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Apparently there's been a homebrew "make your own vampire game" contest officially supported by Paradox, the winner will get a contract and some funding to complete the game and officially release it. https://dsnee.itch.io/vampire-the-masquerade-blood-frontier Havent' started this one, but it's a Choice of Games style adventure with branching paths where you play an ex-Sabbat or something. https://bannerlessgames.itch.io/last-night-on-earth-vampire-jam This one is a Coteries style game that thus far only has you hunting, killing, and then disposing of your first victim. Has nice art, at least. https://eltharion.itch.io/ghost-of-the-past Pretty bold attempt at a third person adventure game. I think it's made in Unity.
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Nov 29, 2021 01:09
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Glad to see Paradox has already run out of ideas on how to get Vampire games published and has essentially resorted to shovelware. Like good on these passion project programmers getting their work out there but from the perspective of Paradox I can't imagine this is charity, like wtf? I sometimes wonder if all the text/adventure/etc Vampire games would sell half as well as they do if fans of the property weren't so incredibly starved for content.
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Nov 29, 2021 08:00
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Mendrian posted:Glad to see Paradox has already run out of ideas on how to get Vampire games published and has essentially resorted to shovelware. This is a weird negative dump on a cool thing, especially "shovelware"? Are text adventures an inherently lower form of video game?
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Nov 29, 2021 08:34
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Blockhouse posted:This is a weird negative dump on a cool thing, especially "shovelware"? Are text adventures an inherently lower form of video game? Some folks see them as lesser because you don't usually have to do any modeling, animation or rigging, which are seen as the "hard" parts of gamedev. And yet, how many games in the world have truely good stories? Writing is loving haaaaaaaard.
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Nov 29, 2021 08:39
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Handing the license to CYOA writers is the one smart thing Paradox has done with it. It gets down to the real meat of what WoD is all about, that thing I can’t remember just now… Cutting edge particle physics? That doesn’t sound right. Car customization and modeling? 3d platforming??? It’s on the tip of my tongue.
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Nov 29, 2021 09:30
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Edited to be less combative. I am not calling these kinds of games bad. I am questioning the motivations of a company who seems to want to put out as many of these kinds of games as it can in short order. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Nov 29, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 10:45
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Mendrian posted:Edited to be less combative. This contest thing aside, the "text adventure" games are licensed, not produced nor even published by Paradox. The games are being made because developers want to make them, hopefully because there's an audience.
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Nov 29, 2021 11:01
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Any company wants to leverage it's IP to make as much money as possible. If people want to play Paradox for the license rights and make these games and other people want to buy them then that's all good. e: in particular a company that handed over a large sum of money to buy outright an IP that has no appreciable presence in the collective gaming consciousness might have good reasons to want to do anything to raise its profile.
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Nov 29, 2021 11:15
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Inzombiac posted:Some folks see them as lesser because you don't usually have to do any modeling, animation or rigging, which are seen as the "hard" parts of gamedev. 3 Duke nukem 3d Duke nukem returns Rainbow island
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Nov 29, 2021 11:25
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It does feel like, to some degree, the abundance of Vampire CYOA games is also a way to use the license while the bigger projects have largely not panned out, to be honest. I don't necessarily think it's a bad choice though.
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Nov 29, 2021 13:23
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Mendrian posted:Edited to be less combative. The motivations are that they spent a lot of money on a once niche-popular IP that has a limited window for getting back into the public consciousness and becoming a well known property. They're casting wide nets to grab people passionate about said IP because they'd rather have people that like the IP and five a poo poo about it on board than just farming out for whatever palette swap. Even Bloodhunt still thematically ties into the lore of the world, crazily enough. It's not a particularly STRONG or DEEP setup, but it works for what the game is. There's a long rear end blog post on the WoD site where they talk about how they took old VtM, stripped out all the novelization metaplot poo poo that became so overarching as to actively detract from the game (like locking 99% of two iconic clans behind being in a cartoonishly evil cult, with lots of bullshit overhead to playing them) and applying game design methodology to make the whole thing more playable and encapsulate the core ideas of what the game is about - horror, controlling the savage beast inside you, trying to survive the night, being a predator.
