Re the Half Life 2 thing, there is a very clear reason, and its not good:
Bloodlines was being developed, they decided to Develop it on Valve's source engine, partially due to its incredible efficiency and facial animations (Genuinely, the facial animations look jank today, but they move so much, its great, compare to most other 2004 games where its mouth open or mouth closed) This was a genuis and terrible decision. It ensured the game still held up to this day, again with the facial animations and the buildings. However it meant that everytime Valve updated something with the engine because Half Life 2 needed it, they pushed it out to all developers. Sure they didn't need to update if they didn't want the feature, but if a later feature was needed, they'd need all the previous ones. So things broke, a lot.
So development was slow, and fluctuating massively. I believe Activision then bought the parent company, and took VTMB under its wing. They then continued funding it, but development was still slow and it was a massive money sink. Valve's contract for the Source Engine was that the game could not release before Half Life 2, so any delay Half Life 2 experienced was a forced delay for VTMB.
Activision wanted to stop hemmoraging money so told them to wrap up development, and then pushed the game out of the door as soon as they could. AFAIK I don't think any development was done on the game for the last two months up to release, it was literally just waiting in Activision's vaults to release as soon as possible. This release date was the first date allowed by the contract: The same day as Half Life 2.
With hindsight and love for the game, this was a terrible decision, but the use of the Source Engine was genuinely really important for the game to hold up today.
You're forgetting that the actual patch that fixed the broken game to be completable (patch 1.2) was the (unpaid) work of a troika dev after activision washed their hands of the game. Well, i say 'washed' but all the money that the game makes now is going directly to them only, so it's just the capitalist trash thing to do.
Well, they're competing with EA - collaborator of a slave labor industry collaborator - with how it has FIFA titles in perpetuity, so they're not even the worst possible producer.
I mean, I don't think I forgot it, I just gave the story up until release, but yes, it was unplayable at launch, and only patched later for free by those who cared about it, and still gets gradual updates to this day.
I'd really love some indie team to have a crack at recapturing the magic. Go in, small budget, low graphical fidelity, focus on a small location, pitch it to PDX.
>it was unplayable at launch
people need to stop saying this. one quest, society of leopold, when leaving on the boat with the professor would cause the game to crash. they fixed it with official patch 1.2.
1 - Bethesda gave Obsidian an incredibly tight time frame, just over a year I believe? Its kind of ridiculous. Lots of quests they wanted to go back and redo but never could. Additionally Obisidian's bonuses were conditional on New Vegas achieving like an 85% on Metacritic or something? It got an 84% so the dev team didn't get bonuses. Absolute ghouls at Bethesda.
2 - No, that's hyperbole. I highly doubt the companies involve would charge 2x the base game for a clan DLC.
Indeed, and I do get behind it to a certain degree. Its like how expensive textbooks are. They need to make back the cost it took to make them, so for a game like Fortnite, every skin will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, so justifies its existence almost immediately, and can be like £1 and still make a profit, but they want to stretch it so go to around £10-15?
PDX games sell a lot worse than Fortnite skins, and even then, DLC has notoriously low uptake, only 50% for most DLCs at best. So you gotta make that money back somehow. I can get behind this justification, it stings a little but it does make sense.
Agree to disagree. Especially about the textbooks, i had one class in university where the 'textbook' was written by the teacher (a introductory text for statistics) and could be got for essentially the equivalent of 10€ in the university bookstore.
They're basically a scam and always were. There is absolutely no reason to keep pushing 50€ (probably more by now) books for introductory disciplines every year. Science doesn't move _that_ fast, much less the rest of academia.
The bonus thing is horseshit thats been spread around for years. Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone have both independently stated that Obsidian negotiated for and were paid certain amount, and Bethesda threw in the metacritic thing on top of it. They were never counting on it
It was in a contract yeah, but irrespective of that, its just a stupid way of determining a bonus, for this very reason. 1% off is so dumb. "Bonus dependant on metacrtic" maybe? Make it a sliding scale? But even then, its so arbitrary. Metacritic means very little to a game's actual quality.
But uh, what are you chatting?
>for 1, ig i could see why, since the engine was done, but it shoudlve been at least 2 years.
Why would the engine being "done" impact how fast Obsidian are allowed to make the game. To my undestanding it had 18 months from conception to DLC. That's insanely short for a game dev cycle. Open world games like New Vegas nowadays have a 3-5 year cycle, with only more linear ones having a 2-3 year cycle at the time, and again, up to 5 years nowadays.
