Editing Vampire: The Masquerade (section)

==Video Games==
===VtM: Redemption===
'''Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption''' was a low-system but (for its time) high-quality 3D Diablo clone. The protagonist started as a human crusader fighting against East-European pagans who got injured and seperated from his comrades, doing several errands until a Brujah embraced him, after which he kept tracking down the nun that healed him back when he was alive. It had a very interesting plot and timeline; the game time started in the Middle Ages Prague, and ended up in New Year's Eve, 2000, in New York.

However, it has a very repetitive flow, consisting of dungeons with three or four levels with increasing encounters of several vampires per 20-30 meters. At the dungeons' final levels you kill a boss, blah blah, story advances, you make a Humanity choice and so on until you face a FOURTH GENERATION TZIMISCHE VOIVODE that wants to rape the world (and rapes the party unless you know freeze spell and kill him over the flesh portal).

Honestly, the game mechanics are almost nothing like the tabletop game: disposable discipline scrolls that didn't use blood, a teleportation spell that took the player back to town called "Walk the Abyss", and many other features directly ripped from Diablo 2 (such as tomes for learning Disciplines). Yes, it is Diablo 2 with Vampires in all but name. And guns, when the plot progresses to modern ages. If these features don't bother you, then it's worth a shot. Assuming you can tolerate the slow start where you'll have a hard time hitting anything and the '''FUCKING''' Tremere Chantry in the mid-to-late Dark Ages section of the campaign. Just spam dexterity and "to hit bonuses", and supplement the lack of strength with Potence and Celerity. You'll be fine. And don't bother with modern guns, keep the Ainkurn Sword on your main character at all times, and the game is a cakewalk. If you've GOT to use ranged weapons, give powerful single shot guns to your companions (as they can't use auto-fire because AI is more A than I). Or just give them modern crossbows and bows. Oh, and the Blood Magic tome breaks the game so make sure to use it on the one party member you ''know'' you'll always have access to.

The best feature VtM: Redemption had was a multiplayer mode, in which a complete tabletop scenario could be made from in-game scripting and a bit of careful sandbox construction (spawning furniture, items, missions etc.). The game even came with two perfectly fun pre-made multiplayer scenarios!

Tl;dr. 100 Dexterity, Ainkurn Sword, tome of Blood Rituals from Haus de Hexe level 3 and Black Gloves from Setite Temple Level 1 for your companions make you win automatically.

===VtM: Bloodlines===
'''Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines''', while enjoyable and faithful to the fluff, suffers the same problem as Knights of the Old Republic II and [[Dawn_of_War#Soulstorm|Soulstorm]]: it takes 1GB+ worth of fan-made patches, mods, and restored content to make the game ''work''.

The story is Los Angeles, you being an accidentally embraced vampire whose sire is executed. The Prince of the city spares you because the Anarch leader stood up for your neck. So it's your job to start small, beat back the Sabbat, talk to Anarchs, Camarilla and Kuei-Jin and learn that a mysterious artifact is stirring up the city.

And baby, it's epic. It even has the usual Vampire intrigue and dickery, though you still get railroaded until the final decision. Also you get to meet [[Cain|The Man Himself]], though you only figure it out near the end if you pick certain dialogue options with him (or are Malkavian).

Even then, some shit just couldn't be fixed, despite all the heroic bastards who to this day work on fan patches, EIGHTEEN years later and counting. Bugs. More bugs than a Bethesda alpha game. The game runs a pre-HL2 version of the Source Engine despite being released ''after'' HL2 (due to shitty contracts from Valve and Activision), and it shows. Characters fly if you so much as spit at them, prostitutes can teleport, the game crashes randomly, there are serious memory leaks, NPC vision is completely broken, random furniture changes into wacky objects, your haven computer for quests becomes unusable, and on and on and on. Huge chunks of the game were cut before they could be finished, not to mention the content the devs ''wanted'' to include but flat-out never had the time to build.

To top it off, the final act of the game devolved into a John Woo film complete with a Matrix-style shootout in an office building. If you built up your character as a [[Diplomancer|smooth-talking diplomat with no weapon skills]], the game became unwinnable as hordes of AI goons armed with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr_Aug the best weapon in the game] reduced you to a pile of smoldering ash unless you had very high Fortitude, or were a [[Kommando|enough of a stealthy git to sneak throughout the whole map]]. But by the time you get to the end, you should be more than aware you'll need to bring a serious arsenal.

