- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
That's not rare at all, though? Having Big Good divine/quasi-divine entities or forces is pretty baseline. Admittedly there's a significant market share to making them actually just a villain with good publicity, but even so.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Even so, sometimes it does feel like a breath of fresh air when they're actual good guys and are actually relevant.
Like, I get where @MysticBandit is coming from. Just saying.
That depends on what you qualify as core gameplay. If it's measured by how much you spend fighting, that's half of VTM: Bloodlines. Overwhelming majority of the main quest line involves mandatory combat. However I would agree combat is not core gameplay, it's not what the game is about. It's just someone made a tacked-on combat and then proceeded to tack it on everywhere as a low-effort substitution for increasing lack of content. Not really a surprise that a content-rich Santa-Monica has comparatively little while content-starved Chinatown is drowning in it.
However if time-sink combat is not the key gameplay loop, then what is? What do people come to Bloodlines for?
It's not exploration since the hubs were not adequately designed to account for tedium of running back and forth across the city on foot. Nor are there nooks and crannies to discover.
It's not combat - nobody comes to Bloodlines for combat.
It's not resource management, since traders are all the same and blood is everywhere.
It's not dialogue because while Bloodlines has more dialogue options than Fallout 4, it suffers from the same problem as Fallout 4 - namely that most of the dialogue doesn't matter one way or another. In true Fallout 4 fashion, you can flat out refuse and still have a quest foisted on you.
It's not quests since they are all very linear and tedious, a mix of combat encounters and fetch quests.
It's not character build variation, God no. There is little character customization, half the stats are dump stats, third of skills are useless, half the disciplines are of "+ stat" and reskin variety.
So what is it?
Bloodlines' core gameplay is walking through weird hubs, listening to weird people and buying enough trenchcoats/BDSM gear to look like a weirdo yourself. No, it's not a joke. That's what the game is literally all about, the actual main gameplay loop. That's what people come back for.
The hubs may not be designed with exploration in mind, but they have their charming dilapidated hobo-riddled style.
The characters are rather flat and it's not like there is much interactivity in your dialogue, but they are all stylishly weird. It's style over substance, but it's hard to deny the style.
Your character may lack any customization and the dialogue may be very limiting in terms of what person you can try to roleplay as. But the armor definitely transitions you from a bland everyman to the appropriate archetype. A Brujah is some guy in a shirt who becomes a badass biker. A Ventrue looks like a cheap extra until she gets a stylish evening getup. A Nosferatu shifts from a hobo to a cool BDSM goblin.
That's what the Bloodlines is all about.
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Horologer
Incertae sedis
- Location
- a risen sea
Yeah, works with genuinely good gods tend to be rare, or at least rarer. I think it's because they tend to run into the literary version of the Problem of Evil. "If there is a good God, why do we suffer" becomes "if there is a good god, why is there a plot happening"? The latter isn't an impossible question to answer, but it does complicate the writing process.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
The easiest answer is "see that vertiginous chasm surrounded by a cross between Pripyat and the Zone Rouge? that's where a god got suplexed."
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I have to very strongly disagree with this.
You say that dialogue does not matter because there are not consequential choices but that's a pretty narrow definition of 'matter'. Are consequential choices the only way that dialogue can matter in a role playing game? That certainly helps of course but I don't think that choices are the only way that dialogue options can contribute to an RPGs quality. JRPGs are widely recognized to be a type of RPG and yet they don't have an abundance of significant choice. The reason for this is the same reason that Bloodline's writing is widely well regarded, the purpose of RPGs is to provide a sense of immersion and sell a compelling setting. Dialogue doesn't need to lead to multiple end-points to do that, it just needs to be well written. To your credit you do mention this but make the mistake of calling it "style over substance", having a good atmosphere is the substance of a narrative driven RPG like Bloodlines. In this case the style and the substance are one in the same.
Furthermore you argue that quests are all linear and tedious and to be fair for many of them that is true, but then you go on to cite interacting with the characters as the core appeal of the game. But the quests are how you do that. They're the vehicle for which the player experiences the characters' personalities and the world as a whole. They're absolutely critical to the atmosphere that makes Bloodlines great. Furthermore I would strongly disagree with reductively labeling all of them as tedious, there are numerous quests that are widely regarded as compelling. The Oceanview Hotel in particular is (in)famous for being genuinely chilling but it wasn't alone in providing a good time. The Plaguebearer quest, the Snuff tape quest, the quests involving Jeanette and Theresa Voreman's split personalities, and so on. A major part of why Bloodlines is famous is for its compelling quests that not just contribute phenomenally to the atmosphere but also are often great in their own right.
