I’ve ever seen.
11/04/2009 at 16:35 anduz says:
Even with it’s many problems vtm: bloodlines is still one of the best RPG I’ve ever played. But then I’ve always prefered the writing, moral codex and humor of Black Isle/Troika compared to Bioware which fared much better both at and beyond Interplay.
13/04/2009 at 22:13 xxxmysteryhousexxx says:
em.. yea the game is great and too bad that they stoped the production… but i have n ideea cuz i dont like the radios from ingame so i think im gonna customize it.. soon… re-edit the sound from the radio’s … ill come back here when im done
15/04/2009 at 19:38 teko says:
I wish Valve had bought Troika :(.
Imagine Troika games with Valve’s level of polish…
19/04/2009 at 11:39 Tessera says:
I agree with many of the comments here.
What I can not agree with are the people who have attempted to lay too much of the blame at Troika’s feet. When you try to produce art on an assembly line, then this is invariably what happens: the bean counters begin cracking their whips and the art ultimately suffers.
The fact that Bloodlines continues to increase its popularity… nearly four and a half years after its original release and in spite of all of its flaws… is probably the best testimonial to the brilliant Troika team that exists.
For myself, Bloodlines represents the last truly inspiring RPG that has been released for the PC market. Nothing else during the past few years even comes close.
All my best,
- Tessera -
Co-author of the True VTMB Patch
Texture Artist and Modder (retired)
28/04/2009 at 01:41 Ron says:
For a four year old game, it’s hella entertaining to play. I feel bad for Troika for not getting the support they needed to make the launch successful. And they’re not even getting any royalties now for all their hard work.
Fuck Activision. I download all their games and host the torrents to piss them off some.
03/05/2009 at 23:53 Dennis says:
I finally got a copy of this gem and just finished playing it through for the first time, then I come on here and find articles still being written about it five years after it was released. “Deus Ex” popped into my mind very early on while playing, and that is really the only game you can compare Bloodlines to.
Before I was halfway through this game, I knew I was playing one of the best games I had ever seen. Of course I played it with all the community patches and on a newer pc, so the game never crashed and I noticed only the most minor of bugs.
I agree with a lot of the comments about the pros and cons of Bloodlines. I too was disappointed in the forced FPS ending to the game. I wish Troika had the time and the money to craft an ending that was in the spirit of the rest of the game. You could have had options, depending on your skills, to trick, blackmail, steal, or diplomatically finish the story. There was no need for the Painkiller finish.
The rest of Bloodlines, though, is a masterpiece. This game had me hooked like no other I have played in years, and yes, I finished Fallout 3 just a few months ago. No comparison.
28/06/2009 at 23:49 solowd says:
I’d hope for a sequel, but it will never happen
Characters and writing are in a league of their own.
Combat needed a makeover, but this didn’t really show until the awful sewer/warrens sequence. Amazing game overall though.
29/06/2009 at 00:00 solowd says:
also, there’s a quest that involves a prosthetic-maker
did anyone else think this was a reference to The Fugitive? The guy’s name is Gimble, which sounds like Kimble…and he has a definite resemblance to Harrison Ford (starred in the movie)
maybe I’m crazy though
08/09/2009 at 08:36 Matt says:
MeestaNob! says:
Wesp5, that makes no sense.
The artificial delays imposed by their agreement with Valve would have meant that Troika would have had longer to fine tune their game in opposition to Activision’s desire to get it out into the public quickly. I cant begin to imagine the disaster Bloodlines would have been if they could have released ahead of HL2.
Using the same engine, Valve made the game of the decade, while Troika made an ambitions mess.
==================
You’re obviously not a software engineer. It’s really impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t done any coding how much of an advantage it is to be familiar with the code. This is not an apples to apples comparison.
A 3rd party developer (Troika) using a game engine has to develop familiarity with the engine during development. Valve had in-house expertise with the engine. You can’t overestimate the value of having that expertise on-hand. Furthermore, Valve had the architects of the engine on hand to answer all the questions of what the engine *would* be capable of when finished. A 3rd party developer can only hope that what it requires will be ready by release time and even then is totally beholden to the engine developer to get it working far enough ahead of schedule that they have time to grok it, develop against it, and then test against it.
Bottom line: the engine developer will always make the best use of the engine.
HL2 was not some great game, other than its technical achievements. The story in HL2 and countless other FPS’s … 1 guy with a gun against a horde of baddies must save the world. Truly original and inspired…? I mean, really, what can you say about that? Well maybe it was cliche, but I promise you, they did it with feeling? It was the most inspired guy-with-gun-saves-world story ever? The FPS phenomenon really needs to die already, but we know it never will, because it’s the lowest common denominator in video gaming. Calling a FPS “game of the year” or hailing its story as “great,” or saying that it’s the best game because of the number of copies it sells is like saying Mariah Carey writes better music than Mozart because her sales figures say so.