Despite all that, the game is rather fun up until the end sections, where you could tell the pace was kind of slowing down and winding up - you could really, ''really'' tell when they were more pressed for time. The voice acting and writing are top notch (for the main characters anyway; the background voices sound like someone hired their cousin to come to the studio and read off a script), the locations memorable, character animations during conversations were generally better than Half-Life 2, which had a superior version of the engine (though they locked you in, unlike HL2, and their eyes skitter around like dice in a cup), the main and side quests can mostly be solved in multiple ways, and each vampire clan feels distinct (with Malkavians being ''extra'' lulzy and pseudo-spolierish and Nosferatu being forced to use alternative routes most of the time or break the Masquerade). Pity, it had to suffer from Half-Life syndrome. And seriously, fuck Activision. The fact they put it up on Steam and GOG for twenty dollars is a mockery in many ways. They gutted a great game from being significantly better, don't fucking pay them for it.

The game has multiple endings. Half of them pull no punches at showing how badass you are. A few others end badly, that's on you if you are stupid enough to trust the wrong people and you should've seen it coming. One easter egg ending is [[What|Monster-a-go-go]], really.

Fans have patched the game to be as good as it can be. There are also plenty of mods which integrate into and expand the game's story, plus new gimmicks like The Final Nights (where you can play as Baali, Laibon, Samedi, Salubri and other bloodlines) with a much more hardcore ruleset, or Companion Mod (which is also integrated into many other popular conversions but not The Final Nights) where you can keep companions with you via helping them out (like Ash and Hunter Yuki) or through Dominating their brains out. Also the prince gives you the right of Embrace for your Ghoul Heather (with full voice acting). So you can storm Venture Tower with 4 vampires raining machinegun fire and Disciplines. Finally, starting from v.4.0 the Clan Quest Mod contains a completely fan-made story arc in a completely new Sabbat controlled location. Along with tons of new voiced characters, a chance of joining the Sabbat and diablerize other Kindred. However, that mod is still even MORE bugged than the unpatched Vanilla diarrhea of code of the base game.

===VtM: Coteries of New York===
'''Coteries of New York''' is essentially a visual novel set in the Vampire: The Masquerade setting. You can choose to play as Brujah, Toreador or Ventrue. It provides a very atmospheric introduction to the setting and the Camerilla as a faction, as well as some high quality art and colorful characters. However, it is lacking in length, the player choices affect very little, and the ending is an extremely abrupt cliffhanger. The scenes are fast paced, engaging and clever, but the overarching story fails to fit these pieces together in a satisfying way. This makes for yet another Vampire game that is frustratingly close to greatness, but falls sadly short.

===VtM: Shadows of New York===
Sequel to VtM: Coteries of New York. It doesn't continue the story of the character from Coteries of New York, by the way. Making the previous game's cliffhanger sting even more.

===Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road===
Available on Steam, '''Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road''' is a self-contained text adventure from the studio "Choice of Games". It is, like all of their other games, a text only "game of choices". For a simple text adventure, it has major depth and is a very smooth adaptation of the Vampire V setting. You play a courier for the surviving Kindred, driving through the midnight roads and avoid the Second Inquisition (which has the common sense to even deal fairly with harmless, non-murderous vampires) as you do jobs for money, blood, fast cars and power. Your character sheet is realistic tabletop stuff, along with Willpower points to re-roll botches and hunger checks, and you get to do the good old tabletop style game with dice rolls based on your stats. Think of it as a single-player tabletop V5 Vampire game session. Like a roleplaying session, it starts linear but then diverges based on your choices.

Has had several sequels, spiritual and otherwise, including '''Parliament of Knives''' (which is politically-focused and set in Ottawa Canada), '''Out For Blood''' (where you play a vampire hunter), and '''Sins of the Sires''' (where you're a Caitiff in modern-day Athens).

Notably, the "Choice of Games" studio had previously released '''Choice of the Vampire''', a separate title strongly inspired by the classic Masquerade setting.

===Bloodlines 2===
The second Bloodlines game was announced by Paradox for a March 31st, 2020 release. It was announced using [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYvWfDxhm_s a trailer with no gameplay] and minimal gameplay details, developers [https://clips.twitch.tv/InterestingGlutenFreeSaladCeilingCat proudly announcing they'd be injecting personal politics into it] - par for the course with an IP operated by Onyx Path. Additionally, Cara Ellison (best known in /v/-territory for getting [[Hotline Miami]] 2 banned in Australia by writing an article half-truthfully claiming it had a rape scene) is on the writing team, serving as quite the recipe for [[skub]]. 

The head writer of the original game are at least on the team as well, and it also will have mod support at launch according to the Devs. Chris Avellone (of [[Fallout#Fallout_2|Fallout 2]]/[[Fallout#Fallout:_New_Vegas|New Vegas]] and [[Planescape: Torment]] fame) was on the writing-team in it's inception, but it was stated by Paradox that through "iterative writing" all of his contributions have gone the way of the Dodo - this was said in response to allegations coming out against Chris Avellone, from several women on Twitter (basically that he had allegedly "acted predatorily"; claims later withdrawn by the accusers), which saw him booted from many big-name studios. Furthermore, Paradox fired Narrative Lead Brian Mitsoda (who had worked on the first game) without explanation or compensation, lowering whatever hopes were left for the game even more. Even with the usual PC boogeyman, the first impression of Bloodlines 2 is that of yet another Current Year Video Game™, especially after very underwhelming first gameplay. [https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-4-writing-bloodlines-2.1236078/page-2.

