VtM: Bloodlines 1 Year Anniversary Q&A

[funcroc]

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetvampire/t...tid=1773542&p=4

 

What is the Bloodlines crew doing now?

 

I am fortunate in that I still work with a good portion of the Bloodlines

Edited November 17, 2005 by funcroc

[Gabrielle]

Good to see some of them made it over to Obsidian.

[Illunder]

Mitsoda wrote the Malk dialogue and he now works for Obsidian (w00t)

 

Bloody marvelous, I absolutely loved playing as a Malkavian and does this mean I get to play as a mad character in NWN2?

[Spider]

Mitsoda wrote the Malk dialogue and he now works for Obsidian

 

More importantly, he designed the Ocean House Hotel level, one of the best game levels I've ever played.

[Darque]

Wow

[kumquatq3]

coo

[kirottu]

Brian Mitsoda worked with TORN.

[Cantousent]

Bloodlines is one of the best CRPGs of all time. It was underappreciated, but it was finally the game worthy of Troika's promise. Unfortunately, it came too late to save them. They finally get it right, don't give stupid excuses, have some excellent writing, and then Troika goes out of business? I'm glad some of the talent ended up at Obsidian.

[Calax]

I hate running through the Ocean House... it makes it hard to sleep.

[Baley]

Arcanum will always and forever be their masterpiece.Bloodlines is a personal favourite.

 

It looks like Obsidian has a lot of big names,I hope we'll see something interesting soon.

 

Isn't Mitsoda working on PNJ?

 

(see MCA's gamer girl interview part 2)

Edited November 17, 2005 by Baley

[kirottu]

Isn't Mitsoda working on PNJ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yes he is.

[Baley]

To tell the truth I was hoping for a more official confirmation from the man himself.

 

Mister Mitsoda doesn't seem to have an account here.

[Gorth]

I wonder who was responsible for casting and directing of the voice actors. The game had the best voice acting of any game I've ever played :cool:

[Baley]

Aren't you forgetting Star Wolves and Seal of Evil ?

[Oerwinde]

They finally get it right, don't give stupid excuses, have some excellent writing, and then Troika goes out of business?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

They didn't quite get it right. It was the buggiest game I've ever played. Even after the patch. It was also too combat heavy. I really don't understand why all the games based on the WoD are so combat heavy, when in the manual they tell you the game isn't about combat.

Edited November 17, 2005 by Oerwinde

[SteveThaiBinh]

They didn't quite get it right. It was the buggiest game I've ever played. Even after the patch.

Yes. I'm glad they're at Obsidian, because obviously they're creatively very strong, but I hope someone is checking their programming from time to time.

Edited November 17, 2005 by SteveThaiBinh

[Musopticon?]

It's not only the programming that hinders performance, but the old version of Source. Older than what HL 2 had.

[Spider]

I wonder who was responsible for casting and directing of the voice actors. The game had the best voice acting of any game I've ever played  :cool:

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Margaret Tang, he says so in the Q&A.

 

Unfortunately, it came too late to save them.

 

Or, apparently, too soon. According to the Q&A development was cut short when WW announced they were ending the WoD. I guess that means funding was cut short as well putting Troika in a bad position, especially when they didn't get FO3.

 

They didn't quite get it right. It was the buggiest game I've ever played. Even after the patch. It was also too combat heavy. I really don't understand why all the games based on the WoD are so combat heavy, when in the manual they tell you the game isn't about combat.

 

You haven't played ToEE, have you? Although I must say I feel kinda lucky when it comes to Bloodlines, I hardly encountered any bugs at all. I had the archeologist crash (and that was a pretty severe bug) and some minor bug with not getting money after a quest. That's it, at least as far as I could tell (there's the occasional spelling error as well of course).

 

True, there were some performance issues with the game, but for me that was merely a matter of having a computer that wasn't up to specs. With my current one I haven't had those problems either.

 

Edit: The game was only combat heavy during the end game. Up until that it had about the same as other RPGs (depending on your character build). And the end part of the game was, according to the Q&A, undeveloped due to the pushed release date. Up until that point the game is excellent, afterwards it's quite mediocre.

Edited November 17, 2005 by Spider

[CoM_Solaufein]

Bloodlines and Arcanum great games by a good company that died too soon. Glad to see some of them came to Obsidian. I remember Jesse's name from Fallout.

[Judge Hades]

Arcanum was okay but had serious design issues in the rules system that made the game too unbalancing in many portions of the game. Never played Bloodlines because after the crap of ToEE I just couldn't stomach another Troika outing.

 

It is good however that those were at Troika found jobs elsewhere and with luck will hone their craft in higher quality games.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

They didn't quite get it right. It was the buggiest game I've ever played. Even after the patch.

 

I can't say I ever chanced upon that many bugs in the game, though it had its share. Personally I found titles like Neverwinter Nights and Temple of Elemental Evil to be far buggier - even with their corresponding patches.

 

It was also too combat heavy. I really don't understand why all the games based on the WoD are so combat heavy, when in the manual they tell you the game isn't about combat.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I agree. But then, it seems most developers working with PnP licenses always turn their licensed games into some combat-fest one way or another. I can't remember many PnP licensed games which didn't had that much of a focus on combat... Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis and Planescape: Torment come to mind as titles which still managed to give players more ways to go about the game other than strictly combat, though.

[Volourn]

BL was a fun game. But, it was likely the only game that could challenge TOEE and the ES series as the buggiest games I ever played.

 

The game had a solid story (not best ever), great characters, and good role-playing.

 

It had too much combat THROUGHOUT the game; but I expect that in RPGs. Even games like FO and PST had more combat than most people are willing to admit. That isn't the problem with BL's combat. The problem with BL's combat it was quite frnakly some of the worst combat ever.

 

BL could have been one of the best RPGs ever; but ended up just being another good CRPG like IWD, NWN, the KOTOR series, or most of the overrated 'old school' games.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

It had too much combat THROUGHOUT the game; but I expect that in RPGs. Even games like FO and PST had more combat than most people are willing to admit.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'm not sure people don't want to admit games like Fallout and Torment had a lot of combat. I think most people who played the game try to make the disctinction between the games having a lot of combat but conversely most of it was not necessary to go trough (especially true with Fallout, not so much with Fallout 2).

[Ellester]

Glad to see some troika people over here. All of Troika

[Spider]

BL was a fun game. But, it was likely the only game that could challenge TOEE and the ES series as the buggiest games I ever played.

 

Seriously, can someone give me some examples of all these bugs you keep mentioning. Because I really don't get it. It wasn't like FO2 that kept crashing for me so much it was unplayable without a patch. Or like Kotor1 that I had to some serious juggling with settings just to get it to start. Or the dreaded memory leak in Torment. And ToEE is in a league of it's own.

 

I only had one bug that really affected gameplay and that was the crash I mentioned earlier (that was a real showstopper had it not been for the workaround with the console people posted on some forums).