With Bloodlines, I was so interested in the story, that I found the combat to be almost annoying, like it was a hurdle to the real fun — watching the story unfold, hearing the voice acting, and seeing how many cool ideas they had for giving a V:tM fan a simulated experience of the P&P game. It was a great adaptation, buggy or not.
14/09/2009 at 06:12 Throat says:
I think Bloodlines and Deus Ex are the only two games that leap instantly to mind that were both well-written and well-acted. Awesome to hear from one of the writers. You made the game what it was. Thanks.
27/11/2009 at 10:11 Hari says:
Now that we’ve put little dartboads on Troika’s, Activision’s, Valve’s and Rook’s belts, and the darts have gone below, lets step back and look at the game itself.
No game that’s as buggy, and has failed so badly in sales, as VTMB, gets such an in-depth discussion flaming a very successful publisher, a popular game developer and a forgotten one.
I finished the entire game with just the ‘boat’ bug, and if you have the habit of being scared by the hotel and saving every time you saved your Toreador skin, the ‘bug’ took me 3 minutes ( including Googling it) to cross. Never noticed any other bugs, probably because, my definition of a game has been fun, not polished, and I’ve played a lot of so-called ‘buggy’ games.
There’s a difference between a little humidity in the air, and rain. Some people think humid is a bug, I think acid rain is a bug. There were no ‘leopards flying at treetop level’ (Boiling Point) or ‘items disappearing from inventory’ (Daggerfall) bugs in VTMB.
The bug doesn’t have to be a ‘show-stopper’ to count as a bug…if it irritates me for having to spend 3 minutes fixing it, its a bug. But you see, I was so ..”hungry” to get to the rest of the story… the minutes didn’t count. And that, Mr. Mitsoda, is why story/voice acting/art direction rules. Gameplay is the process of experiencing that world as well, not just finding better ways to kick ass. Why do you think DIablo is one of the best-selling franchises ever? Why do Diablo fans sign petitions for the game to retains its original look? The story, the look are what made a simple point-click-hack-slash like Diablo sell.
I found HL interesting, and VTMB immersive. Thats the difference. And what’s a game without Tourette and Beckett and Malkavians?
Thanks to the patchers for patch 6.6 and those wonderful mods you can find at moddb.
And for years, I’ve searched an urban fantasy setting that can match what VTMB did in terms of immersion. No luck.
28/11/2009 at 14:43 Hari says:
Now that we’ve put little dartboards on Troika’s, Activision’s, Valve’s and Rook’s belts, and the darts have gone below, lets step back and look at the game itself.
No game that’s as buggy, and has failed so badly in sales, as VTMB, gets such an in-depth discussion flaming a very successful publisher, a popular game developer and a forgotten one.
I finished the entire game with just the ‘boat’ bug, and if you have the habit of being scared by the hotel and saving every time you saved your Toreador skin, the ‘bug’ took me 3 minutes ( including Googling it) to cross. Never noticed any other bugs, probably because, my definition of a game has been fun, not polished, and I’ve played a lot of so-called ‘buggy’ games.
There’s a difference between a little humidity in the air, and rain. Some people think humid is a bug, I think acid rain is a bug. There were no ‘leopards flying at treetop level’ (Boiling Point) or ‘items disappearing from inventory’ (Daggerfall) bugs in VTMB.
The bug doesn’t have to be a ‘show-stopper’ to count as a bug…if it irritates me for having to spend 3 minutes fixing it, its a bug. But you see, I was so ..”hungry” to get to the rest of the story… the minutes didn’t count. And that, Mr. Mitsoda, is why story/voice acting/art direction rules. Gameplay is the process of experiencing that world as well, not just finding better ways to kick ass. Why do you think Diablo is one of the best-selling franchises ever? Why do Diablo fans sign petitions for the game to retains its original look? The story, the look are what made a simple point-click-hack-slash like Diablo sell.
I found HL interesting, and VTMB immersive. Thats the difference. And what’s a game without Tourette and Beckett and Malkavians?
Thanks to the patchers for patch 6.6 and those wonderful mods you can find at moddb.
And for years, I’ve searched an urban fantasy setting that can match what VTMB did in terms of immersion. No luck.
04/12/2009 at 19:19 Dominic White says:
Troika were a really weird studio while they lasted. They had talent, they had vision, they had drive… and then they had Activision as a publisher and a dwinling budget/deadline. Almost all of their games would have been remembered as absolute classics off the bat if they’d just had another six months development/testing/tweaking time.
Fortunately, all their games have gotten amazing fan-patches. Seriously brilliant ones. Temple of Elemental Evil was almost unplayable at launch, and now it’s probably the best D&D 3.0 crawler you could hope for. Arcanum is a much smoother experience now, and Vampire.. hell, they’re STILL finding unused chunks of dialogue, character models and details in the game data files that they’re patching back into the game.