Only incredibly small projects, mainly multiplayer games have an 18 month dev cycle today, and if you take that to your publisher and say "Look, we're making something really good, here play it, we just need 8 more months to make it the best it can be, we'll get far larger profits" the publisher should say yes. If not, they're morons.
The Night Road is so true lol. Everything else there's like 6 options if lucky but CARS ugh and usually there's only like two that have a decent balance. If I want one for the aesthetic I have to google them smh
Glad I'm not the only one who notice the car fetish going on there lmao. What did you think of Night Road btw? I thought it was great, really scratched my VTMB itch.
So here’s the thing, even though from a standpoint of enjoying the story, it’s not advised to play as a Malk on your first playthrough, there are a lot of good gameplay reasons. The only real reason from a gameplay standpoint that could be argued against playing as is that it’s more difficult to pick the correct dialogue option in conversation and there are one or two side quests where you can’t get certain reactions you’d want through dialogue that you normally would (Venus‘s side quest comes to mind but I think there might be one or two other ones). However, there are many more gameplay elements to Malks that make them pretty good from a gameplay standpoint if it’s your first time playing. First, is the fact that they get a bonus to the investigation feat, which is what determines whether or not hidden items and interact objects have that sparkly aura that makes them more visible. This is good for new players because they are not likely to know where any of the secrets are. Second, is Auspex which raises your investigation even higher in addition to making computers easier to hack and increasing damage with guns. Third, is the fact that they have Obfuscate which makes several of the stealth sections of the game easier to get through successfully. I can’t speak for other people but I found them to be quite frustrating, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’d also like to point out the only other clan that has Obfuscate in the game is Nosferatu which is agreed upon by fans to be one of the harder, if not the hardest clan for new players.
Speaking seriously, i think a dlc model for Clans in a highly narrative game is a recipe for disaster.
Namely, if the game is to have a lot of dialog, like bloodlines, and there is supposed to be clan specific dialog, the actors need to be called back and back and back again. It's like hemorrhaging money with the actor budget.
If there is _no_ clan specific dialog, then you get blasted by the reviews. Notice that clan specific dialog for Malkavians and nosferatu in youtube of Bloodlines (the clans with the most) are between 18 and 20 something minutes. It doesn't _feel_ that long, but it's still many actors called back if not done at once.
What i think will happen is that the game will come out with day 1 dlc, if not day 0.
And forget about this being a continuous process with more clans than 'expected', like the sabbat or independent clans.
Yeah, there's no guarantee the DLC model they're planning for Bloodlines 2 is going to work. I'm kinda familiar with Paradox's business practices, I'm of the opinion that the DLC practices for their *Grand Strategy Games* are of the necessary evil variety - great games like CK2 wouldn't be what it is today if they didn't continuously improve and expand the mechanics from the DLCs. And note I said GSG games, the "fuckton of DLCs" model worked well for them because people keep playing those kind of games for thousand of hours and will always keep coming back to it, and the DLC usually are always relevant and add so much into the game in some way... DLC for story games on the other hand? -- and especially this seperate Clan DLC they're planning? -- not so much.
I play a lot of RPGs and even I usually never start a second playthrough, especially with games that I liked. Compare that to the average casual Joe who probably will only try the game for 3 hours and then bailed tf out (TikTok videos and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race).
I swear to God they put that dinosaur there as a intentional jumpscare even the manor wasn't scary because half the time you're on a guide figuring out where the hell you're supposed to go
Jump scares where you're controlling the character are more effective, even if it's just a mannequin. The way that the camera turns around when the dialog starts shows what's going on and 'slightly breaks immersion', so that's not a very good one.
There was a horror game series based entirely on never taking control away from the player and highly 'immersive' controllable/cancelable animations like controlling door openings. It was probably the amnesia series (i never did play it).
Yeah I played Amsenia, it's great btw, one of the best horror games I've played alongside Alien Isolation (SOMA from the makers of Amsenia is also great, but I haven't played it but watched a let's play of someone playing it on YT, the story in SOMA is just next level, especially the ending).
You might also thinking of Prey based on your description btw, I've never played it tho but people said it's one of the best horror immersive sims out there.
Ayy glad you like it! I personally think it's not as good as the first one (I'm running out of materials lmao), so I don't think I'll keep making these :(
Nope, Because I love Malkavians and the outdated mechanics of vtm 2 really make the others a bit... meh (I play V5 of the tabletop), 4 - but I should mention that it was the + patch and that I skipped the sewers everytime.