Lastly I do have to take exceptions with the accusation of flat characters. If Smiling Jack, Andrei the Tzimisce, Bertram Tung, and many others are 'flat' then clearly multi-dimensionality is dreadfully overrated. Bloodlines is chockfull of charismatic, hilarious, tragic, and every other type of character you can name. They're part of why the atmosphere is so phenomenal and why despite its numerous flaws as a game it's still a cult classic several decades later.
There's nothing wrong with having heterodoxical opinions. If you dislike the quests or dialogue that's certainly your right but I think you've significantly misunderstood what makes Bloodlines so appealing. The quests and dialogue are the glue that holds the game's world together and why it works exactly as well as it did. Bloodlines is not successful despite the quests and dialogue, it's successful because of them.
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Unless you play as a female Tremere and get to experience amazing glitches with your armor physics, especially if you're using blood armor.
I suppose Tremere deserve it for their sins, though.
So, I guess that's as good enough a cue as any to give my controversial opinion, that being that the Oceanview is kind of overrated as a horror experience. You go into the hotel, creepy voices whisper at you, you read through journal entries written literally as the wife is being murdered, a spooky ghost pops in and out to pose at you, and you're only in actual danger a couple of times. It isn't a bad experience, but it's also not something that I couldn't replicate just by going to itch.io and going through the front page. Even if you only count games that aren't 'supposed' to be scary, I feel like there were other games released around the same time that did their spook sequences better... Honestly, I'd say that even in the same game, I found Grout's mansion to be more unnerving.
Now, I will admit that I'm a latecomer to the game. I only downloaded it more than a decade after it came out, and I had a general idea of what the Hotel was supposed to be. So, maybe I'm just too jaded, or I missed out on the initial experience, or I need to watch The Shining before I start playing through it. But even so, I don't think I was ever really scared throughout the whole scene. If anything, the emotion I most remember about it was frustration that I somehow couldn't get over the ledge in the elevator shaft and kept dying when it fell. So yeah, it really isn't something that I would put on a 'Scariest Moments in Videogames' list the way many people apparently do.
hghwolf
Bird of contempt
Man, I've done the Ocean House enough times to where I'm basically speedrunning it just to get it over with, where I know all the triggers and jumpscares, and it still spooks me a little. The fact that you're rarely in any actual danger isn't a drawback to that, it's a boon; if some meatpile could pop out at any time and gargle in your face you get way too many tension relief points, but with the only 'surprise' danger being the elevator the newspapers and 'spook' events have time to settle and breathe, as you slowly piece together what might or might not have happened, the tension can ratchet up, you, the big scary monster, are made into prey by something ultimately far lower on the totem pole than you are.
It's an amazingly well crafted scenario if you have even the slightest buy-in. Grouts mansion just doesn't compare; sure, it's a testament of non-mans inhumanity to man, but it's a well trod and obvious horror that you can easily detach from, just like the sewer Slachtza or the Sabbat lair. They aren't real the way the Ocean House is. Just videogame levels.
It's an amazingly well crafted scenario if you have even the slightest buy-in. Grouts mansion just doesn't compare; sure, it's a testament of non-mans inhumanity to man, but it's a well trod and obvious horror that you can easily detach from, just like the sewer Slachtza or the Sabbat lair. They aren't real the way the Ocean House is. Just videogame levels.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
I like both ocean view and grouts mansion but I would only call ocean view a good horror experiance. Grouts mansion is a resident evil setting and a love letter to an actual LA landmark of weird architecture and is the better mystery. Ocean view is slowly racheting tension and, particularly the first time when you don't know the ghost is functionally harmless unless you let yourself die to the lift or fire, the lack of an obvious threat hightens the feeling of danger because you can never just kill or eat the mooks to make yourself feel better like you can in Grouts mansion.
Grout's mansion also has stuff you can kill. Sure, it has creepy things in the mansion, but it's a bit hard to be too intimidated by a horror situation when you're the one who keeps on sneaking up on people and eating them.
Meanwhile the Ocean House has no way to fight back, no way to counter the ghost other than just running.
It's not that dangerous if you know what you're doing, which I'd say is part of the appeal.
