Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

The world and its inhabitants are interesting and unique, and the game has that charming and eccentric early-2000s vibe to it. Too bad the combat gameplay has aged poorly.

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.