I love the feel of Forsaken, but I refuse to play furries.
Back in the day I was fortunate to have GMs who understood this and heavily punished super-hero play. Most vamps in these games didn’t even know about werewolves, let alone mages and most of their lives were spent worrying about what the prince wanted everyone to do and other internal politicing.
In our live games the same GMs always chose players for older characters who were extremely unlikely to turn the game into munchkin. They also enforced rules on such things as older vampires largely being asleep a lot between games and even if not, needing to rely on their Ghouls and younger vampires to get anything done because the older vampires had little idea about, or interest in, modern society/technology/etc.
Rules like this kept everyone’s hand in and kept the politics and trust problems driving the game. Great fun.
I’d quibble with that. Most, commonly encountered, OWoD vampires were intensely social creatures. There’s a reason the second or third supplement was Succubus Club. There are complex networks of secret societies and informal patron/client relationships that revolve around favors owed. Coming together to celebrate, in a sense, humanity was how they retained Humanity and why most Elysiums were in settings chock full of art. Hell, even the Sabbat was heavily into group rituals and bloodsharing and had a very organized hierarchy.
The Camarilla specialized in understanding and manipulating human institutions through ghouled or otherwise controlled mortal proxies and you can’t do that unless you have some sense of how the world of mankind functions. Younger vampires, like the player characters, would be more in touch with modern times and more comfortable in contemporary settings and many are recruited for precisely that reason.
This isn’t Dracula out hiding in an isolated castle. Maybe the most ancient, powerful, and careful vampires hide behind screens of servitors and mystery but player characters really don’t have that option. They’re out there trying to create something for themselves so they can survive to pursue their personal goals.
In the original default setting of Chicago this involved unraveling extremely convoluted informal political networks to understand how to influence the right elder, or talk to the right contact, to get the desired results.
An M60 or Potence isn’t often the answer here (at least until things come to a climax with Sabbat or werewolves running amok). Good social skills and quick wits are.
And I think that once WW saw that players wanted that, they started really pushing it, with elder disciplines and the like. Can’t blame them. It sold. I think the same is true for the MMO.
That’s actually a pretty sharp observation. And then they turned around and complained about players using all those systems to powergame. What did they think would happen?
Ultimately, though, they may be favoring Masquerade because it’s MUCH easier to fit into a traditional MMO framework and allow people to play X-Men, as people are putting it.
It’s still going to be no mean feat. I mean, systems for the Masquerade? If any idiot could, in theory, blow the Masquerade apart and multiplayer games are magnets for idiots…there’s a potential problem here. They could just use the system from the second PC game, Masquerade, but that seems really simplistic.
Then you need to shape the gameplay so it focuses much less on outright carnage than most MMOs and still be entertaining. I can’t see going out and “farming” endless numbers of Sabbat drones or low level werewolves to gain levels or acquire crafting mats. Combat should be very deadly and somewhat meaningful each time around not a routine, daily, grind-it-out.
Real power is social power in the hothouse world of the Vampire not just the ability to control rats or absorb bullets. How do you make that relevant?
I could see that move along the lines of restricting combat between vampires (or reducing the amount of combat as a whole by implementing some masquerade rules that cause human policing forces to come after openly murdering vampires).
I’d think a more refined version of the Masquerade system could work, though I would like to see some disciplinary actions linked to violating the masquerade X times. How about making offending vampires outcasts who can be hunted by others and whose possessions can be confiscated?
Regarding farming, there should be strict enough limits on the numbers of vampires, werewolves, etc. which from a scenario point of view seems more “realistic” as well… it’s hard to imagine a world full of vampires and the likes.
I know i’m going to get some flak because of this (namely “omg, that’s so uninspired and cliché and whatnot” coments) but hear me out;
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Get a game engine which is basically like WoW (flexible, modular, easy to modify and implement new content, able to run on both high end as well as low end computers)
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Get a world which is basically like WoW (large, VERY large, open ended, large cities and highly populated) adapted to the reality of the game (meaning it would be a city with it’s environs and suburbs and then a way to go from city A to city B without breaking immersion).
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Give players the ability to highly customize their character (haircuts, body shape, purely decorative clothing which supersedes the “+4 attack bracers of mighty power” and makes everyone look like a clone
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Divide the playing PC’s into two main factions (Camarilla & Sabbat) with subdivisions within each (clans and antitribu clans).
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Allow players to have access to both casual PvE (raiding that safehouse for fat lewt) and hardcore PvE (raiding that very hard Prince of Whatever hideout for even fatter lewt) as well as just messing around in the game world (achievements, faction rewards via faction reputation)
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Create mechanisms which force players to “feed” (they have to hunt NPC in the game world to maintain their blood pool) but punish them for outright attacking an NPC in plain sight (“guards” rush you and basically turn you to ash and force you to run back from the graveyard).
and that’s it, I’d buy it.
Yes, you can say “it’s basically WoW with a Vampire: The Masquerade theme over it” and yes, it’s basically it, but so much more since the setting is so different, new game mechanics can be put into play, etc, and the game is scalable, accessible to a large target audience, appealing to old and new alike and capable of running on both low end as well as top grade computers.
That’s my take on it.
What a horrendous Idea! Vampire the Masquerade has absolutly nothing to do with “Raiding” and “Loot”. That is not the Masquerade.