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Nov 29, 2021 16:29
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Fuzz posted:The motivations are that they spent a lot of money on a once niche-popular IP that has a limited window for getting back into the public consciousness and becoming a well known property. They're casting wide nets to grab people passionate about said IP because they'd rather have people that like the IP and five a poo poo about it on board than just farming out for whatever palette swap. I for one will happily continue to take smaller, CYOA style Vampire games if it means we can avoid the jankfest that was Werewolf the Apocalypse: Earth Blood. Which admittedly, I've probably sunk maybe five hours into over the course of several sessions, and not because it's great or anything, but when it works, it moves along pretty well, until you get into a combat arena and then have fun managing your powers and trying to survive the waves of enemies spawned at you, all while fighting with the jank rear end controls and camera.
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Nov 29, 2021 16:39
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Wow there are a lot of submissions on itch. I'm still waiting for a Wraith: the Great War soulslike.
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Nov 29, 2021 16:46
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Mendrian posted:Edited to be less combative. It's worked out extremely well for Games Workshop with Warhammer, so why not? Some amount of quality control is ideal, but nobody's making anyone buy every game with Vampire attached, so just buy the ones that are good/interest you and don't worry about the rest.
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Nov 29, 2021 16:51
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Blockhouse posted:This is a weird negative dump on a cool thing, especially "shovelware"? Are text adventures an inherently lower form of video game? No, I'm legitmatly glad folks like you are getting all these games. But I want a loving third person action rpg where I'm a vampire doing cool vampire things.
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Nov 29, 2021 17:12
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Sinteres posted:It's worked out extremely well for Games Workshop with Warhammer, so why not? Some amount of quality control is ideal, but nobody's making anyone buy every game with Vampire attached, so just buy the ones that are good/interest you and don't worry about the rest. Fair warning, gonna be a lot of  . Scroll down to the bottom and look for a bolded TL;DR version if you don't want to read an in depth take:I don't necessarily agree with this assessment. GW used to be a perfect example of a company screwing up utilizing their setting similar to how Paradox is screwing up. Only GW did it in a somewhat different way and for far longer. The thing with Warhammer and GW is that recently GW seems to have started to/actually learned the lessons that are necessary to use the franchise/IP as an IP farm to develop games around. This happened around the time they made Fantasy crash and burn. A lot of the games earlier than that were not only rarely made to begin with due to GW's batshit standards for letting a game be made, but also had a bad habit of being dogshit barring a few rare exceptions. And if you go way back then even some of those exceptions that were legitimately good or had brilliant design decisions that could have helped the franchise as a whole (and that made those games popular) just got hosed over out of GW's needlessly spiteful take on protecting the IP. Take the video game version of Epic (Not the 2015 one.) called "Final Liberation" from way back when as an example. It was basically what happened if a game developer realized there was an unacceptably high and just all around cost prohibitive amount of money to getting into the tabletop game and compensated for this by translating the tabletop game into a videogame to remove the cost of the hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to get all the figures you'd need to play the game at that scale. This was basically the equivalent of Wizards of the Coast realizing that not everyone wants to spend a fortune on cards and making a video game version of MTG. Which would open up the franchise to a lot more people than it could get before. Which is a good idea! Only GW did not see it that way. Since if someone bought Epic's tabletop requisites they'd be paying a literal fortune that makes the cost of the small scale variant that is their main money maker seem downright small. So why tolerate this game doing a cool 1:1 translation of the scaled up wargame that lets people play it without spending a thousand or more dollars? Hence them cancelling future expansions. Of course, nowadays they don't push Epic at all since --- and who could have foreseen it --- no one wanted to play Epic outside of rich grognards since the cost of buying an army (Or a titan or other similar large thing you wouldn't see in the main line of war game.) is way too loving much. And of course no one ever played it on the scale of Final Liberation due to cost issues, which just translated even esoteric elements of the armies over to a coherent video game format. Likewise, look at a far later game to see an example of how they started to learn their lesson. Dawn of War 1 was given to a major company with established development and RTS chops. It later was released to critical acclaim. People are still playing the first Dawn of War thanks to it's incredible modding community, fairly robust back end design (despite being limited by 32 bit standards and other various issues of the time), and what were for the time largely innovative ideas on an increasingly stale genre.