"A funny thing happens when you stir up enough trouble in the tiny, open-world portions of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. If you indulge in showing off your uber vampiric parkour abilities and wield your other powers too openly, the music intensifies and sirens, followed by the sound of a helicopter, surround you as you, hopefully, are trying to hide. At first, it instills a sense of urgency, a panic. You have to find somewhere in the not-so-sprawling map of Seattle to hide away."
"The thing is, there are no police cars with sirens blazing. Stop and look: There are no helicopters. You'll reach a game over screen if you continue to violate the vampiric code of silence known as the Masquerade, but aside from cops on the streets opening fire on you (who are hardly a threat given that you're literally a 400-year-old vampire), so much of the sense of danger around you is nothing more than a shallow facade."
Bloodlines 2 ramps up audio alarms and environmental cues when players openly use vampiric abilities in public, creating an immediate sensation of urgency and panic. The game signals pursuit with intensified music, sirens and helicopter sounds, prompting players to find hiding spots across a compact Seattle map. Visual and auditory threat cues lack physical counterparts; no police cars or helicopters actually appear, and civilian police are minimally dangerous. Violating the Masquerade triggers a game over but produces little substantive consequence. Feeding on or killing humans yields no lasting moral or mechanical penalties. The game omits a tabletop-style humanity or hunger meter that affects world and character outcomes.
Read at Kotaku
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]