Let them break the mold of Standard MMO fare for once. Raiding is the bane of an MMO for me and should have been abolished as a mechanic in its current form long ago . I give CCP the benefit of the doubt and assume they are smarter than this and try something new and exciting. A MMO without any classical “Endgame”. Copying WoW is not the way to break through. The many WoW clones attest to that. They make money but at a pittance compared to the big boy. Only way out of that is doing something completely differnt.
Some MMOs have actually tried to break the mold you know, a number of them. It might be fitting for a vampire game to join them since they are all undead now har har har.
The only one that survived is Eve by the way, out of MANY that have tried and died.
There’s already been two computer games based on Masquerade, which might have influenced their decision to use it for the MMO. It’s what the market is (potentially) more familiar with.
Hm I am not that familiar with MMOs as WoW soured me on them. I play most for a bit but not all of course. So I am curious of wich MMOs you would categorize as breaking the mold and being undead?
I know EvE breaks the mold and that is why I expect CCP to not follow the “WoW” model or better “EQ” model but rather think of something along the lines of EvE.
Shadowbane tried to break it.
Matrix Online, IIRC.
Like said above, all MMo’s that have tried to break the mold end up cancelled or F2P, and those who try to emulate WoW fail at some of the aspects that actually makes WoW such a hit: the huge world, the easy to understand mechanics & interface and the easily accessible PvE with “immediate” rewards for doing so.
I understand what the Masquerade is supposed to be (hell, I played more VtM than WoW, years-wise), I understand it’s not a “let’s kill baddies, collect loot and go to the tavern for some ale and wenches” but games, specially MMO’s, have to appeal to a large audience or they fail at the whole MASSIVE part of the name, if they don’t target a large audience there is no point in making a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER game and they might as well make a new single player game.
That said, gamers and specially those who play MMO’s, usually play the game to interact socially with other players, sure, but the vast majority does it for the “loot”, be it that new piece for their set, that new sword, that new ship upgrade or whatever, there has to be a direct reward for them to stick around.
Games who lack such strong reward components end up failing, EvE is a success because it rewards world PvP and social communities who farm and fight in the game world and end up creating fodder for the other players, WoW doesn’t have that strong world PvP component so it focuses on raiding PvE and it’s rewards.
Again, I just hope it’s both accessible and scalable and that it doesn’t end up being another Age of Conan or Warhammer Online.
If they try to make WoW with vampires, I’m out. Instead I hope they aim for a much more modest budget that doesn’t require eleventy billion subscribers to break even. I hope they aim for EVE - a small game that specifically doesn’t appeal to the unwashed massed so that everyone there for more than a week is actually there to play that game and not just because they are bored and don’t have anything else to do.
I’m so sick of vampires. This announcement does not excite me but I’m always up for a new MMO. I suppose I’ll give it a try but I hope the break the mold and diverge from what vampires are supposed to be. I envision the player base being a bunch of emo kids cutting themselves.
Eve breaks the mold in two major ways: 1) it is the only game focused on non consensual pvp to not die instantly, and 2) it is the only popular sci fi mmorpg. Every other game that has tried either has died, quickly.
List of dead or life support mmorpgs that tried to be different:
Shadowbane
star wars online
dungeons and dragons online
Earth and beyond
Fallen earth
Planetside
Horizons
World war 2 online
Neocron
Pirates of the Burning Sea
star wars galaxies (Note: this was pretty unique early on before they generic’ified it)
Tabula Rasa
champions online
Now you can say some of those died because they weren’t that good, but they all did things out of the norm to some degree and rather than be met with applause they were met with disdain.
Champions online is a good example as it is a mmorpg that tried to focus on loot a it less, only to be met with much gnashing of teeth.
You have a very conservative idea of ‘different’ to be including Tabula Rasa and Champions Online in that list, I think. Champions Online was absolutely trying to make things as familiar as possible for WoW players.
The player base will be people who were goth kids cutting themselves in the 90s.
Goth kids in the 90’s didn’t cut themselves though; well, my wife didn’t anyway.
WoW already exist, so making another WoW would be a waste of time and money… WoW is like Coca-Cola, and your aspiring product Nuke Cola will be rejected because it dont taste exactly like Coca-Cola.
CCP can make something new, maybe, but I am not betting on it.
I was talking to someone about this last night – CCP managed to create a niche game in Eve that started small and (continues) to grow its subscriber base, while generally eschewing attempts to appeal to the “usual” MMO crowd that thrives on WoW-style DikuMUD descendants. If they make a game that is trying to appeal to a huge market and ends up being “hunt down evil Sabbat to get fat lewts” I will be very surprised.
Eve’s player-centric gameplay actually seems like it’s perfectly suited to a V:tM game, but I’m not sure how that will translate to an MMO. “Fighting” between vampires in V:tM wasn’t usually about getting an army of vampires and beating the crap out of the other guys, at least in my experience, and social-fu seems like it would be harder to encode within a game (unless you do something much more MUSH-like, where it is ALL about socializing), and that’s going to make it hard to give the more conventional MMO players an in. Even Eve has missions/exploration sites that provide a way in for people so they can get their feet wet and give the rest of the game a chance to latch on to them. Are you going to go around hunting rats to drain for blood just to survive your first few days in the game? :)
I dunno. I trust CCP to come up with something new – whether or not I’d enjoy it, I’m not sure. I am very curious just from a “how are they going to do this” point of view though, and I look forward to seeing some actual gameplay trailers or something in the near future – they’ve been teasing this thing out for what, 3-4 years now at this point, it’d be nice to see what they have actually been doing all this time. Maybe there will be something more at FanFest this year.
I knew plenty of cutters, but to be fair, not all of them were goths.