It has a sense of danger, you might die a couple times if you mess it up, but it's not too likely to kill you.
Which might be a controversial opinion: Horror games are often better suited to have easy gameplay rather than hard. Or rather, it should arrange things for the player to die a bare minimum of times.
While obviously, in most games, you want there to be the feeling of imminent failure, dying more than a few times is bad for the atmosphere of dread. Sure, it mught make a good jump scare for a zombie to bite your head off, but familiarity breeds contempt, and dying too many times turns it tedious. Dying can often be a pre-maturely cathartic way to take the player out of the experience, of making them focus more on how to survive than being terrified of whatever's killing them.
Hell, sometimes, when a game is freaking me out too much? I just approach the horror and let it kill me. Okay, that,s what the death is like, those are the consequences, good to know. It takes me out of the experience.
So, to my mind, a minimum of lethality (whatever is needed to convince the player that there is a genuine threat without killing them too frequently) is better than a high difficulty where they actually do "fail" and die a lot.
Meanwhile the Ocean House has no way to fight back, no way to counter the ghost other than just running.
It's not that dangerous if you know what you're doing, which I'd say is part of the appeal.
It has a sense of danger, you might die a couple times if you mess it up, but it's not too likely to kill you.
Which might be a controversial opinion: Horror games are often better suited to have easy gameplay rather than hard. Or rather, it should arrange things for the player to die a bare minimum of times.
While obviously, in most games, you want there to be the feeling of imminent failure, dying more than a few times is bad for the atmosphere of dread. Sure, it mught make a good jump scare for a zombie to bite your head off, but familiarity breeds contempt, and dying too many times turns it tedious. Dying can often be a pre-maturely cathartic way to take the player out of the experience, of making them focus more on how to survive than being terrified of whatever's killing them.
Hell, sometimes, when a game is freaking me out too much? I just approach the horror and let it kill me. Okay, that,s what the death is like, those are the consequences, good to know. It takes me out of the experience.
So, to my mind, a minimum of lethality (whatever is needed to convince the player that there is a genuine threat without killing them too frequently) is better than a high difficulty where they actually do "fail" and die a lot.
First, I would caution against throwing around words like "widely" when talking about a cult classic, where the public interest is by definition is limited to a group already positively predisposed to the subject. As far as "wide" perception is concerned, the game has died without much fanfare twenty years ago.
Just like the sequel, ba-dums.
More importantly, I don't see any way how unresponsive dialogue can contribute to a sense of immersion and sell a compelling setting. If anything, it's the exact opposite - once a player understands that the dialogue choice is hollow, it reduces the immersion and devalues the setting.
It is also quite telling that the very first quest you name as compelling is the hotel quest. A quest which is basically one long cinematic with no interactivity and variation. Is it a bad quest? No, I wouldn't say so. But it only underscores my point that a player walking around weird hubs listening to weird people (in this particular case - reading their notes) is the high point of the game, because that's the entirety of the hotel experience.
Also, since you insist that the quests are a vehicle through which a player explores the characters - what new insights into Therese can one derive from the hotel experience? Nothing much. In the context of Therese/Jeanette interaction, it is entirely arbitrary and serves as nothing but a toll to continue the conversation.
As for the characters, I don't think that characters being specifically flat is what makes the atmosphere. If Bertram Tung was not as pure and unadulterated Nospheratu information trader stereotype, Andrei the Tzimisce - as much of a generic Tzimisce Sabbat bad guy or LaCroix - as much of a Ventrue cliche, would the game really suffer? Would the atmosphere get worse? I doubt it.
Yeah, the Tremere got a shit hand.
Male Tremere starts out as more of a gigolo than his Toreador counterpart and then just de-evolves into a generic douche in a jacket.
While female Tremere - I have no idea what they were going for with her design. First she looks like a blind stripper, then some second-rate groupie, then passes a "I found a crimson coat in a thrift shop" phase, finally settling for some kind of Karen-in-winter outfit.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Soma was massively improved with the patch (first fan-made, then integrated into the actual game) that made enemies unable to kill you. Changing the previously killer cyborgs to helpless nudgebots really sold the angle of how pathetic and pitiable their situation had made them. It's one kind of horror to see a human reduced to a psychotic murderdroid who will endlessly shamble after you around a set of corridors to kill you, it's entirely another to see the same person reduced to a husk that can do nothing but come up to you and scream, and neither of you have any power to affect the other.
hghwolf
Bird of contempt
On the contrary, there being few meaningful consequences to any dialogue choice in Bloodlines lets people respond how their character would.
