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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

Fuck Activision. I download all their games and host the torrents to piss them off some.

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)

Imagine Troika games with Valve’s level of polish…

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.