The game starts with an fantastic opening song and intriguing menu screen … and leads into an very amateur-ish looking opening cinematic, with floaty gliding characters, odd breezes blowing clothing around, mysterious occasional cuts to black, and an almost incompetent lack of audio synchronization. You Only Get One Chance To Make A First Impressionįor many reviewers and gamers, their impression of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was etched in stone before they even took control of their character. We could certainly sit around all day and analyze the root causes of their demise, and that has actually been done to some extent or other through the years, but I’m much more interested in diving right into a look back at their masterpiece, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Soon enough Troika was gone, and it was revealed that over the first few months a mere 75,000 copies of the game had been sold, far less than the 200,000 by their first release Arcanum or even the 125,000 managed by their second release Temple of Elemental Evil.
Released into the pre-Twilight world on the same day as Half-Life 2 after being held back by order of Valve (it wouldn’t allow anyone else to release a Source based game before them), Bloodlines was perhaps doomed to commercial failure from the start. It is hard to think that a mere five years ago releasing a product based on vampires would be considered a commercial liability, and that there hadn’t been a game released based on the Source engine, but that was the environment in November of 2004. Hello, L.A., you’re up way past your bedtime, aren’t you? That is the line that greets you when you arrive at your apartment ‘haven’ in Santa Monica after a poorly done cutscene and wonderful tutorial, coming from a radio show that is just one of the many delicious undercurrents that make Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines one of the absolute best role-playing games of the past decade.
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