Bloodlines The Masquerade

Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines on Steam. If you have any questions about the Wiki or helping out, you can ask one of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines Wikis administrators. Adding content. The hidden afterlife of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. A couple of weeks ago, I booted up a game I hadnt touched in years the 2. RPG Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. For all the time Id spent away from it, I was surprised how well I remember its distinctive dark fantasy version of Los Angeles. After being unceremoniously dropped in Santa Monica, I worked my way through the ranks by running errands for the citys vampire prince, who invited me to visit him downtown. Then I left his building, ambled into a nightclub, and nearly got stuck in a huge metal turnstile. Wait, I thought. Ive never seen this before. Even the game hadnt been so familiar, I knew I would have remembered something this annoying. Then it struck me in order to play the notoriously buggy Bloodlines, especially on modern computers, its practically mandatory to download a fan made patch. Heat Transfer By J.P. Holman. The patch fixes a handful of irritating flaws, but it also optionally restores old content that was cut during Bloodlinestroubled development process. Sketchup 8 Pro Completo Portugues'>Sketchup 8 Pro Completo Portugues. Id used the patch before, and largely thought of it as a fixed quantity. But at some point since my last playthrough, it had added, without my involvement, this weird, tiny detail. In fact, over the last 1. Its like returning to your hometown, only to discover it changed while you were away familiar, but different. What was that turnstile doing there The more I played, the bigger the changes got. There were whole areas Id never seen before, and items I couldnt recall receiving. An addition I did remember, which restored an entire quest line, had a different villain at the end although I wasnt sure I could trust my memory, until my confused Google searches confirmed the switch. The patch wasnt originally, and still isnt, like playing a mod that adds all new material to an old game. Vampire The MasqueradeBloodlines delivers a new type of RPG experienceone that blends all the core elements of a traditional RPG with the graphical richness. Dev0lved ENB The VTMB ENB was a little messed up, so I took a look at using another sourceengine ENB, the one for HL2. Bloodlines Antitribu is an expansion and modification developed for Vampire The Masquerade. But it isnt simply excavating old items, either. Its a window into all the directions the original project could have gone, as interpreted by one man a German analytical chemist and longtime video game modder named Werner Spahl, or wesp. Spahl is far from the only person whos contributed to Bloodlines unofficial patch. He took it over from the original creator, Dan Upright, in 2. But Spahls the projects sole manager, and for over a decade, his vision has shaped what might be the gaming worlds ultimate albeit unofficial attempt at a Directors Cut sans director. Supporting Bloodlines character Beckett gives the player a reconstructed quest. Uncovering hidden video game content is a fascinating process in its own right a recent Kotaku piece delved into the dedicated community of Grand Theft Auto 5 fans that hunt within the games code for incomplete buildings and vehicles, missions and story threads. But theres a special poignancy in Bloodlinesand its ever excavating fanbase. The game was widely considered unfinished at release, after developer Troika and publisher Activision clashed over deadlines. Appearing on the same day as Half Life 2, the role playing game sold poorly at launch, and Troika dissolved without even having time to fix all its many bugs. There are worse cases of what might have been in the video game world, but Bloodlines will always feel like a cult classic that missed its chance at becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Many of the patch features are simple. One folder, for example, lists every usable item made for Bloodlinesby its developers, even those that didnt make the official cut. By cross referencing the catalog against whats found in the actual game, Spahl or any other modder can find scrapped weapons or occult charms and drop them into one of Bloodlines official levels for the player to find. Elsewhere, they might spot an extra vampiric power, or an unused character model. The original game becomes a life preserver for its own unfinished designs. Its less like finding a deleted scene than reshooting a lost film. In other cases, though, the mod has been expanded from what the original developers produced for the final version of the game to include bits intentionally removed in development. Those involved in the mod have dug through outside material to find hints of how the game evolved through its creation which is how the turnstile was discovered and why it was added. Rather late in the whole patching progress, we stumbled onto a French site that had a lot of concept art and beta screenshots, Spahl told me over email. In one of these the turnstile was clearly visible in Club Confession, where it is restored by the patch right now. Of course, theres a reason why the developers decided to cut a broken turnstile. And so, in an even stranger meta design choice, Spahl added the in game dialogue that allows players to ask the club owner to remove the turnstile a thing that was never in the original game to begin with. Bloodlines The Masquerade' title='Bloodlines The Masquerade' />Theres a contradiction here. Hypothetically, Spahls patch restores the video game equivalent of deleted scenes. In practice, its more like reshooting lost scenes from a classic film, requiring plenty of independent decisions. And the more ambitious the change, the looser its connection to the original object. The LA Public Library, as rendered in the unofficial patch. Take, for example, the extra quest I mentioned above Night at the Library, where your character disrupts a ritual held by the monstrous Sabbat vampires. If you were simply looking through the games code, youd never find a hidden map or list of objectives the only clues that it had ever existed would be some textures and models that resemble the real world LA Public Library. Instead, the inspiration was a postmortem interview with Bloodlines designer Brian Mitsoda, where he briefly mentioned a cut quest involving the unused location. Spahl read the interview, spotted the models, and emailed Mitsoda for more information. The library design never even made it into an alpha stage, Mitsoda replied, according to the patch notes. It was discussed, part of the level was built, but there was never any finalized quest plans or layout. There was some idea of it being a side quest connected to one of the major characters and the Sabbat, but it never really got beyond that. Nearly everything in the library mission, which includes two cavernous areas and strong ties to the larger Vampire the Masquerade mythos, is improvised around one developers vague recollections. The maps were sketched out by Spahl and built with the help of other Bloodlines modders, and an earlier boss was brought back, delivering an unused monologue from his game files. The raw materials were already there, but their arrangement is pure speculation. Daus HendriksThat arrangement is also endlessly mutable. After Night at the Library was added four years ago, some players were dissatisfied with the boss whose voiceover featured a different accent than his other appearances and Spahl replaced him with a totally new character. He saw a smoke shop and cafe mentioned on an in game bus map and worked them in, rearranging the quest substantially. You can occasionally find confused players posting in forums, wondering why walkthroughs are steering them wrong. This kind of confusion is one of the reasons that restored material is in a separate section of the patch, and theres some disagreement over whether it counts as restoration at all, as opposed to a separate mod. Its also not, arguably, the best version of Bloodlines.