Practicing Sustainable Agriculture in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2

     It is a well known truism in games media that the more colons there are in a game's title the more likely it is to be ass. Usually this kind of thing smacks of Suit Involvement and Brand Preservation, where the cool but harder to trademark Gods and Monsters becomes the much more specific Immortals: Fenyx Rising, which tells you next to nothing about the actual game itself. (Side note, if you liked Breath of the Wild try Immortals, it's actually pretty good. Just...only do the A New God DLC.) World of Darkness games are hit double with this, because the properties themselves have colons.

    I don't have much unique to say about Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. I agree with the general consensus that the main quest and characters are fun, the side missions can go fuck themselves, and that your headmate, a Malkavian detective named Fabian, is the breakout star. I'm one of the many that would love a game that's just Fabian solving mysteries and talking to fridges and dead cats. Really, it reminds me more than anything of early-era Cyberpunk 2077: An ambitious idea based on a tabletop license and marred by development hell, each manifesting scars in different ways. I doubt V:TM:B2 is going to get the Cyberpunk 2.0 treatment, but it would be nice if it did (it won't). 

    Heck, I'd argue that Bloodlines 2 even has better movement mechanics: rushing across the rooftops of Seattle is an absolute joy, even if it lacks the In-The-World-Ness of Night City (albeit that would require so much more budget than this game ever got). Instead, what I'd like to talk about today is just something silly that I found. 

    In Bloodlines 2, there are four forms of experience points: XP, which you get from doing quests, and three different flavors of blood, which are randomly found among NPC populations. What's supposed to happen is you find the people with specially-flavored blood, lure them into dark alleys, and then snack on them, but hunting and gathering is inefficient and janky. However, the player can also gain access (through spending some XP and flavored blood) to three separate abilities, each of which has a combat effect but also, crucially, flavors the victim's blood. So instead of luring victims to a dark alley, why not just find someone already in the dark alley and make them your victim?

    The results obviously make a mockery of the whole idea of the Masquerade, and the intended angst of the narrative state of being an undead vampire. But the mental image of flipping someone off and immediately snacking on them is so worth it.