Vampire: Bloodlines Preview & Media

IGN PC has put together a comprehensive two-page preview for Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, based upon a recent build they were able to check out. A snippet to follow:

What’s most immediately noticeable about combat is the third-person perspective, which we weren’t aware was a part of the Source engine. (And Boyarsky tells us they made no significant changes to the code besides extending the particle system to support lots of spell effects and altering the lighting). While 3rd-person is currently the rule for combat, you can otherwise switch between first and third. The high-level Obfuscate skill looked pretty cool, with a Predator-like shimmering effect. You won’t get a load of weapons to choose from at one time, as this is an RPG game with a set amount of inventory space, but keep in mind that vampires are already pretty handy with their bare hands and whatever spells they might have at their disposal.

You will also be fighting solo. There are no plans for a party-based system or hirelings, although you will be able to temporarily charm people to do your bidding, if you have that skill. The entire game takes place in real time (“and RPG with and FPS interface”). The game also won’t be making use of the Source engine’s support for vehicles. Speaking of Source, it’s interesting to note that the game was demoed to us on an nVidia-powered rig that that Activision brought in for the presentation. Apparently, Valve has been able to make some significant improvements to the code since Newell discussed the large performance gap back in the fall. Even when factoring in possibly lower-quality textures, lighting and character detail, it still ran pretty fast and didn’t appear to have any jaggies. When asked for comment, Doug Lombardi stated, “We haven’t had a chance to benchmark Vampire specifically…The Source engineers are working closely with all the GPU and CPU manufacturers to insure great performance across all hardware.”

In addition to the preview, IGN has also tossed up four new screenshots and a video showing a Brujah in combat.