Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

Being released the same day as Half-Life 2 obviously damaged the company enough to stop making games. How about you give them some money by buying this, loving it because it's indeed too fucking good, and maybe we might get some quality games in our industry again ;)

There are plenty of old games that hold up today like Deus Ex and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic with the latter being a good example of what can be done on the Source engine. I don't think VTMB is one of them. For all the raving about being a hidden gem, it is honestly pretty tame and janky to play. It does have some strengths: Voice acting, characters, and atmosphere. Those all still hold up. But I don't see the flexibility fans claim is there. Stealth is pretty much a must have, pacing is weird and I ended up with so many quests on my plate at once. Most of the side missions were not engaging and resolved themselves so quickly. it reminded me more of Postal 2 than anything from DX or classic RPG. And whereas Dark Messiah's combat still feels revolutionary today, VTMB feels even older than it actually is. I think most of the appeal has to be the fact it is centered around vampires and werewolves which is a relatively niche fandom and lacking decent games. It's playable, but is very rough around the edges (even on release that was a big criticism) and it hasn't aged well. The 5 star reviews that also mention the bad combat and rough gameplay really aren't being honest.

lots of them ! cant even enter a bettle without my weapon

12 hours in and every quest has been nothing but "go here, do this, kill this guy, do what i say" It's like im some immortal errand boy. My dialogue also seems to have no real impact, all of the dialogue options seem to end up at the same place and give the same response dialogue. I literally threatened a very important vampire in no uncertain terms several times in a single dialogue tree and it still ended up with me doing an errand for them. Completely overrated.

Even without branching narratives and an exceptionally linear story, the sheer number of ways you have to solve most quests and the impressivly varied dialoge options, the experience of being able to express your character as they're thrust into this world and being forced to think and act with your characters skillset is second to none. With the community patch that fixes most of the bugs coming pre-installed, there's really only 2 caveats. The combat is terrible. (Even if you pick a combat heavy route there's actually not very much of it so this isn't as big an issue as it sounds like it is.) Kinda...low key racist. Every protagonist option is white, in Los Angeles of all places one of the least white places in the country. (you can fix this with mods.) Perhaps more glaringly, several of the asian characters in the final area are *extremely* blatant stereotypes, and unfortunately not always on a meta 'make fun of the people who actually believe this' way. If you can look past those issues (and I can't say I blame you if you can't) it's a must-have for any RPG fan.