Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

- It’s been 18 years since Troika (this game’s developers) have disbanded, yet their legacy continues to endure. A game rushed out before it was finished, riddled with bugs, yet beloved by a small and dedicated community. - Bloodlines’ biggest feature is letting you pick the vampire clan from which you hail from, and interact with the many members of the other clans. This results in many roleplaying moments, as well as reasons to replay the game. - The world is divided into 4 hub areas for you to explore, which get unlocked as the story progresses. As for side missions, they’re all well put together and thought out to fit the game’s theme. NO radiant quests here. - Gameplay wise there’s dialog and combat. Dialog is a joy to engage in, thanks to the excellent voice acting. My suggestion is investing heavily in the Persuade skill. - Combat unfortunately feels clunky, especially ranged combat in the early game. My recommendation is to focus on Unarmed/Melee in the Santa Monica and Downtown areas, then start investing skill points into Firearms only after reaching Hollywood. - But whatever you do, make sure you download the latest version of the UNOFFICIAL PATCH, install it and play from the new shortcut it creates. If you want to make sure it’s installed correctly, just go to the Gameplay Options menu and there you should see "unofficial patch" written along with the current version number.

Played for the first time this year and man, what a great experience! It's a shame this game is a buggy mess, but it's not that big off a deal since unofficial patch fix most of the game-breaking bugs. Unfortunally, the final session took a big dip in quality, mostly 'cause it felt rushed with very underwhelming endings. Besides that, definetly became one of my favorite games! It has a great atmosphere, great characters and pretty good writing, I'm really excited for the sequel!

This game was very ambitious, trying to capture the essence of the world of darkness at its peak. Unfortunately it was published in a semi-finished state, with some bugs and some of the content left out. Thanks to the amazing work of WESP5, the game was not only finished and polished up to the state it deserves to be in, but it was significantly improved. I recommend always getting the latest unofficial patch when playing this game, it makes a huge difference. There are some mods. It's not as straightforward as some newer games, but it's surprisingly easy. Essentially you have the big mods that are the game versions - for example you might play the Vanilla (patched) version or the Extended Version or the Clan Quest Mod version or one of the CompMod version, the list goes on. These are essentially total conversions, they generally keep the structure of the game, and the main quests, but they add new locations, content, clans, and so forth. You can have as many versions of the game installed as you like, they have their own individual override folders and when you launch the game, you can pick which version to play each time. Then there are the small cumulative mods like aesthetics, new models, lighting, textures, music, voices, essentially anything that is not the structural part of the game, these you can easily mix&match. You fancy playing a character based on a famous vampire from a TV show ? There's probably a mod for that, just drop the model and texture files into the right game versions's folder and voilà. 10/10 for immersion, the game balance is not perfect (some attributes & skills are more impactful than others, for example in the base game Persuasion is 100% more impactful than Haggle, some game versions change this for example TFN shifts this focus a bit), the story is surprisingly engaging even on replays. A lot of players replay this game every year like on Halloween. Maybe as a tribute to how good games used to be, maybe just to have some fun...

This is the greatest vampire game EVER. My only complaints are extreme difficulty spikes in just some specific areas, and lack of truly deep character customization (visual) and frustrating skyrim-style limitations placed on skill/level/ability points. Redemption has NOTHING on this game. The game could have used some more love in the free-roam-exploration department in my opinion, and no- I don't mean like in many other games that have free roam and fail to deliver in every other way. more exploration and freedom would have made this game feel less cramped and had that potential increase in freedom been filled with an appropriately increased amount of content- I say free roam would have been a welcome addition. This game is special, like MASS EFFECT ONE special. KOTOR1/2 special. Yea. You know that feeling. It's worth it. Patch it, Mod it, Enjoy. This is one of those no regret purchases on gog.com

Every character feels like a person, no matter how weak or strong, with phenomenal writing and some truly insane possibilities and replayability. One of the true RPG classics. Oh, and thanks to the Merchant's Guild for the recommendation.