Notable so far is that you start as a Thin Blood and have to earn your clan (though whether you can opt to stay one and complete the game this way is unknown at the moment of writing), and the standard edition pre-order gives you Blade's outfit.

Most of the traditional Camarilla Bloodlines will be playable with the notable exception of the Nosferatu and Gangrel. This might be because both bloodlines have a tendency to become walking masquerade violations, which makes the blending-in-with-the-herd aspect of the game nigh-impossible. Which would in turn force the game designers to make alternate routes for those clans, so instead of doing that they just relegated the two clans to NPC-only status for now. However, it's equally likely that the two clans are getting held back so they that can be released as DLC shortly after the game launches - they have already promised two DLC and one expansion - rather than for gameplay reasons, especially since Gangrels only become walking Masquerade violations after they frenzy a bunch of times making their omission from the playable line up rather more suspect then the Nosferatu. It might also be due to the timeline/canon they're going by, since depending on which one you choose (they're quite the clusterfuck with all the re-releasing of VtM), Gangrel may or may not be part of the Camarilla. Either way, all future DLC will be released free.

The setup (as of April 2019): Seattle, Early 2020. Fifteen years on from ''Bloodlines'', the West Coast is still feeling the fallout of the Ankaran Sarcophagus Incident and the destruction of the LA Camarilla. On one foggy night, a swarm of Kindred descend onto Pioneer Square, committing a Mass Embrace upon the pedestrians unfortunate enough to be out and about. You were one of those poor bastards, of course. A short while later, you're carted before the local power players as the key witness of the attack and will be executed shortly afterward. As the room devolves into petty squabbling, a fire engulfs the building and you barely make it out alive-ish. So, now here you are, plopped out like a naked baby in the woods with barely any idea of what to do next. Oh, and you're a goddamn thin-blooded Caitiff, too! Wow, you really are fucked. 

(Essentially the same start as the original ''Bloodlines'', barring the whole thin-blooded thing. Great creativity, White Wolf...)

Now the thing you were really wondering- when is this game going to actually come out? Unfortunately, after the COVID pandemic, the release of the PS5 and XBOX X, and the fact that Hardsuit Labs is no longer working on the game- who knows. While the game is still scheduled for release "eventually", most of the project leads left in 2020, as of mid-November 2021 interview for PC Gamer, Paradox officially stated that while they are "happy" with the progress but that there will be some time until a new release date can be announced, stay tuned for further developments.

There is a small amount of hope however, as for right now there are some back-alley rumors that Harebrained Schemes (developers of the fantastic [[Shadowrun]] Returns and its sequels) is behind the development now, however that is only rumors and Paradox has yet said anything about it.

===Failed developments===
For a very long time, there was to be [[World of Darkness#Video Games|an MMORPG made]] by CPP Games, the guys who made [[video games|EVE Online]]. The development of this MMORPG was announced at EVE Online Fanfest 2006, alongside the announcement of the simultaneous merger between White Wolf and CPP Games. It reportedly would've focused on political and social interactions, instead of combat (like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars do). It was canceled in April of 2014 during The Week Of Nightmares, about a day after an anon on /v/ leaked some internal alpha screenshots. And now, thus, all chances at a good VtM game are dashed... truly, this is Gehenna. There is even glimpses of in motion footage in the WoD documentary (it's mostly bleh outside of that), which look great for ah MMO of the time (especially in an internal Alpha).

The best hope we had for a release was the effort being put into "Project Dogmat", a vampire MMO that tried pulling plenty of similar qualities from the mythos/World of Darkness MMORPG whilst functionally being a different setting. But unfortunately, it died too.

As of October 2015, Paradox Interactive (of Europa Universalis fame) now owns the rights to the World of Darkness, having bought all of White Wolf from of CPP Games. Paradox have released a new game "inspired by choose your own adventure books" titled ''Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood.'' Here's the blurb from the press release:

<blockquote>''"In Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood you’re a young artist who wakes up at night to find you’re no longer human…but exactly what are you and why are you so ravenously hungry for blood?!? Told entirely through an innovate mobile messaging perspective, We Eat Blood is a sharp, mature, and terrifying story about your first nights as unwilling predator and prey. Will you join ancient vampire conspiracies, or will you turn the tables on oppressive authority and seek your own future? The temptation is real. The game is written and illustrated by Zak Sabbath and Sarah Horrocks."''</blockquote>

Let's just say that the game wasn't very good, and the author was outed as a sexpest, leading to it being pulled from online retailers.