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Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2

Fourthspartan56 said:
If it lets them implement more more exotic Clans then that would already put it above Bloodlines 1. Paid content can be done poorly but it doesn't have to be, it's simply a question of how substantive it is vs how much it costs.
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Yeah, it would have been nice to have Nosferatus and Malkavians in bloodlines 1... wait.

Stop normalising selling unfinished and gutted games, come on. If they made a DLC for the funky clans later on while selling a complete game at the start it'd be fine, but this ain't it.
 
If they don't have the Clans that were in the original game in the base game of 2, then yeah that is absolutely bullshit. It's one thing to save Lasombra or Tzimiche or whatever for DLC, but come the fuck on.
 
The_Reptile_ said:
If they don't have the Clans that were in the original game in the base game of 2, then yeah that is absolutely bullshit. It's one thing to save Lasombra or Tzimiche or whatever for DLC, but come the fuck on.
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I could almost understand not having a Nossie because their flaw bends the whole game around itself but c'mon, there's an easy out for the Malk by having their psychosis be something subtle instead of the purple batbaby of 1. Hell you could have the thinblood headmate be the psychosis for a Malk, which could be a cool way to reframe whatever dumb shit is going on there.

We're probably not gonna get a Gangrel outside a DLC because Protean would be a fair bit of animation work.
 
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I have to admit to not exactly shedding a tear over losing Malkavian. In the OG it has some interesting elements like the whispers and some of the dialogue was fun when you know what's going on, but a lot of it was just not good. Losing Nosferatu is understandable given how much work it would take, but also much more of a shame because it had such a distinct impact on the play experience and some elements of Nosferatu work really well in a more modern setting (mainly the fact that they're very online).
 
hghwolf said:
Tremere, Ventrue, Toreador

Brujah's for fighty people, Ventrue for talky people, Tremere for casty people and Toreador for shooty/hybrid people. It'll be some basic bitch path Tremmie too.

God forbid we have any of the interesting clans.

Outside chance of the Toreador being a Nossie instead for sneaky people but that would require way more work, just like a Malk would, so I'm not seeing that happening.
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I see it more likely that Tremere would be skipped over rather than Toreador.
Tremere is less of a Vampire trope, and most probably harder to implement.
 
Renu said:
Yeah, it would have been nice to have Nosferatus and Malkavians in bloodlines 1... wait.

Stop normalising selling unfinished and gutted games, come on. If they made a DLC for the funky clans later on while selling a complete game at the start it'd be fine, but this ain't it.
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You'll have to forgive me if I'm unimpressed with tired anti-DLC buzzwords.

We don't actually know anything about the game, trying to pretend that its completeness or lack thereof is an established fact is farcical. That it has fewer clans then 1 could be an indictment against it, or it could be a product of more developed Clan content. I'm not overflowing with hope for 2 but I reject this kneejerk hostility to the existence of DLC.

Starfield said:
I see it more likely that Tremere would be skipped over rather than Toreador.
Tremere is less of a Vampire trope, and most probably harder to implement.
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I disagree, Tremere are the mages and thus naturally fit in as a gameplay archetype. Furthermore if you're going to have a limited number of clans it makes sense to have more unique ones because they're more distinctive.

Toreador are at their heart just another social Clan, if Ventrue are in (as they likely are) then it would be hard to justify their presence given the limited spots for Clans. They're different but not different enough.
 
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I admit I have very little idea of what each clan is known for, both in lore and in game mechanics.

For a long time, I thought the Brujah were the clan of artists and poets, of the "rage against the dying of the light" type. Because that's how they were described in Vampire The Masquerade Redemption, possibly biased because the protagonist was a Brujah.

Later, I was told the Brujah were actually the "combat monsters" of the clans, as in the straightforward "hit it until it stops moving" sort. The Toreador were described to me as "Brujah but more talky", the Ventrue were "very talky and stuck up" (which given the baseline arrogance of Vampires made me think Ventrue were even more so), Tremere were "Mage player in a Vampire game", and Gangrel were "Werewolf player in a Vampire game".

Again, no idea how accurate any of these are. Apparently the first Bloodlines game had an unfinished attempt at fleshing out the clan descriptions during character creation, but I've never experienced that, because when I tried the fan-made patch that supposedly put it in, there was a warning of "don't spend more than twenty seconds on this clan selection screen, or the game will crash".
 
Adloquium said:
For a long time, I thought the Brujah were the clan of artists and poets, of the "rage against the dying of the light" type. Because that's how they were described in Vampire The Masquerade Redemption, possibly biased because the protagonist was a Brujah.

