Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - Troika - PC

[Mazakiel]

I just got this because I was bored as hell last night and my pinky is fucked up so TF2 is harder then it needs to be.  If "the sewers" & "the haunted hotel" are the two stages that you get sent two before you can do Murcurio's second mission then I don't get what the complaining is about.  I enjoy'd the haunted hotel for the first half of it & it was never a bother, though I did die once jumping into the glowy purple shit.  The sewers were no hassle to get through either.

I always love the whole "take a quiz to pick your character thing" but I got Malk, which was sorta funny I guess.  I rerolled a artsy homo vamp because honestly they had the best pre-selected backround.  The one where after you've been turned you start to enjoy killing people more and more as it gets easier.  That totally sounds like what would happen if I gained special powers.   

The sewers being referred to as a major pain in the ass, at least the ones I saw as a major drag on the game, come in a later part of the game once you're branching out into other city areas.  They're basically a combat gauntlet with some of the more annoying things you can have to fight.  They're a pretty big momentum breaker. 

[Llava]

the Nagaraja

This impressed me the most.  The Nagaraja are even more obscure and mysterious than the Baali, and everything about that character felt unwholesome and mysterious.

[Azazel]

Which patches should I be downloading, exactly?

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines v4.4 Patch.. what else?

[caladein]

Which patches should I be downloading, exactly?

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines v4.4 Patch.. what else?

That's all if you're running off of Steam (also, disable auto-update).  From retail, you probably want to patch to 1.2 (official patch) and then do the latest unofficial patch.

[Azazel]

Cool. I have a retail disc so will d/l the official 1.2 in case it's not pre-patched.

[WayAbvPar]

I stalled out very early in this game...IIRC there was something else that was released around the same time that stole all my gaming time away. I really need to go back and play it with all the patches in place.

[Strazos]

Agree with WAP. I got to the strip club area and stopped playing.

What else that is good came out around that time?

[Hoax]

Honestly even w/ 4.4 I get some CTD's that tell me nothing, client.dll crashed, sw3333t.

Also I really don't like Hollywood, I ended up killing a couple of key npc's I was so sick of their bullshit.  Also they offered me a bunch of shit to blow my $$$ on then said haha you need it to complete this quest...

fuckers.

[Furiously]

Links to the patches...

http://www.planetvampire.com/bloodlines/files/patches/

The unofficial patches really really really help.

[Lantyssa]

I just got this because I was bored as hell last night and my pinky is fucked up so TF2 is harder then it needs to be.  If "the sewers" & "the haunted hotel" are the two stages that you get sent two before you can do Murcurio's second mission then I don't get what the complaining is about.  I enjoy'd the haunted hotel for the first half of it & it was never a bother, though I did die once jumping into the glowy purple shit.  The sewers were no hassle to get through either.

I imagine people are talking about the sewers in the Hollywood stage.  (Or thereabouts.  It's been a while.)

[Velorath]

I didn't really have a problem getting through the sewers.  The Malkavian Primogen's house though felt a bit longer than it needed to be (and I say this having stealthed through most of it).  The only other part that felt somewhat tedious so far was the last part of the plaguebringer quest (going through the "crackhouse" to get to the Bishop).

[Mazakiel]

That plaguebringer quest was a pain in the ass.  One of the few quests I basically have to force myself to do on playthroughs. 

[Hoax]

I'm on the Hollywood sewers bit, but I guess I'm just not at all annoyed with those enemies.  Of course my unarmed is 8 so I literally rip them in half as they jump at me.  Sure its not auto-win because they can't be drained but really with the mummy finger or whatever I recently picked up (increases passive healing) they are trivial.  If I get stuck going in circles for an hour, sure that'll piss me off so I'll get back to you after my next play session where I actually set out to find these fugly idiots hiding in the sewer.

