We are not dead. We are something else entirely.
It is a bitter pill to swallow, acknowledging that the Vampire RPG game that you founded this very blog speaking about is never going to have it's triumphant sequel. Like the blood-starved citizens it references, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 seems cursed by the High Wills never to see the light of day, nor catch the shimmering reflection of it's pride, ever. I've never been one to happily and easily swallow my medicine either; my own body rebels at the order, my throat will go so far as to seal itself shut if it has to. So that wound is better not salved, but handily papered over with another Vampire themed Role Playing game so as to disguise the disfiguring so that it may fester and grow gangrenous away from my catching eye. Hurray for unhealthy compartmentalising! Although coming from my thirty-odd hour playthrough of Vampyr, I wonder if maybe I chose the right replacement game. (Swansong is out; I could have easily fed my VTMB thirst through that.)
Instead I ended up with Vampyr, an action-based vampire game set in London in 1918 at the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic. You play as recent Kindred- oops, sorry that's my 'Vampire: The Masquerade' verbiage, still firmly lodged in my frontal cortex, they use the word 'Ekon'- so you play as the recently Ekon-ified doctor Johnathon Ried who is, yes, a specialist in blood transfusion... urgh. (I wish I could say that was a passing wink and a nod; but his work in blood literally becomes central to the entire running narrative and is bought up often enough to the point you have to stop rolling your eyes at it.) Going into this game all I knew about it was that the developers behind the game were DONTNOD Entertainment, which puzzled me at the time of this game's announcement because all I thought I knew of their work was Life is Strange, and my tenuous relationship with that series. It was only after the fact that I looked into their work an realised that DONTNOD made lukewarm and ironically forgettable action platformer game; Remember Me.
Right away I'm happy to report that Vampyr is heaps more memorable than that game, which built itself on the premise of mind manipulation and utterly failed to flesh out anything else interesting about it's identity for the game's entire runtime. For one, Vampyr wins on style points as it boasts a handsome Victorian vampire sporting a suspiciously modern hairstyle. (Seriously; I know that the 1910's were the age of the hair wax pomade, but boasting that alongwith a side fade and a pointed beard? Reid looks like he spends his weekends off from the Pembrooke giving lectures at Blackwall Academy. Which... he totally could have been doing, he's a vampire.) And for two it has a genuinely unique framework for it's gameplay loop which supports the underlying themes of the narrative to the point where I was actually playing as the game wanted me do despite starting my playthrough actively edging towards trying to undermine it.
Vampyr also features a story which exceeded my admittedly meagre expectations to keep me at least remotely invested throughout it's length, which really pulled some weight when the thigh-deep world building started to come up a little short nearer to the back half of this storyline. I know I'm a bit spoilt coming from the expansive river of vampire lore from 'Masquerade', touched by countless dozens of inspired authors over many different projects, but sometimes I feel Vampyr's frail attempts to plant the routes of it's own vampire lore start to either come up disappointingly short or run away in strange angles that I'm not convinced the team ever sought a second opinion on. If you told me that a single writer focused on the world building and ancillary setting whilst the others focused on characters and narrative, I would totally believe you.
At it's face, Vampyr is a story about being made a Vampire rather suddenly and searching for the mysterious figure that sired you. A bare basic narrative for a vampire story which thankfully gets shelved into the 'B-plot' once we start focusing more on the Spanish flu and a wave of barbaric vampiric-offshoots called Skals that are infesting the city, and a slightly confused narrative thread that seems to incidentally equate the two diseases as indistinguishable until the running story thread just shrugs it's shoulders and
outright connects the two. And I have to admit; working to discover the fictional mysterious secret source behind a real viral pandemic from the late 1910's is actually pretty interesting. That lens of fiction-based-on-history elevates a lot of what would otherwise be a fairly cookie-cutter narrative into a genuine page turner. (Or controller picker-upper; to transmute that context.)
How this plays out is in a well conceived but clumsily executed gameplay cycle of investigation marred by necessary bouts of action fighter gameplay that never quite feels as good as you want it to. Somewhat fittingly given the specialisation of the development team, I think the investigation portion of this world, as well as the 'web of social interaction system' which underlies it, is inspired and actually pretty strong. And the combat is a 'Witcher 3-like' dodge and stab affair that feels a bit heavy and fiddle-some when you pick it up, settles into 'serviceable' as you get used to it, and shrivels into a tedious annoyance as the enemies become more varied and resourceful and the repertoire at your disposal stays mostly static. For a combat system to play the exact same way at hour 3 that it does in hour 30 is perfectly fine if you've got a great system, but when it's only okay- that becomes one of the flagship reasons why I don't think I can bring myself to pick up this game ever again for a replay.
