Editing Vampire: The Masquerade (section)

===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.