What has really pissed me off is if I "happen" to kill a hooker I don't even get my money back.  Rockstar games has conditioned me blahlbah.  I think my humanity is at 3 atm, I don't auto-lose if it gets to 0 do I?

Also, swords, I am impervious to gunfire but swords just ruin my goddamn day, I have to bust out the auto-shotty + bullet time whenever I see some katana wielding asshole...

[Samwise]

You don't autolose, I don't think, but your risk of Frenzy goes up.  Which isn't all bad because frenzying is sorta cool.  I deliberately tanked my humanity as a Gangrel so that I would frenzy once in a while.

[Moosehands]

Just did the sewers last night.  The combat wasn't a problem really.  I used a katana against the crawlies and the fatties and circle strafed with the shotgun around the 4 legged "women".  It did feel a touch long though, especially when you take into account the trip through the porn company and the house in the hills that led up to the sewers themselves.

I think I've hit another bug, which is quest breaking but hopefully not game breaking.  When I'm sent back upstairs in the abandoned hospital to send the director down to the basement, he's buggered off.  I've reloaded a few times to try different conversation options and have gone back upstairs via both routes that I can find, but the guy is just gone.

Funnily enough though, I was able to send someone else down there.  I'm not sure if I was lucky in the order I did sidequests or if the second one just wouldn't be available until you've done the hospital but it was a satisfyingly bastardish thing to do.

[Rasix]

I think I've hit another bug, which is quest breaking but hopefully not game breaking.  When I'm sent back upstairs in the abandoned hospital to send the director down to the basement, he's buggered off.  I've reloaded a few times to try different conversation options and have gone back upstairs via both routes that I can find, but the guy is just gone.

Funnily enough though, I was able to send someone else down there.  I'm not sure if I was lucky in the order I did sidequests or if the second one just wouldn't be available until you've done the hospital but it was a satisfyingly bastardish thing to do.

He's at his apartment, cowering in fear.

[Moosehands]

No fooling?  Cool.

That makes some manner of sense from a real world perspective but unless I missed some critical bit of text (which is possible, I'm a drunk) I never would have figured that out in game.

[Prospero]

If I recall correctly something points you towards his apartment. She might even tell you where it is.

[Samwise]

He drops his card with his home address on it.  Put more points into your Perception (I think that's the one) and handy clues like that will sparkle so you don't miss them.

[Moosehands]

That'd be it then.  I was going for a "big, dumb Brujah" experience so I've got 1 point of Perception and no points of Investigation.

[Samwise]

And accordingly you missed the clue that would have been blindingly obvious to a keen-eyed Malk.     But you found a different way to handle the problem anyway.

This is a perfect example of why I think this game is so  .  And so worth playing through a few times.

[sidereal]

The wacky secret Malkavian clues in that game are the win.

[bhodi]

I've played with too many "I am a jelly donut" Mulkavians to really enjoy the class. I stay away from them, even today.

[Hoax]

So I thought I'd post, I cleared the infamous sewer, yeah it was sorta weak.  I wrote up a shorthand guide from Gamefaq's but I doubt I would have needed it for anything except saving me time on the pumps on/off thing.

It sucks that they throw a miniboss at you and then turn it into a stupidly placed standard enemy from there on out.  In fact the whole enemy placement of the sewers was pretty retarded.  But nothing was much of a challenge though I did burn through my goddamn auto-shotty ammo supply.  Also I don't much care for Nosf, the convo with the leader took forever because I wasn't going to ask him who he was, I knew, he knew I knew, fucker.

So I got to Chinatown and wow, fun times, my character is built for ripping through swaths of human fodder, which is fitting because I picked the Toreador backround that states something to the effect of:  "as it grows easier to kill mortals you begin to enjoy it more and more" which fits my playstyle in PC rpg's to a T.  I shredded everyone in a bath house, bathed in blood when they tried to ambush me and my mole and rampaged through their club, restocking ammo all the way.  Unarmed 8 + Firearms 5 + Colt Anaconda = winrar.

