“It’s not as big a chunk of my life as it may seem,” he says. He goes on to praise Bloodlines’s relatively realistic (but with vampires, natch) urban settings and complete freedom of approach – be it combat, stealth, or seduction – Spahl, like those RPG forum folk I mentioned earlier, sees it as “more or less the best game I’ve ever played.”Ī good enough justification, then, to spend over a decade working on it, although Spahl downplays his commitment.
Bloodlines merged the great quests and worlds of those adventures with the action and graphics of an FPS.” “With Doom and Half-life, I switched to FPSes, because they let you explore new worlds from a first-person perspective. “When I was young, I played a lot of text and graphic adventures,” he tells me when I ask why he chose to commit himself to Bloodlines in particular. I spoke with Spahl about how he handles the responsibility of resurrecting and managing a game that has grown into a cult classic in the time he has been patching it. Despite containing new levels, different item placements, and even different characters at crucial plot points, the patch is now deemed so crucial to Bloodlines that it has recently been lumped in with the GOG.com copy of the game. What started as a bug-fixing, technical project in 2005 quickly evolved into something more creative, as Spahl and the community began using scant bits of code, concept art, and rogue files hinting at whole unfinished chunks of Bloodlines to fill in its many blanks. Now in its 9.9 iteration, Spahl’s patch is perhaps better described as a fan’s vision of what Bloodlines could havebeen were the developers, Troika, given more time. This band of acolytes devoted themselves to improving the game, and one devotee in particular – chemistry professor Werner Spahl – has spent the past 12 years stitching together Bloodlines with his unofficial patch. Still, something at its heart was able to bewitch a small group of players they saw in it a foundation on which to build.
It was full of unfinished quests, bugs, unbalanced abilities, and missing areas. The truth is that Bloodlines was lacking when it launched. But are they praising the game as it was or the game as it is now?īloodlines is one of many classic PC games that are still worth playing today. You will read declarations on RPG forums that it is a masterpiece, perhaps even one of the best games ever made – with unforgettable quests, excellent writing, and diverse character customisation. You will hear whispers on subreddits about its troubled development and what a technical disaster it was upon release in 2004, even though relatively few people actually played it back then. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines has grown into something of a legend among PC gamers.
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