Cautiously excited tho
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Vampire: The masquerade
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I just don't see how this game is likely to be good. Portraying social issues and including racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities isn't going to be the game's issue. The tabletop game (despite a somewhat checkered history in some areas) has a history of being welcoming to people and not flinching away from difficult and current issues, and that extends to its video game counterparts. What worries me is that none of the people who made the original what it was worked on this game. Then, it went through a tortured development process. I genuinely thought it was vaporware for years.
Video games (and basically all mass corporate media) are really weird. It's like if the corporation that owns the rights to the Beatles' library just made another band altogether, put them in similar suits and haircuts, and then just went, "these guys are the Beatles 2!" They have the rights to the Beatles' songs, so they're up there playing stuff from Sergeant Peppers, but it's just a bunch of totally different guys. And then they start playing their new stuff - totally unrelated to the original band in conception, motive, etc. - and people are like, "you like the Beatles, right? That means you gotta like the Beatles 2!"
Yeah, the new W:TA book makes a note of how while the writers and publisher are legally prohibited from using real corporations like Exxon and Nestle, the players are not, and are encouraged to utilize those corporations and their real-life atrocities for gameplay purposes, and I think all the books specifically call out that this game is not something fascists will enjoy. Socioeconomics and Politics are part and parcel of WoD settings, and it'll be a poor game that takes a milquetoast stance on the economic violence inflicted on people by the banal evil of hypercapitalism, the same way it's a poor game that doesn't push characters in dark, bleak directions for everything from power to survival.
Theseus: The Masquerade - Shiplines
I mean, troubled development aside, you could have written basically the same comment about Baldur's Gate 3 and yet that game turned out great. Have some faith, there's no reason why Bloodlines 2 can't be a good game as well.