It's also not actually true ? There's a ton of little ways in which you influence things. You can't influence the main plot until the end, but that also is reasonable because you are fledgling caught in the machinations of your elders, and your autonomy is very fucking limited.
...man you don't understand narrative at all do you ? I suppose if one does not go in on the Ocean House it might be a little harder to understand but like...
You've experienced the story of the hotel, the suffering of the wife, the evil of the husband, the emotion, the regrets, the whole tragedy of a murdered family that echoes and continues for decades long after everyone involved should have, at least, gotten their rest. You're close to it, it's on your mind, you empathize because you're still on the Path of Humanity and have been a vampire for like... a week, if that. But you have this cherished locket that allows it to finally end, if not well, then at least end.
Therese treats it as a plot token. She doesn't give a fuck about the people, just her project and the money involved. Jeanette throws it into the ocean, condemning the ghosts to eternally play out their tragic tale, not even out of malice for them but just to piss off her sister.
If that doesn't give you an insight into their characters then I'm sorry, but you need to start paying attention.
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I'll freely admit that I played SOMA first with the harmless enemies mod, mostly because the reviews I read argued that the stealth gameplay was tedious.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The issue is that fictional horror - all fictional horror - requires buy-in. If you go into a horror experience with the 'well it's just fiction' attitude then it's not going to work, because at the end of the day it's all just pixels/words/CGI/actors and none of it is actually real.
So Ocean View worked for me, because I was bought into the game already by that point; it'd given me reason to anticipate interesting shit happening. Sure, it was clunky and weird and kinda not actually good to play, but the storytelling was on-point for a lot of it.
Also the Tzimisce sewer bit was a good bit of horror, for me, because I'd gone into it with nowhere near the resources I should have and so it was a fucking nightmare to crawl through, always an inch from death; a different kind of horror to Ocean View, though.
So Ocean View worked for me, because I was bought into the game already by that point; it'd given me reason to anticipate interesting shit happening. Sure, it was clunky and weird and kinda not actually good to play, but the storytelling was on-point for a lot of it.
Also the Tzimisce sewer bit was a good bit of horror, for me, because I'd gone into it with nowhere near the resources I should have and so it was a fucking nightmare to crawl through, always an inch from death; a different kind of horror to Ocean View, though.
Mechasaurian
Big Bossu
- Location
- Lost among fields of history
- Pronouns
- They/Them
What compounds this is that killing you is, ironically, probably the least scary thing a horror game can do. Because it sends you back to the last checkpoint, and thus reminds you that it's really just a game.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, it's why games like Dark Souls and so on aren't particularly scary; after the first ten or twenty deaths it's just something you laugh off.
The trick is disempowerment without death and without making the game unpleasant to actually play.
Mechasaurian
Big Bossu
- Location
- Lost among fields of history
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I was thinking more of straight up survival-horror games like SOMA and the Amnesia series, and Alien: Isolation. The Soulsbornekiroring stuff...sometimes has horror-ish elements to it, but I don't think they would be traditionally classified as horror games?
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was mostly thinking of Bloodborne, TBH, which hews the closest to horror, and I was also agreeing with your broader point that games which kill you a lot make enemies inherently un-frightening.
(Also from Bloodborne is the most frightening enemy type, one who can permanently destroy a fairly limited resource with an attack.)
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
This might be why I never found the Ocean View scary at all, even on the first playthrough.
The game itself tells you (via the questgiver) that the Ocean View has ghosts, but they can't hurt you. Now, this isn't literally true, since the ghosts can cause various physical phenomena that cause HP damage, but there isn't the terror of "you are being pursued and in fear of your life". It's just a poorly-lit environment where something horrible once happened, and some poltergeist is trying to interrupt you while you're exploring the place. And the "something horrible once happened" loses its impact when I'm a vampire who got introduced into vampire society by horrible things happening, like my sire being executed.
There's nothing for me to buy in to, going in blind.
Never fuck up your tunneling in the Nether while wearing full Protection 4 Diamond Armor and fall in a lake of lava, is all I'm saying. The amount of time it takes to die is excruciating when mixed with how you can only slowly move towards the shore, not sure if you'll burn to death or not. Totally a horror game experience right there.