Vampire: Bloodlines

[Samwise]

Hrmm, it would appear that while the fix does infact get you though the bug, it does so at the expense of one's inventory menu as well as a perpetual cutscene loop in the following dialog with Beckett.

I got the Beckett loop too.  Fortunately, I had an autosave from immediately prior to that, so I just loaded from it and tried again.  Walk down that section of street very slowly.  That's what I did and this time Beckett found me.  As far as I could guess, the first time he just wasn't able to run up to me because I was in a place he didn't expect and his pathing got stuck on something, so the cutscene could never complete.

[geldonyetich]

Poor fool didn't mirror it on a site with actual bandwidth.  As a result, the unofficial patch is obtainable due to the din of thousands of VTM: Bloodlines players trying to get it from some guy's personal webspace.

[stray]

"Offical" Patch released:

This is the official release of the v1.2 Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™ patch by Activision.

This patch will update Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines to version 1.2. The patch addresses a number of known issues, including fixes for the Society of Leopold quest, keys and keycards disappearing, the use of Protean (Level 5) and Fortitude at the same time, and various other gameplay updates.

EDIT: Bah! It still runs like shit.

[WayAbvPar]

Figures- I just bought WoW to play while I waited for a patch. Oh well- Vampire can wait a bit longer =)

[Megrim]

Naw, it's a damn fine game regardless of bugs. Sure wish they had spellchecked it or something, tough.  Although it seems to me that most of the bug issues people are having are heavily system-dependant.  The only issue i've encountered was the Leopold quest CTD (which was fixed via the level skip thing while swimming under the boat).

It's definitely worth playing now =)

 - meg

[Ironwood]

Naw, it's a damn fine game regardless of bugs.

You're destroying quality in the gaming industry.

Stop it.

[stray]

Fucking Troika, man. I should have known.

I'm just giving it away...It'll make a lousy Christmas present or something.

EDIT: OK, yeah, the Ocean House was pretty damn cool, but I won't be buying another game from Troika again. The only other things that held any value were more White Wolf related. The rest is shit, bugs and otherwise.

[Furiously]

Ok - finished it last night. The 1.2 patch seemed to fix a lot, but the Ocean house was the worst for me. Until I patched my MB with a new bios, updated my sound drivers, and then it worked fine.

The story was great. I'd put this up there with Planescape and KOTOR. I want to go back and play with a different char type and see how much different it makes the game.

Gonna try guns and swords this time and screw the seduction.

[Lionhunter]

so.....if i play KOTOR2,PoP2 and Ridick,is this still worth getting it?

So...uhm...yeah

[schild]

Make one more post in the flavor of Pyro and you're gone.

[Lionhunter]

whos's pyro?a spammer?
ill stop spamming....for the moment.Gonna try to post some content first,and think later.or the other way around....

[schild]

Edit: Removed other stuff. Bloodlines stuff below was more important and obviously topical.

I run Bloodlines on a second hard drive. I noticed a couple days ago that the harddrive it was running on didn't have a pagefile. Went into system administrator shit in control panel, activated a huge pagefile for the drive (something like 3 gigs on a 250gig drive) and pachink, no more perfomance problems. YMMV, but you need at least a 1500mb pagefile for stuff from the source engine to run as it should on your machine. Or so other sites say.

[Samwise]

I want to go back and play with a different char type and see how much different it makes the game.

I'm almost done with my fourth time through the game now.  Getting pretty tired of the sewer level (this last time through, having convinced myself that I'd wrung every possible strategic dimension out of those fights, I just noclipped to the end so I could get back to the fun bits), but most of the other quests actually feel different depending on your character type, and I've had fun seeing different sides of various quests and characters.

For example, I didn't realize until my fourth time through the blood bank quest that Vandal is screwy in the head because he's Therese's ghoul, and is therefore whacked out on Malk blood.  Playing as a Malkavian gives you a lot of information that you don't get with the other character types (assuming you can decipher it through the heavy layer of cheesy metaphors).