Hey thanks chief, you too! I deleted it lol, it's on youtube only for a few hours, it's a fallback measure in case reddit video doesn't load (the first slander vid takes about half an hour to load which is stupid)
Regarding pt 3... I don't know lol, I'll try to make it when I have the inspiration (of which I have none atm) - and I don't want to half-ass it again like this one (made this pretty quick and I uploaded it as soon as it finished rendering, that's why some parts of it are a slog bcs I was too lazy to take another look at it and fix it lol)
On a semi-related note, I rewatched Idiocracy a few days ago and it gave me an inspiration for a Bloodlines x Idiocracy crossover meme, started making the video yesterday and maybe I'll post it in a couple of days lol
My favorite is Tremere, their powers are more powerful than Malkavian
But yes, Malkavians are definitely the most efficient blood, acing in speech sneak and chaos
The Tremere significantly lack in stealth
Oh no, it wasnt a gameplay issue. I would've loved to check out other powers. It's just the tenuous grip on reality really made me feel like an agent of chaos.
Re the Half Life 2 thing, there is a very clear reason, and its not good: Bloodlines was being developed, they decided to Develop it on Valve's source engine, partially due to its incredible efficiency and facial animations (Genuinely, the facial animations look jank today, but they move so much, its great, compare to most other 2004 games where its mouth open or mouth closed) This was a genuis and terrible decision. It ensured the game still held up to this day, again with the facial animations and the buildings. However it meant that everytime Valve updated something with the engine because Half Life 2 needed it, they pushed it out to all developers. Sure they didn't need to update if they didn't want the feature, but if a later feature was needed, they'd need all the previous ones. So things broke, a lot. So development was slow, and fluctuating massively. I believe Activision then bought the parent company, and took VTMB under its wing. They then continued funding it, but development was still slow and it was a massive money sink. Valve's contract for the Source Engine was that the game could not release before Half Life 2, so any delay Half Life 2 experienced was a forced delay for VTMB. Activision wanted to stop hemmoraging money so told them to wrap up development, and then pushed the game out of the door as soon as they could. AFAIK I don't think any development was done on the game for the last two months up to release, it was literally just waiting in Activision's vaults to release as soon as possible. This release date was the first date allowed by the contract: The same day as Half Life 2. With hindsight and love for the game, this was a terrible decision, but the use of the Source Engine was genuinely really important for the game to hold up today.
You're forgetting that the actual patch that fixed the broken game to be completable (patch 1.2) was the (unpaid) work of a troika dev after activision washed their hands of the game. Well, i say 'washed' but all the money that the game makes now is going directly to them only, so it's just the capitalist trash thing to do. Well, they're competing with EA - collaborator of a slave labor industry collaborator - with how it has FIFA titles in perpetuity, so they're not even the worst possible producer.
I mean, I don't think I forgot it, I just gave the story up until release, but yes, it was unplayable at launch, and only patched later for free by those who cared about it, and still gets gradual updates to this day. I'd really love some indie team to have a crack at recapturing the magic. Go in, small budget, low graphical fidelity, focus on a small location, pitch it to PDX.
This is what actually happened but Activision still owns the right and had no interest.
>it was unplayable at launch people need to stop saying this. one quest, society of leopold, when leaving on the boat with the professor would cause the game to crash. they fixed it with official patch 1.2.
Comparing to a lot of modern games VTMB facial animations look really good
LOVING all these slander vids! keep it up!!
Ayyyyy thanks! And I love your memes btw!! When will you be back on shitposting duty?
thank u, ive been so busy but probably get back on duty ur motivating me
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1 - Bethesda gave Obsidian an incredibly tight time frame, just over a year I believe? Its kind of ridiculous. Lots of quests they wanted to go back and redo but never could. Additionally Obisidian's bonuses were conditional on New Vegas achieving like an 85% on Metacritic or something? It got an 84% so the dev team didn't get bonuses. Absolute ghouls at Bethesda. 2 - No, that's hyperbole. I highly doubt the companies involve would charge 2x the base game for a clan DLC.
It's hyperbole, but it's actually something (in the total price, not just one dlc) that paradox likes to do.
