CaptainElectric: I'm also curious about savegames, but from a different angle.
I have a friend who just quit playing in frustration because the game appears to have a checkpoint system that only allows autosaves, no manual saves. HOWEVER, she is playing on Steam, without the Unofficial Patch.
A character death set her so far back in the story that she noped right out of the game, probably for good.
Selfishly, I'm asking because I'd like to play this game here on GOG, and I'm hoping saves are handled in a bit more modern fashion, i.e. unrestricted, manual saves. Someone please let me know if that's the case!
The game supports manual saves and quick saves, both in the original and the unofficial patch version of VTMB. I am not sure what game your friend was playing, but that doesn't sound like Bloodlines. It always had quicksave and manual save. It is a source engine game. It was upon release. In my original post, I was referring to need to start a new game every time you update the unofficial patch, which still seems to be the case with the modded version available on GOG.
I ended up just installing the unofficial patch on the main branch and disabling auto-updates so saves aren't invalidated.