If I make it through a fifth time, VtMB will officially break Max Payne's record for consecutive play-throughs of a single player game by me.

[Murgos]

Malkavian female Heavy Cloth armor, chaps and a cowboy hat, nuff said.

[Samwise]

For me it was a toss-up between the light cloth (the skirt that would flip up if you turned too quickly) and the light leather (half a cop uniform with "Precinct 69" on the back).  The other clans dress very drably by comparison.

[HaemishM]

Ok, I'm in this game, and I think I'm fucked. I'm playing as a Nosferatu, and I seem to have done all the quests for Downtown and yet can't go to Hollywood yet. I have a quest to see LaCroix Downtown, but when I went in there the first time, I insulted the guard and now he won't talk to me and I can't enter any of the elevators. Have I missed something?

Also, my ghoul friend Mercurio seems to have died because I didn't get him morphine quickly enough. Am I fucked?

[Fabricated]

Ok, I'm in this game, and I think I'm fucked. I'm playing as a Nosferatu, and I seem to have done all the quests for Downtown and yet can't go to Hollywood yet. I have a quest to see LaCroix Downtown, but when I went in there the first time, I insulted the guard and now he won't talk to me and I can't enter any of the elevators. Have I missed something?

Also, my ghoul friend Mercurio seems to have died because I didn't get him morphine quickly enough. Am I fucked?

There's a service elevator you can get access to if you enter the building from the sewers.

[Sobelius]

I want to go back and play with a different char type and see how much different it makes the game.

I'm almost done with my fourth time through the game now.  Getting pretty tired of the sewer level (this last time through, having convinced myself that I'd wrung every possible strategic dimension out of those fights, I just noclipped to the end so I could get back to the fun bits), but most of the other quests actually feel different depending on your character type, and I've had fun seeing different sides of various quests and characters.

For example, I didn't realize until my fourth time through the blood bank quest that Vandal is screwy in the head because he's Therese's ghoul, and is therefore whacked out on Malk blood.  Playing as a Malkavian gives you a lot of information that you don't get with the other character types (assuming you can decipher it through the heavy layer of cheesy metaphors).

If I make it through a fifth time, VtMB will officially break Max Payne's record for consecutive play-throughs of a single player game by me.

Total side note here: this is kind of replayability that's missing from a supposedly story-driven MMORPG like CoH. Imagine if CoH's mission stories varied in content and detail depending on your archtype or origin? Obviously, making multiple paths for a single player RPG is part of its appeal. Glad to know Bloodlines holds this kind of replay value.

[TheWalrus]

Haemish, losing Mercurio is no biggie. Ya just lose one place to shop, whoopty doo.

[trias_e]

I was waiting for a patch to come out to play this game.  So now I ask:  Is this patch really game-fixing?  Or not that big of a deal?

Will there be another patch?

I'll wait for them to finish their game before I play it.

[Llava]

I also want to play this game, but I would like to be fairly certain that it works.  Updates?

[eldaec]

It's just dropped to £10 to buy in the UK, so I've only just picked it up. The 1.2 patch seems stable so far, but I'm not far in.


Also, is it actually possible to affect the outcome of the incident with the gun in the club in Santa Monica?

The number of routes through the dialog tree I've tried is starting to suggest not.

But I am playing Malkavian, so I often have little idea what the hell I am talking about.

[TheWalrus]

I had very little problem with the game bugwise. I think I had 3 instances where I said WTF. The worst one is getting stuck in a dialog loop with the Nosferatu in the tunnels. %*^*& annoying.

 To answer the Therette question, you have to have a decently high persuasion skill to affect it positively. If you can convince them to live happily together, you get more XP, and the advantage of seeing one freaky lookin CEO type. If your persuasion is low, thou art surely screwed. Go with Jeanette. You at least get to make it with her that way.

[Abel]

There was only one truely gamestopping bug in the release and that one was fairly close to the end (of course that was one bug to many).

1.1 patch took care of that, game still doesn't run great but frankly if you like FP-style RPGs at all you should have tried this game out long before already 

Tip : high persuasion can be very important. Gives lots more options in discussions.