The extent of the issue is really this. When you're not socialising, investigating, or playing doctor, you're attempting to do any of those things which better suit this game's identity whilst being beset by endless hoards of either Vampire-Skals or vampire hunters on every street corner. It is no exaggeration that simply in travelling the streets of London you'll be forced to murder hundreds of annoying NPCs that stand around like human roadblocks and litter the path. You know that feeling in a JRPG when you're crossing the tall grass and the screen flashes and you just want to scream "For the love of god, can I please just get from A to B"? That's this entire game in a nutshell. Combat that you simply endure being forced upon you hour after hour until you're planning your routes through the streets of London specially to avoid high spawn density. Needless to say; this doesn't feel like a very natural world to navigate. (Having lived in South London myself, however; I will relay that down here we do, in fact, have to wade through hoards of crazed violent men in order to pop round the shops at night; it's just the daily tribulations of life.)
The combat of Vampyr is your standard third person stamina-based slashing game with anicllary vampiric abilities that are acquired at level-up and fuelled by a blood gauge you refill by biting staggered enemies. Staggering occurs by breaking a stagger gauge, that reinforces itself to be stronger each time you break it. Staggers reward you only with a small window to bite and not really an opportunity for damage dealing, making it all but useless in a prolonged bout aside from the fact that blood is the only reliable way of healing aside from using items. Items suffer from the game's constant autosaving mechanics which is designed to make sure you can't go back on your choices, but means that expensive restorative items which are expended in a big battle that you end up losing, won't be refunded. This is somewhat similar to how Dark Souls does it, except that Dark Souls is built to encourage this idea of personal investment of items and the risk involved, and thus From Software builds it systems so that most consumable stockpiles can easily be restored by just killing a few of the right enemies in a farming adventure. Vampyr has you painstaking craft each elixir by gathering ingredients for expensive recipes that are randomly awarded to you after battles in infinitesimal amounts, or buying those ingredients with shillings, that are similarly rare. I'm a breed of gamer who already has trouble using limited resources when they're in trouble, and Vampyr reinforced that fear with gusto.
Bosses are when the combat of Vampyr starts to get a little bit interesting, as most standard NPCs are merely an annoyance. Now most every boss apart from a couple is a suped up version of a moveset that will presently become NPC standard after that particular encounter, and so aren't all that unique in themselves. Some have a few special mechanics such as avoiding flashes of light across the stage or managing never-ending trash spawns, (God I hate unending trash spawns in boss fights) and a few are just high health bar enemies who can absorb high amounts of damage. Some of these fights were actually challenging, the last one got me sweating a little, but all them suffer from the handling of Johnathon himself. Johnathon moves just cumbersome enough to make you feel unagile next to your opponents and his attacks for some weapons seem to correspond in just delayed enough of a fashion to sometimes feel unresponsive. Now know I'm talking about a hairline inconsistency here, one that would absolutely never be noticed in most games, but for one which relies so much on it's petty fights between objectives, every flaw stands out like a sore thumb. Also, though this was a problem I couldn't replicate with reliability so it might have been a bug, there appeared to be a light issue of 'action queing', where you press a couple of buttons and the game commits to the second action before the first is committed, forcing you into an animation you otherwise would like to be reactive during. So watch that panic pressing, I suppose.
Difficulty in the game is controlled mostly through a totally divorced from context levelling system which denotes enemies becoming stronger as the game goes on for no explainable reason. Levels decide how much damage the player does, with the closer you are to the enemies level dictates how close to your own max damage output each attack does. This is a bit of an artificial way to control difficulty, as the game can only really turn that dial up by kicking enemies to a much higher level than you, because any one who matches you in level, even bosses, are hardly more than a gnat to be rolled over. Enemies that are ten levels above you, however, take absolutely no damage and will almost always on-hit kill you. So there's no moment of sound balance. For some reason, when base damage is untouched, every encounter is laughably easy, which speaks to a problem with balancing that the team resolved rather crudely.