[Moosehands]

More tales of woe:

The Fu Syndicate was absolutely awful.  Seriously to hell with that bit.  Way, waaaay worse than the sewers.  Not only are there big chunks of unskippable dialogue and rooms full of instant death, but the "puzzles" (and I use the term loosely) forced me to gamefaqs.com after about the 10th "what the fuck do I do here?!?!" reload.

Talking to Johnny left me in some weird state where after the cutscene ended and he started firing at me I could move the camera around in circles, cycle through (but not equip) inventory items with the hotkeys, and bring up the console but I could not move or fight or trigger powers or bring up the character screen or any such thing.  I found a fix for this on the PlanetVampire forums in the form of "frenzyplayer" in the console.

Talking to LaCroix after returning from the Giovanni mansion has me stopped dead (  ) however.  As soon as our conversation ends he starts walking toward a red couch and the game walks me along with him.  The first couple times I was standing in front of him and he got hung up on me.  Eventually I turned on noclip and stood halfway hanging out the wall behind him, and now he's getting hung up on the couch.  Final result?  The cutscene never completely ends (the letterbox effect doesn't go away) and nothing I can find to do in the console fixes it at all.

I really want to like this game, but like basically every Troika game (ToEE, Arcanum) I'm left with a feeling of "great concept, completely fucking asstastic execution".

[Hoax]

I'm about to do the Fu Syndicate tonight, are you using the unofficial 4.4 patch?  I am and haven't once had a cutscene issue, lots of other stupid bugs and sloppy stuff?  Hell yeah.  But nothing that broke the game except for a few CTD's which haven't cost me much time because I save regularly and autosave is a winner.

[Moosehands]

Yep, using the unofficial patch.  Tonight I'm going to try going back to fullscreen mode in the off chance that windowed mode is somehow causing my problems.

My advice for the Fu Syndicate is to make a separate save before you walk into each room.  You don't want to have to listen to the Mandarin's speeches over and over again every time you reload.

[Rasix]

I just did the Fu Syndicate and Giovanni missions.  I had no problems with either outside of getting frozen in the hacking position (at the Fu Syndicate) when guards burst in on me.  Fixed by jumping a couple times.  I don't find Fu Synidcate to be that difficult, but I've done it a few times.  The beams are the worst part, but you can sometimes glitch it by quicksaving right before.

This is the first time I've used guns at all in a play through, they aren't that bad at later levels.

[Samwise]

Guns with auspex and/or celerity are great.

[HaemishM]

The only part I really had trouble with in my one playthrough with the Nosferatu was the goddamn graveyard sequence. All those zombies and not nearly enough bullets. Took me about 5 or 6 tries, maybe more. I don't remember any of the rest giving me nearly as much trouble.

[Tebonas]

You people won. I will replay it this weekend. I just can't decide if Malkavian or Tremere. The Brujah playthrough was quite easy when the game came out. I'd like something more challenging.

[Rasix]

Everyone should play as a Malk at least once.  If nothing else, zany outfits!

[Hoax]

The only part I really had trouble with in my one playthrough with the Nosferatu was the goddamn graveyard sequence. All those zombies and not nearly enough bullets. Took me about 5 or 6 tries, maybe more. I don't remember any of the rest giving me nearly as much trouble.

They give you a fuckton of ammo in the box where u get the quest.  I've found that quest to be damn near immpossible, but I didn't pump up bullet time at all.  I'm not really much of a fan of that mechanic.  Any tips for beating that one?

[Samwise]

Everyone should play as a Malk at least once.  If nothing else, zany outfits!

The fact that almost every line of your dialogue is different from every other clan is pretty good too.

Also, there are additional dialogues between you and various inanimate objects.   

[Sky]

Yeah, talking to the stop sign was one of those memorable gaming moments. That's some creative funstuffs. This thread threatens to aggro the fiancee.