I worry I’ll never play another game like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. In the RPG’s world, it’s always night. That makes sense, you’re a vampire after all. You can’t go out in the sunlight, so you skulk around the city streets after dark. It’s a lore-driven decision, but the result is that VTMB presents a version of Los Angeles we never see in video games.
Santa Monica, Downtown L.A., Hollywood, Chinatown — they’re settings you would expect to see in sun-drenched games like Grand Theft Auto 5, Dead Island 2, or Tony Hawk. Even L.A. Noire, which has “noire” right there in the title, largely took place during the day, as Cole Phelps drove around the well-lit city streets. Inhabiting Los Angeles as VTMB’s creature of the night makes its neighborhoods feel entirely different.
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Some of that otherworldly feeling is the result of Bloodlines being, as of today, 20 years old. Crowds were more difficult then, so VTMB’s streets are largely vacant, save for the odd NPC shuffling past. That constraint actually helps the game’s atmosphere, in the same way that Halloween’s Haddonfield was made all the more eerie through the low-budget production’s inability to spring for extras to populate its streets. Even VTMB’s night clubs, where industrial music plays for eager leather-clad dancers, feel weirdly empty.
Its world felt like a window back to the world I grew up in, the world of the 2000s. I wouldn’t play it until decades after that time had passed. It seemed like an RPG for the cool kids who grew up on PC games, not console kids like me who felt proud when they managed to plug their GameCube into the TV correctly. This was a game that, when recommended, came with the huge asterisk that you needed to download a fanmade unofficial patch for a baseline functional experience.
Developer Troika was rushed to release the game, then shut down shortly after launch. That left VTMB in a lurch, and dedicated fans stepped in to fix it. I’ve always been turned off by even the slightest amount of tech-y legwork, and that kept me away from the game for too long.
The Empty Streets Of A Haunted L.A.
When Bloodlines 2 was announced in 2019, I decided it was time to finally see what all the fuss was about. When I finally played it, we were in the midst of a global pandemic. The empty streets looked like the streets outside my apartment. The clubs seemed less empty and more socially distanced. I stayed up into the early hours of the morning playing because, realistically, what did I need to be up for? I found the game at the exact right moment, when the real-world was as strange as the World of Darkness.
I was thoroughly unprepared for how much VTMB would be exactly the vibe I wanted from a game. One of my formative memories is playing Sonic Adventure 2 in my bedroom and listening to family watching The Matrix in the living room. Bloodlines felt like that, a mash-up of everything that was cool in the early 2000s, expressed through the polygonal graphics I was most nostalgic for.
It also hit at the right time in my life as an RPG fan. I had recently played through The Outer Worlds, which was co-directed by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, two of the creators of Fallout and two of the co-founders of Troika. The Outer Worlds wasn’t the first RPG I played by any means — I grew up on Pokemon, Shining Force, and Final Fantasy — but it was the RPG that pushed me to think seriously about role-playing. It pushed me to create a character who wasn’t just a self-insert and work through how they would respond to each moral dilemma the game threw my way. So, by the time I started Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, I was ready to make the choices it wanted me to make.
I’m still waiting for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The announcement that compelled me to finally explore Troika’s haunted Los Angeles has, five years later, led to nothing. I still want to play that game, but I know that nothing will feel quite like the original. Nothing ever has.
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