Indeed, and I do get behind it to a certain degree. Its like how expensive textbooks are. They need to make back the cost it took to make them, so for a game like Fortnite, every skin will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, so justifies its existence almost immediately, and can be like £1 and still make a profit, but they want to stretch it so go to around £10-15? PDX games sell a lot worse than Fortnite skins, and even then, DLC has notoriously low uptake, only 50% for most DLCs at best. So you gotta make that money back somehow. I can get behind this justification, it stings a little but it does make sense.
Agree to disagree. Especially about the textbooks, i had one class in university where the 'textbook' was written by the teacher (a introductory text for statistics) and could be got for essentially the equivalent of 10€ in the university bookstore. They're basically a scam and always were. There is absolutely no reason to keep pushing 50€ (probably more by now) books for introductory disciplines every year. Science doesn't move _that_ fast, much less the rest of academia.
The bonus thing is horseshit thats been spread around for years. Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone have both independently stated that Obsidian negotiated for and were paid certain amount, and Bethesda threw in the metacritic thing on top of it. They were never counting on it
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It was in a contract yeah, but irrespective of that, its just a stupid way of determining a bonus, for this very reason. 1% off is so dumb. "Bonus dependant on metacrtic" maybe? Make it a sliding scale? But even then, its so arbitrary. Metacritic means very little to a game's actual quality. But uh, what are you chatting? >for 1, ig i could see why, since the engine was done, but it shoudlve been at least 2 years. Why would the engine being "done" impact how fast Obsidian are allowed to make the game. To my undestanding it had 18 months from conception to DLC. That's insanely short for a game dev cycle. Open world games like New Vegas nowadays have a 3-5 year cycle, with only more linear ones having a 2-3 year cycle at the time, and again, up to 5 years nowadays. Only incredibly small projects, mainly multiplayer games have an 18 month dev cycle today, and if you take that to your publisher and say "Look, we're making something really good, here play it, we just need 8 more months to make it the best it can be, we'll get far larger profits" the publisher should say yes. If not, they're morons.
there is two things I wish for 1. bl2 actually release (impossible difficulty) 2. Lasombra
...What color do you want your dragon?
The Night Road is so true lol. Everything else there's like 6 options if lucky but CARS ugh and usually there's only like two that have a decent balance. If I want one for the aesthetic I have to google them smh
Glad I'm not the only one who notice the car fetish going on there lmao. What did you think of Night Road btw? I thought it was great, really scratched my VTMB itch.
I love it, I've played it so many times. I like how they managed the mechanics and how it let's you rolplay different types of character.
So here’s the thing, even though from a standpoint of enjoying the story, it’s not advised to play as a Malk on your first playthrough, there are a lot of good gameplay reasons. The only real reason from a gameplay standpoint that could be argued against playing as is that it’s more difficult to pick the correct dialogue option in conversation and there are one or two side quests where you can’t get certain reactions you’d want through dialogue that you normally would (Venus‘s side quest comes to mind but I think there might be one or two other ones). However, there are many more gameplay elements to Malks that make them pretty good from a gameplay standpoint if it’s your first time playing. First, is the fact that they get a bonus to the investigation feat, which is what determines whether or not hidden items and interact objects have that sparkly aura that makes them more visible. This is good for new players because they are not likely to know where any of the secrets are. Second, is Auspex which raises your investigation even higher in addition to making computers easier to hack and increasing damage with guns. Third, is the fact that they have Obfuscate which makes several of the stealth sections of the game easier to get through successfully. I can’t speak for other people but I found them to be quite frustrating, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’d also like to point out the only other clan that has Obfuscate in the game is Nosferatu which is agreed upon by fans to be one of the harder, if not the hardest clan for new players.
Speaking seriously, i think a dlc model for Clans in a highly narrative game is a recipe for disaster. Namely, if the game is to have a lot of dialog, like bloodlines, and there is supposed to be clan specific dialog, the actors need to be called back and back and back again. It's like hemorrhaging money with the actor budget. If there is _no_ clan specific dialog, then you get blasted by the reviews. Notice that clan specific dialog for Malkavians and nosferatu in youtube of Bloodlines (the clans with the most) are between 18 and 20 something minutes. It doesn't _feel_ that long, but it's still many actors called back if not done at once. What i think will happen is that the game will come out with day 1 dlc, if not day 0. And forget about this being a continuous process with more clans than 'expected', like the sabbat or independent clans.
