Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Good, in fact excellent, tidings for those who find themselves able to enjoy Fallouts both old and new, and for anyone who lived through the 90s heyday of PC RPGs. Tim Cain, the main brain behind the original Fallout and later co-founder of the much-missed Troika, has fetched up at Obsidian. Until this July, he was at Carbine, working since 2005 on what turned out to be Wildstar, but today we discover that he’s now Senior Programmer at the Fallout: New Vegas/ KOTOR 2 devs. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE.
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I’m guessing all these patches are iterative and not of much interest to the rmore casual Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines observer by now, but whenever one of these fan-made updates passes by my inbox I still can’t help but double-take and think ‘wow.’ You guys are wonderful. Completely mad, but wonderful. Bloodlines is now seven years old, was essentially abandoned by its publisher after its developer closed a few months after release, but the fans have just kept on going, fixing things, improving things, digging up locked away extra content and generally trying to keep their dream game alive. And, in a vampire fetishistic subset’s case, entirely gratuitously add oodles of bare breasts wherever possible and regardless of any effect on atmosphere or internal logic. I’ll stick to the fixes and restored content, thanks.

Anyway: patch 7.6 – 7.6! – is now out, and along with a few fixes restores some missing soundtrack music to the game. Grab it from here, along with assorted add-ons. If only every abandoned game received so much love so much later.

Who remembers the above charmer? I polished him off with a sledgehammer. Felt good.

The umpteenth unofficial Vampire – The Masquerade: Bloodlines patch has been released, bringing us up to version 7.2. This time the few changes are all very minor, so I’m really posting this as a reminder. If you haven’t played Bloodlines with these unofficial patches that not only fix the game, but dig out and restore a stash of Troika’s unfinished quests from the game’s files, you’re missing out on one of the single biggest gems PC gaming has to its name. 7.2 patch notes below.
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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.
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There’s a bittersweet flavour to playing Bloodlines. It’s not because of the vampiric moodiness and the twilight tales that it tells, nor the real-world tragedy of its costly development finally undoing brave development studio, Troika. No, the sense of sorrow comes from the realisation that there’s nothing like this on the horizon. The idea is begged: why should there be so few games like this? Oh right, because it’s so very hard to do.
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[This is an extended version of something I wrote for PCG. Well... I didn't write it for PCG. I wrote it for myself after something had moved me in the flawed-but-oft-magnificent Vampire: Bloodlines and I sold a cut down version of it to PCG months later, as it's spoiler central. It's very much my personal experience with a memorable section...]

“Power Corrupts” has never been true. In my experience, Power Seduces. “Corrupt” implies it’s akin to sprinkling a little shit in an otherwise immaculate meal. The problem with power is that it just makes everything better. And when someone’s staring up at you, saying you’re the best person in the world and they’d do anything – anything – you ask, could you say no?

I thought I could. I was wrong.
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