[HaemishM]

Ok, I'm in this game, and I think I'm fucked. I'm playing as a Nosferatu, and I seem to have done all the quests for Downtown and yet can't go to Hollywood yet. I have a quest to see LaCroix Downtown, but when I went in there the first time, I insulted the guard and now he won't talk to me and I can't enter any of the elevators. Have I missed something?

Also, my ghoul friend Mercurio seems to have died because I didn't get him morphine quickly enough. Am I fucked?

There's a service elevator you can get access to if you enter the building from the sewers.

Yes, I'm a fucking idiot who cannot read. I went back to Downtown and looked at the sewer map again and saw the underground entrace. The worst part was that I had already seen it and thought to myself that I should go look at that, but I never did. I got caught up with other quests and forgot it was there.

I am Jack's Complete Lack of Short Term Memory.

EDIT: I've only played the 1.2 patch. The biggest bugs I get are just lack of optimization, such as how the sound stutters or the game freezes for a second as I'm walking along. And this is with a 7200 RPM SATA drive on a 3.0 Ghz P4. Maybe it's better with 1 GB of RAM instead of 512MB.

[Samwise]

1G of RAM would probably help.  The game seems to use all of it, since when I quit or alt-tab out, there's a lot of grinding as everything else gets pulled off of disk (with most other games I can alt-tab out and everything else is still in physical memory because the game didn't use up the full gig).  Yeah, this thing's a hog, which is a shame.  I'm looking forward to trying it on my new SLI rig once I put that together.

I'm almost done with my 6th playthrough now (Nosferatu).  I'd recommend against playing a Noss for your first time through, as it presents a number of unique challenges - for example, having to use the underground entrance to Venture Tower.  I'd found it by accident in one of my previous games, so I knew exactly what to do when Chunk refused to let me up, but I can see how that'd be frustrating as hell if it was your first time in there.

Obfuscate is the bee's knees.  Sticking an invisible katana through someone's back just never gets old.

[Llava]

As an avid reader of V:tM books for the last 8 years, I still can't get into Nosferatu very much.  Malkavians and Gangrel are more my style.  That's because I'm a walking stereotype.

[HaemishM]

See, I dig the Nosferatu. I'm not a big fan of the whole V:TM franchise, but when I played the CCG they put out years ago, Nos was my favorite clan, followed by Brujah. Then maybe Gangrel. All the poncy, fairy-type clans like the Ventrue just pissed me off.

[schild]

Would it surprise anyone if my favorite clan was the Malkavian? Anyone? Please?

[Megrim]

That i think was one of the problems with Bloodlines. All of the clans presented were the poncy Camarilla ones (for which i have very little liking). So the natural choice for most i think is Malk, since it's the only one that is truly unique. All the others are too stereotypical (Brujah/Gangrel? hah!)

 - meg

[Furiously]

Would it surprise anyone if my favorite clan was the Malkavian? Anyone? Please?

Shocked. Just shocked. Mine too, but just cause she was the hottest.

[Samwise]

The Malk dialogue is awesome, as is the Dementation discipline.  If I were to replay any of the clans, it'd be Malk, no contest.

[Fabricated]

Malkavians have the funnest dialog overall, but it gets mildly annoying whenever you meet anybody new since you usually have to go through the, "What the fuck are you saying you goddamn fruitcake?" dialogue before getting down to business.

I played Treador since they're decidedly middle of the road in terms of advantages/disadvantages, and since all the other non-Malk clans looked retarded. I almost picked Brujah, but the male Brujah looks like a fucking wigger.

[schild]

wigger

Wow. I haven't heard that word since like 1994. That's probably why it's funny too.

Malkavian4life.

[Llava]

I do like the Tremere and Venture (and even the Toreador, though less often) if I'm in the right sort of mood.  There is something fun about completely ditching your conscience in a pursuit of power.  Uh.  Fictionally.

Hell, one of my characters in CoH has a backstory that would fit in perfectly with the Tremere.