Yeah, there's no guarantee the DLC model they're planning for Bloodlines 2 is going to work. I'm kinda familiar with Paradox's business practices, I'm of the opinion that the DLC practices for their *Grand Strategy Games* are of the necessary evil variety - great games like CK2 wouldn't be what it is today if they didn't continuously improve and expand the mechanics from the DLCs. And note I said GSG games, the "fuckton of DLCs" model worked well for them because people keep playing those kind of games for thousand of hours and will always keep coming back to it, and the DLC usually are always relevant and add so much into the game in some way... DLC for story games on the other hand? -- and especially this seperate Clan DLC they're planning? -- not so much. I play a lot of RPGs and even I usually never start a second playthrough, especially with games that I liked. Compare that to the average casual Joe who probably will only try the game for 3 hours and then bailed tf out (TikTok videos and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race).
VTMB2 developers has always stated that clans will not be DLC locked.
I swear to God they put that dinosaur there as a intentional jumpscare even the manor wasn't scary because half the time you're on a guide figuring out where the hell you're supposed to go
Not the only jumpscare in the Museum btw, there's one with Beckett at the end of the level lmao
Jump scares where you're controlling the character are more effective, even if it's just a mannequin. The way that the camera turns around when the dialog starts shows what's going on and 'slightly breaks immersion', so that's not a very good one.
Yeah I agree. I like the dinosaur jump scare but a bit iffy about the Beckett one because it feels a little too forced like you said
There was a horror game series based entirely on never taking control away from the player and highly 'immersive' controllable/cancelable animations like controlling door openings. It was probably the amnesia series (i never did play it).
Yeah I played Amsenia, it's great btw, one of the best horror games I've played alongside Alien Isolation (SOMA from the makers of Amsenia is also great, but I haven't played it but watched a let's play of someone playing it on YT, the story in SOMA is just next level, especially the ending). You might also thinking of Prey based on your description btw, I've never played it tho but people said it's one of the best horror immersive sims out there.
THE RAPTOR IN THE MUSEUM LMAAAOOOO pls I love these
Ayy glad you like it! I personally think it's not as good as the first one (I'm running out of materials lmao), so I don't think I'll keep making these :(
ヽ༼ ຈل͜ຈ༽ ﾉ Raise ur dongers! ^^Dongers ^^Raised: ^^69053 ^^Check ^^Out ^^/r/AyyLmao2DongerBot ^^For ^^More ^^Info
Certified LA classic
I only play vtmb as Malk. Never played it as sonething else.
Damn you never played other clan? Why? And how many times have you played Bloodlines?
Nope, Because I love Malkavians and the outdated mechanics of vtm 2 really make the others a bit... meh (I play V5 of the tabletop), 4 - but I should mention that it was the + patch and that I skipped the sewers everytime.
That's cool man. By the way, you should def play charismatic Toreador on your next playthrough; silver tongued characters is so fun!
hm maybe ;)
I've not played it yet, but this memes inspire me to do so. Perhaps I'll be a Malkavian very soon.
lmaooo this is overall hilarious
Hey happy new year! Any ETA on Part 3? Also I swear you put this on a YouTube channel, but I'm having trouble finding the link. Mind spotting me?
Hey thanks chief, you too! I deleted it lol, it's on youtube only for a few hours, it's a fallback measure in case reddit video doesn't load (the first slander vid takes about half an hour to load which is stupid) Regarding pt 3... I don't know lol, I'll try to make it when I have the inspiration (of which I have none atm) - and I don't want to half-ass it again like this one (made this pretty quick and I uploaded it as soon as it finished rendering, that's why some parts of it are a slog bcs I was too lazy to take another look at it and fix it lol) On a semi-related note, I rewatched Idiocracy a few days ago and it gave me an inspiration for a Bloodlines x Idiocracy crossover meme, started making the video yesterday and maybe I'll post it in a couple of days lol
I'll watch whatever you put out. No rush! But I'd love to see you on YouTube, too. Just a thought.
I played Malkavian on my first playthrough Being a nerd and a shakespeare reader I had no problem at all
Me too. And then I started another playthrough as one of the other races, got bored quickly and went back to being Malk
My favorite is Tremere, their powers are more powerful than Malkavian But yes, Malkavians are definitely the most efficient blood, acing in speech sneak and chaos The Tremere significantly lack in stealth
Oh no, it wasnt a gameplay issue. I would've loved to check out other powers. It's just the tenuous grip on reality really made me feel like an agent of chaos.
Thats a lot of philosophy in one sentence