Later, I was told the Brujah were actually the "combat monsters" of the clans, as in the straightforward "hit it until it stops moving" sort. The Toreador were described to me as "Brujah but more talky", the Ventrue were "very talky and stuck up" (which given the baseline arrogance of Vampires made me think Ventrue were even more so), Tremere were "Mage player in a Vampire game", and Gangrel were "Werewolf player in a Vampire game".
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The bruiah lost most of their culture when their city state was destroyed during the roman era iirc.
 
Adloquium said:
For a long time, I thought the Brujah were the clan of artists and poets, of the "rage against the dying of the light" type. Because that's how they were described in Vampire The Masquerade Redemption, possibly biased because the protagonist was a Brujah.

Later, I was told the Brujah were actually the "combat monsters" of the clans, as in the straightforward "hit it until it stops moving" sort. The Toreador were described to me as "Brujah but more talky", the Ventrue were "very talky and stuck up" (which given the baseline arrogance of Vampires made me think Ventrue were even more so), Tremere were "Mage player in a Vampire game", and Gangrel were "Werewolf player in a Vampire game".
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Both descriptors are true to some extent. Modern Bruja are for the most part rebels for rebellion's sake or wistful elders pining for the enlightenment of lost Carthage, their seat of power. They are among the best fighters on an individual level, but unfortunately that does not scale well against rivals with powers that act on a macro scale. Their position in modern Cainite society strikes me as the same that of 'rebel' subcultures subsumed by capital.

The cultural hegemony solidified fully towards the Toreador during IIRC the Renaissance period in a sort-of Patron(Ventrue)-Artist(Toreador)-Scholar(Tremere) trinity, while the Bruja splintered.

Ventrue are one of the clans embodying nobility, so 'talky and stuck up' is a mostly correct descriptor, and in part an adaptation to the modern lifestyle. They are, however, the Clan of Sceptre and Sword, so elders are frequently knights, generals and warlords. Just as it became culturally in style for mortal nobles to 'soften' and become patrons of the arts, so did the Ventrue adapt.

Tremere were literally founded by hermetic mages that for some reason decided to become vampires and stole themselves some blood, so the descriptor is sort-of correct though there has been a millennium of cultural drift.

Admittedly I have not been keeping up with modern VtM all that much, so I might be wrong in some places.
 
The problem with the 'rogue' slot is that the obvious 'key' discipline for it is Obfuscate. Pretty much every clan or bloodline that has Obfuscate also has something that would be a lot of work to properly implement; the Shango, Setites and Assamites have their own brand of sorcery with the Assamites also having Quietus, the Malkavians are insane and need that reflected in dialogue and gameplay, the Nossies are walking MVs, the Samedi are walking MVs AND have necromancy, the Baali are also sorcerers and, y'know, the Baali and the City Gangrel would also need a Protean discipline made.

There are fairly obvious clans for the archetypes of fighter, caster and talker that wouldn't create extra work; Brujah, of course, are the archetypical smash clan, Tremere are defined by being blood mages and for the talky man it's a coinflip between the beguiling Toreador and the commanding Ventrue for clans with social focus with little in the way of disciplines that require much modeling or animation and design work but the rogue archetype has no easy or obvious pick.

Assuming the split will be between these four archetypes of course. It would make sense to do it that way, but we don't actually know do we ?
 
I guess if they're really in depth storylines etc, 4 clans isn't as bad but I feel like the 'core' VTM clans are like, Brujah, Ventrue, Toreador, Nosferatu and Tremere? Minus Malkavian which to be fair has clear difficulties to implement, so that feels like DLC wouldn't be unreasonable. At least those are the ones in the V5 corebook, so you'd think they'd have those. Hopefully the DLC won't be too ridiculous in terms of cost/sizing.
 
The third clan have been revealed and its the Banu Haqim. I don't know if its my lack of familiarity with The World of Darkness, but I was certainly not expecting the Banu Haqim to make an appearance.
 
I wasn't expecting that, but I guess it makes sense to have the assassin clan given this game seems to be shaping up a little Dishonored esque.
 
Adloquium said:
For a long time, I thought the Brujah were the clan of artists and poets, of the "rage against the dying of the light" type. Because that's how they were described in Vampire The Masquerade Redemption, possibly biased because the protagonist was a Brujah.
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My understanding is that there the Old World Brujah basically being an aristocratic clan that's a rebellious Romanticist answer to the more conservative, Enlightenment coded Ventrue. Good dutiful noble scion vs renegade drunken rabble rouser noble scion.

Then at some point there was a transition to modern nights where more and more Brujah came from different walks of life, creating a populist more broadly counter-culture form.
 
Brujah stuck with the camerilla though, so the rebellion cred of their leadership is low AF.
 
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