19/02/2010 at 22:59 Bugged Brujah says:
First, great interview, and I’m reassured by Mitsoda’s words. I always felt that Bloodlines was an amazing game in its heart, mainly due to the story and approach of the plot. The writing was a primary part of this. Good work, Mitsoda.
Now for the ugly bit. I was infuriated upon the release of Bloodlines. Just getting the game up and running was a nightmare, let alone the numerous bugs during play. Now wait, don’t dismiss this post just yet. I know many have claimed either that they encountered zero bugs, or at least no show stoppers, but I’m not some special unfortunate. I am most certainly not alone. Personally, I encountered game ending bugs multiple times. This means I restarted more than once, just to reach the game’s conclusion a single time. During each playthrough minor bugs plagued nearly every encounter. Whether it was a dialogue skip that forced me to reload to see the entire conversation, or a combat glitch that fucked up the situation, or simple things like Malkavian “voices in the head” not loading properly or plain botched game mechanics, these things arose at nearly every turn. Even those bugs that don’t destroy your game, only force you to reload, become unbearable when they are so numerous that they shatter your immersion. The haunted mansion? Not scary to me. It would have been if I hadn’t already been petrified that I’d lose my game AGAIN, and was too busy saving multiple slots and worrying about the next technical hurtle I’d have to leap. Resident Evil and Silent Hill were so much more terrifying than Bloodlines’ haunted mansion, and yet they shouldn’t be. The writing and setup for that scene was top notch, much better than Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but the mechanics ruined it.
I assume most commenters defending Troika are newcomers to the game, playing fully patched (those are FAN made patches, in case you aren’t up to speed) and thus, haven’t had the displeasure of experiencing the fubar that is Bloodlines upon release. Hell, I’ve heard that argument back when it was released six years ago now. Plenty of people were able to play it without flaw, but even if it just affects twenty-five percent of the consumers, that’s far too much. You wouldn’t want to be in that minority, and percentages less than that have halted sales on games lesser than Bloodlines.
Those saying they play it fine on release say it like it means something. It’s like saying your grandfather smoked heavily and lived to a ripe old age, so cigarettes must not cause cancer. Bullshit. If you played Bloodlines on release without a hitch then got dealt a good hand, but massive amounts of people bought this game and got royally screwed. If you were around for the release (or can find a forum that archives its posts that far back) you’ll know the insane amount of technical problems gamers experienced with this damaged game.
I’m surprised myself that I’m still so bitter over this game six years after this release. It was a beautifully ambitious game, modeled off a setting dear to my heart (I’m a big fan of White Wolf). When it worked, I couldn’t have been more pleased, and this could have easily been my favorite game of all time. The problem is that it’s viciously broken. I’ve read a lot of good arguments on who is to blame for this, and I believe neither the publisher nor the developer should made out to be Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. In the negative respects, I think Troika bit off more than they could chew, forcing Activision into a corner. I also think Activision should have given them the benefit of the doubt and thrown more money and time at the problem, but as poster Lintman said, “Hindsight is 20/20.”. I don’t have personal experience with the situation, but given Troika’s history of releasing unplayable games, I’m inclined to agree with others in being glad this company is defunct. I was introduced to Troika when they released Arcanum. A fantastic game, and a classic in my eyes. I later played Temple of Elemental Evil. I’ve loved all three of these, and they deserve credit for their design and idea, but not their execution.
This was a long post, and probably more than any casual reader would bother with for a game released half a decade ago, but maybe my grief will serve as a constructive criticism for any developer (Bloodlines affiliated or otherwise) who chances to read it. Best of luck to the Troika team in their new endeavors. They obviously had a talent for great game ideas, even if it never worked out in the end.
P. S. – I’m installing Bloodlines again as I write this, because despite its numerous flaws, I still think it’s an amazing game. For a game to be this broken and still hold a place in my heart (albeit, bittersweet) is in itself an accomplishment of the development team. I hope my experience this time around will prove less problematic.
22/07/2010 at 18:07 JohnnyMaverik says:
“the money from your purchase won’t get back to the original team.”
Bloody Activision -_-
VTM:B is my all time favourite game, and if they’d had a few more months to weed out the worst of the bugs and polish some other slightly janky stuff, it’d have gone down as one of the best games ever made, which in a way it has but sadly mostly in hindsight.
05/06/2011 at 21:21 eightiesmullet says:
A beautiful game – I love this game the same way others love Deux Ex. It’s a great leap for computer games, quite frankly.
29/05/2013 at 20:12 DestroyYourEgo says:
This is my favorite game, rivaled only by Fallout 3. And that’s a pretty big thing to say.
You want a game that plops you in the middle of a very realistic world? Bloodlines has it. I love this game so much, I did a few mods of my own.
I can’t tell you how great I think this game is. It’s a lotta fun, and I’ve always endorsed it!
Thanks for doing this article- I love not being the only cheese standing!