Vampire: Bloodlines E3 Preview

Warcry has put together a one-page preview of Vampire: Bloodlines, based upon what they saw of the ambitious RPG at this year’s E3. Check it out:

For those of you that aren’t vampires, and have dreamed about becoming one, there’s a game in the works just for you. Entitled Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, this game takes place in the alternate dark reality that White Wolf, distributors of the Pen and Paper Vampire, has created. Unlike the half-action / half-RPG game that was released in the mid-90’s, Bloodlines is all RPG, allowing you to raise stats, gain XP and pick any of the vampiric races that are part of the Camarilla (sorry Sabbat fans, you can’t be those crazy Setites). It has some elements of an FPS game, but with the game so oriented around dialogue trees and stats building, the FPS element seems very minimal.

As you enter the gaming world, you’ll notice that the graphics are astounding, with the dark and moody atmosphere lending perfectly to the games premise. Built on the Half-Life 2 engine, Bloodlines will not suffer in the graphics department, and, in my opinion, was one of the best looking games at E3. Pulling blood from a monster’s corpse and bludgeoning his friends to death with a sledgehammer looked beautifully grotesque. The Half-Life 2 engine does remarkable well, even in this RPG setting, and playing Vampire made me equally excited to have a crack at Half-Life.