I think there's no better example of this crudeness than the level up abilities, which all present largely un-transformative powers (apart from the blood heal. That one's pretty much essential) you unlock and then improve the stats of, although only at base values,
not related to your weapon damage output, so as enemies get more powerful your abilities become more useless throughout the game. Some, like the percentage of damage that bites do, never have the opportunity to be useful at all, because by the time you've got enough exp to make it 'strong', enemies are so powerful is still hardly scratches at their health bar. And, amazingly for an action RPG, there are absolutely
no upgrade modules related to improving defence stats! This means there's no way to buff your absorption of hits, and no way to deal with the two different damage types that are introduced throughout the game, flame and poison damage. (I equate 'sun' to flame damage. The effect is similar.) On the hardest difficulty, this means there are fights were getting poisoned once is an actual death sentence as you have no recourse but to just stand there and watch your health bar disintegrate into nothingness before your eyes. You feel just as flimsy at level one as you do by level thirty! All of these issues and oddities converge to form a combat system which can keep you busy from checkpoint to checkpoint, but never really feels exciting or empowering. And with as much respawning enemies as there are between checkpoints, and the fact the game won't let you open doors or gates if you've got an enemy sniffing up your butt, it won't be long before you're dreading each encounter as a tedious roadblock to the progression of the
real game.
But once you do force your way through these armies, you're treated to the very comprehensive, and well made, social interaction system. Every non-violent NPC in this game is unique and developed with their own backstory, secrets, and social circles. Whether in service of your overall narrative or simply to satisfy your own noisiness, you can interrogate citizens about their lives in order to unlock clues that unravel more details on them or others in their circle, so that you naturally dig into who they are and what they're hiding. Some clues can also be gained by finding hidden documents around the world, or triggering an eavesdropping minigame. Oddly for a game about being a doctor, this creates a very robust 'investigation' gameplay system which would suit a private investigator video game like a tailored glove.
Of course there is a vampiric twist to this system, and in Vampyr that comes in the form of 'Blood Quality'. The various denizens of London are marked and ranked by their 'Blood Quality level' which starts off as a fraction of what it could be and rises as you learn more about them for some reason which is never made clear. This 'quality' directly relates to the amount of XP you can gain from drinking their blood, and considering that's your main source for levelling up, getting that quality level close to full before you go drinking is a must. Neatly, this means that it is in the best interests, even of an evil route player, to do specific character side quests before they go snacking; wrapping the quest design into the gameplay loop with the sort of deftness I wish the entire game was bound by.
Another potential detriment to blood quality, hinting how important of a factor it is in the meta game of Vampyr, is illness. One of the selling points of Vampyr is managing the dichotomy of being a doctor bound by the Hippocratic oath, who must sustain himself to the detriment of other's wellbeing. They practically print that on the box. Reading that, and expecting the bare minimum, I assumed that particular dynamic to be paid basic lip-service in the narrative before I simply ignored it and went on a murder spree. Vampyr, again rather cleverly, found a way to gamify that system. Everytime you rest to pass the night, something you need to do in order to expend the exp you've collated, various citizens will be struck with illness, thanks to that pesky Spanish flu, either randomly or spreading from other untreated carriers left from the night before. These illnesses corrupt the blood quality levels and damages the overall health of the district, meaning that the player is incentivised to brew remedies and heal patients, sometimes for the express purpose of getting them healthy enough for you to kill them. Elegantly designed- but there's a problem.
You see, managing the 'state' of the London districts is the metagame of Vampyr, and it means overseeing a sliding scale of troubles that is effected by actions you take in the main story or individually. If you decide to redeem the exp waiting in the veins of a healthy resident (an action which always kills them, for some reason. Vampires of this age don't know how to take a small sip in order to maintain their food sources, apparently. That's the industrial age for you folks, unchecked consumerism personified.) that will have a detrimental effect on the scales and tip it towards collapse, as will not treating illness. Curing illness slightly cures the district, as do some story actions I believe. Which means that the only real way to combat the ticking time bomb across the city, which progresses everytime you consult the level-up screen, is to cure people. And this is where the tedium which is housed in so many otherwise decent systems of this game, lies.
When someone becomes ill they do so from their various districts housed around the game world, typically at safe zones in the centre of various winding streets of endlessly spawning enemies. There is no fast travel in the game, meaning that everytime you want to level up you're expected to do a fifty minute loop of the city to make house calls to all potential patients, whilst piling bodies of vampire hunters in the interim. And just to pour fresh gasoline on the caustic wounds, the game refuses to show you where NPCs are on the overmap. Meaning you need to remember in what parts of this decently big city each character likes to frequent, and if they displace as the result of some quest and you can't find them; you can expect to wander around for the next twenty minutes with 'video game vision' on until you track them down. So that's how a decent idea of gamifying a core concept of the premise slips into a mind numbing chore the game lumps ontop of you to keep up with. A chore which stops you from progressing the game if you have any intention of managing these districts. (Which is one of the only ways that the good/bad endings of the games are decided unless you ignore the moral ambiguity that the narrative tries to take you on and select the developer's pre-decided 'good' narrative choices in order to pursue the 'ultra good' ending. One of these decisions is literally letting a man painfully die from internal injuries instead of ending their suffering. Seems DONTNOD have some very interesting ideas on the concept of being 'morally upstanding'.)
