Vampire: Bloodlines Designer Diary #4

Leonard Boyarsky, joint CEO of Troika Games, has dished up his fourth Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines designer diary over at GameSpot. This time, he talks about how they’re going about combining a first-person shooter perspective with the depth of an RPG. Check it out:

In addition to dealing with the “stats versus feel” dilemma–as well as the number of characters we expected to use versus what we ended up having to do–we also had to implement third-person melee combat. Since the Vampire system has both melee and brawl abilities, we wanted to give players a satisfying experience if they chose to go down these roads. The implementation of melee combat has been more challenging than we originally anticipated, but it has given the gameplay a whole other dimension to be explored. The most difficult aspect of melee combat has been the wide variety of weapons available to players and to other characters. Not only did we have to make all the animations work well in a melee-versus-melee situation, but we also had to make them feel right in a melee-versus-ranged encounter as well. In looking back over the topic of this diary, I realize that third-person melee may actually be the point where we merge the role-playing and first-person action with the third-person game. Perhaps we need to also start figuring out how to incorporate elements from top-down strategy games to make our genre-mixing complete (just kidding).