Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines

I can count the number of games that ask me to make complex ethical decisions (and also portray those decisions as some shade of grey) on one hand. Mass Effect comes close, but even that still falls into the binary mentality — choices are either Paragon (noble and heroic) or Renegade (which ranges between badass and asshole). KoTOR put you on a sliding scale between Lightside and Darkside and made walking the line between extremes almost impossible.

Mass Effect differs from most of the other games I’ve played that offer some kind of ethical framework in that Paragon and Renegade are calculated separately and Shepard is fully capable of being a bit of both. In this sense, it’s a step above most RPGs, morality wise.

But there’s more than one right way to approach a moral framework.

“I could have died last night, but I heard the voice of a smaller god.”

You might remember me mentioning this game before. There’s a reason for that. I stumbled on this diamond in the rough early into my college career and I’ve never quite been able to let it go.

See, there’s this interesting thing about Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines that most modern RPGs can’t really say. It doesn’t preach at you much. Sure, you have to keep up the Masquerade, you have to maintain your Humanity (in my experience it’s kinda hard to fail at this) but beyond that pretty basic idea of ‘don’t kill people who didn’t take a swing at you because that’s giving into the beast’ and a few other pointers, there isn’t really a sense of a binary morality in this game. Everything, and I mean everything and everyone you meet in Santa Monica (and the greater LA area) is a shade of grey. Its moral framework is pretty loose — maintaining Humanity is usually pretty obvious, you have to work hard to lose it — and within that restraint there’s a fair amount of leeway in terms of how you handle things. A lot of the quests (especially early on) can be solved with many different approaches — stealth, persuasion, seduction in some cases, mind control, brute force, you’ve got all sorts of tools available to you depending on the sort of vampire you’ve chosen and your own play-style. A few decisions can raise your Humanity score, a few others along the way can restore any status you’ve lost to Masquerade violations. Other than that? It’s all roleplaying. You’re a vampire. Act accordingly.

Rarely is there a clear right or wrong in this game. When there is, you’re inevitably facing something more horrifying than you. Sometimes that something is human.

And honestly? That’s… kind of brilliant. Don’t get me wrong, I love the BioWare formula, but every so often it’s nice to be reminded that it’s far from the only one that works. Bloodlines worked. There was a clear distinction between enemies in a combat zone and civilians on the street; you knew the rules and you followed them like a good vampire, and it actually impacted your way of behaving in the open world. Unlike, say, Saints Row 3 or Grand Theft Auto, where the police actions resulting from rampaging through the streets and making a very visible nuisance of yourself are a temporary inconvenience at best. Especially late game, your incentive to stay in character in the sandbox is almost nil. But the framework isn’t a leash; you’re given enough rope to hang yourself, as it were.

Really, when it comes to this game, probably the best thing about its sense of morality is that it fits the character and the setting. In this world, even the best of intentions can twist around on you (as they really should for a vampire) and… I think the highest complement I can pay this game is that the choices I made almost always left me wrestling with the most important questions of all: why did I make that choice? And do my intentions matter more than the result?

What does this choice say about me?

What am I becoming?

My personal recommendation is to play the game at least twice, once as a Malkavian. Because the Malkavian makes things very… very different, just in terms of your dialog choices and people’s reactions to them. And by different, I mean hilariously insane. Malkavians are pretty much universally batshit crazy.

Nosferatu also offers a unique approach, but personally I’m not all that big on the idea of being so hideous that stealth and violence are the only tools you’ll have left when dealing with mortals. What can I say? I like my vampires elegant. Still, if you’re more into horrifying, it’s nice that they give you the option. And that characters do react differently to the more… fringe choices. Not bad considering that Mass Effect only refers to Shepard’s class once in the entire trilogy and only offers you unique advantages for a particular class outside combat once, and it happens in a DLC mission. Bloodlines, meanwhile, was giving you unique dialog options for using your clan specific mind control powers in casual conversations, and when did this thing come out again?

Oh, right. In the dark prehistory before game developers started aiming for yearly releases of CoD.

As an added bonus, the soundtrack is really pretty darn good, most of the voice acting is solid, and the atmosphere is just indescribably gothic and oppressive. You really feel like this whole town is just waiting to tear itself apart. One or two quests in particular still give me chills when I think about them—the hotel sequence in particular is the example I point to when I say I want horror in video games to feel like this.

Bugged though it was, Troika deserves credit for trying, and there’s a lot in Bloodlines that modern developers really should be taking notes on. Sadly, they probably won’t. If a sequel to this game came out today it’d probably ship with a dozen microtransactions and a tacked-on multiplayer mode that features like a whole two distinct flavors of deathmatch. Ooo. Innovation! Who knew that it smells just like condescension?

For me, if there’s one video game that perfectly sums up what a vampire game should be, it’s Bloodlines. Not because it’s perfect; it isn’t. Because I still remember it. Because for all its flaws, I still think about it. Bloodlines made me feel like a vampire, slowly losing my humanity as I fought to hold my head high in a world far darker than I was, with characters who remain fascinating and threatening, dark and majestic and wholly unique.

I would love to see someone, a skilled development team, try to make a game like this today. Not a big budget mainstream monstrously, but something where they allowed themselves to innovate again. An open world title, single-player, maybe with a co-operative story, with cool powers and robust character building and role playing features. A world where actions have consequences, where your choices make you stop and ponder afterward.

I want, more than anything, someone to make me feel this way again.