As hinted earlier, I also had a lot of trouble getting into the wider lore of this vampire-centric world that DONTNOD created, which reminded me a little bit of Twilight in how it embraces a vampire-dominant mythical world and overeggs that pie whilst giving everything else lip service. You'll be attacked by giant shaggy wolf-life beasts and get told they're just a particularly animalistic strain of vampirism. (Instead of, ya know; a Werewolf!) You'll learn that Vampires can apparently procreate. I don't mean the biting way either; I'm talking sexual reproduction. Which I would take as a bizarre reference to one of the more nonsensical plot lines from Twilight, but it's mentioned twice from different sources;
that is an aspect of their lore. And in a particularly baffling scene that I can only assume is a total oversight from the developers, one of your close vampire buddies places the Dr Reid's hand on her chest so that he can feel her heart beat, a gesture of endearment. Only, hang on- she's a vampire! Why is her heart beating? The scene even makes you see it in 'vampire vision' so you can literally watch her heart beat. And the reason I say that in particular is an oversight and not a bizarre nook of the lore, is because that same character later makes a reference to the fact that vampires don't have beating hearts- but how do you make that mistake in the first place?
The only explanation which makes sense of all this weirdness in my head is that there was no central creative authority on what the rules of this universe are, which results in a very wishy-washy world that doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Vampires can procreate? How do they produce sperm out their bodies on a diet of just blood; how do they menstruate without a pumping bloodstream. And if their hearts are supposed to work just fine; then what the hell about these monsters is even dead in the first place? They are undead, right? The verbose rhetoric of dialogue chuffs over itself reiterating the 'undead' nature of their affliction time and time again, but apparently by every medically observable metric, this universe's vampires are merely sun-sensitive weirdoes that are on a blood-only diet! All of this was a reoccurring source of frustration for me until I realised something; DONTNOD aren't trying to make a world. Whereas most modern games and movies and TV shows are all entries in some sprawling expansive franchise that has to play by rules set out by dozens of unconnected writers whilst introducing their own snippets to propel their individual story; Vampyr is it's own thing. It's an off-shoot. A one off. The wider world doesn't have to make sense because it's not detailing a real bigger world we'll someday get to explore in future entries, and it's not supposed to. Does that forgive the lore being non-sensical or internally contradicting? No. But it softens the egregiousness of the wrong. At least in my mind. I came to peace with it.
Which allowed me to focus on the main narrative and the goofiness there. Now the majority of the main story is decently straight forward and easy to follow, even if it gets a little off the rails in the third act. (That final boss really didn't have to be so 'apocalyptic stakes' and 'mythical') I was also supremely let down by the wrap up of the B-plot, which is such a limp end that the game just throws it at you on the way to finish the game. Also, what starts as a morality tale kind of wraps itself up by the middle of the game without telling the audience, and from that point on Johnathon is driven almost entirely by his promise to single handily cure the Spanish flu, (Which starts to feel more like a personal pride thing after a while) a spotty set of pocket-book morals that he enforces sporadically and yet with the dogmatism of a zealot whenever he remembers them, and, enduringly, his desire to get his undead noodle wet. Or however that works down there in this topsy turvey world of vampiric trimesters, I try not think about it. I'm not adverse to that kind of story beat, in fact I like them when they're done well; but this one felt supremely ill-fitting and weird. I'm not saying they didn't have chemistry or anything, I just don't know why my vampire story needs a love sub/adjacent-to-main plot.
In summation, Vampyr is an effort to bring solid action gameplay to DONTNOD's usual narrative based choices-have-consequences formula and the result was a serviceable title which outstays it's welcome long before the credits roll. So many great ideas in the foundation of this game are let down by the combat which the game relies so heavily on, and even the narrative elements are victim to DONTNOD's questionable writing which makes their games so endlessly fun to poke fun at. Although whereas I'm usually lovingly critical of their model, something about Vampyr's uneven split of action to narrative tips me over into being genuinely annoyed at the shortcomings. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend this game unless you're really desperate for a vampire game and have exhausted the VTM library. Although there are elements I like here, and some embers of promise, ultimately all the pitfalls prevents me from giving Vampyr anything more than a D+ Grade on my esoteric marking scale. I commend DONTNOD from stepping out of their comfort zone and trying something they're not good at, although I'm not sure if I'd recommend they do it more in the future. At least not into action games again. Maybe a strategy narrative game, like Dragon Commander? They'll figure it out, they are all a creative, if strange, bunch.