* And of course after DoW1 there was a host of lovely mobile tier games trying to exploit that success without understanding it. Obviously they mostly flopped. Sometimes these were literal mobile games, in the case of several games. It was only after those failures that we started getting stuff like Vermintide or Gladius once GW realized they had to actually take the handling of the license seriously and find studios that were guaranteed to produce a few good games to keep the shovelware from screwing the market potential of the franchise due to public perception of games in the settings not being worth it. Or to put it another way, it seems like someone in management had finally pointed out (and successfully gotten through to the higher ups) that the tactic of "throw poo poo at the wall until we get a miracle" was stupid. Doubly so since other management choices around that point in time had people railing at both the tabletop and game properties that were sometimes literally crashing and burning. So they began targeting companies that could keep up a core of established decent games while taking risks (Like the admittedly good idea in theory that was the somewhat janky and unfinished Man 'o War game you can't even buy or get your hands on anymore.) with jankier games and more unestablished companies in the hopes of attracting even more attention and sales through the chancier projects. While they were pumping out dime a dozen small scale turn based games or taking risks with innovative games they also had stuff like Vermintide, Gladius, and the TW adaptation carrying the core of the franchise. Paradox is decidedly not doing this. What they're doing is more like if Disney handed Marvel Avengers to an even more incompetent company than Crystal Dynamics. Also, in this case Marvel Avengers had a prior game released that was so much of a cult classic that it was one of the primary selling points in the eyes of video gaming consumers for reviving the license. And before all of this they handed control of Marvel over to someone who blitzed their way through so many PR fiasco's that they accidentally almost started an international incident (This actually happened by the way.) before being fired. And no, the CHYOA games are probably not carrying the IP in Paradox's eyes. Especially since someone suggested that someone else contacted Paradox/WW to do them and not the other way around? Not sure about that bit but it's relevant and surprising as heck if true.  LordMune posted:This contest thing aside, the "text adventure" games are licensed, not produced nor even published by Paradox. The games are being made because developers want to make them, hopefully because there's an audience. Heck, not even all their novel games are good. The one in house novel they released is loving bad on multiple levels. People don't talk about the one that came out before the CYOA games since it was not only awful but also made by a virulent bigot that Sweddrac/old Nu-WW/Paradox ran cover for despite the guy being an overt transphobic dickhead who would go on to write a trans woman he had been harassing into the game as a literal sexual predator.  Hell, for whatever reason either the IP owners or the company that was making Bloodlines 2 couldn't even seem to keep the actual talent that the public feels made the first bloodlines great (Like Mitsoda) on within those companies without outright firing them! Quality control doesn't just exist for products. It also exists for the perception of the franchise as a whole. If you're licensing products out to people you also need to consider the qualities of the companies in question. Paradox is not doing this, and frankly it seems like whoever in the company that calls the shots for that sort of thing just does not understand how to do their job properly. Likewise, if you just keep throwing poo poo at the wall eventually people are going to assume that whatever you produce is just plain old poo poo regardless of it's actual quality unless you get even luckier and one of your games gets the PR boost necessary to shake off that idea. Look at LA by Night and how it redeemed the tabletop game in a lot of folks eyes as a good example of this. Or you wait several years until the bad perception dies down to do another reboot. Or to put all of that in a far more TL;DR way for those who don't want to read a bunch of : The current state of affairs isn't a failure of the VtM license being capable of succeeding in this day and age. It is fully capable of doing that as it occupies multiple appealing thematic niches, unused game ideas that aren't seen in other video games, and even could bring in largely untapped groups wanting more immersive, developed, and less formulaic games. Instead, it's a direct failure of someone in management to utilize and understand the IP on par with CCP's ridiculous World of Darkness MMO development strategy of "Make it fwooooosh.".
Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 17:20
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MonsieurChoc posted:Wow there are a lot of submissions on itch. Call of Duty: Wraith: The Second Breath of War: Oblivion
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Nov 29, 2021 17:21
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OMFG FURRY posted:Call of Duty: Wraith: The Second Breath of War: Oblivion You joke but I'd pay cash money for a Second Inquisition xcom chimera squad style game.
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Nov 29, 2021 18:53
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Boogle posted:You joke but I'd pay cash money for a Second Inquisition xcom chimera squad style game. This checks out. The SI is partially comprised of various countries special forces so you could have that wonky chance to hit that XCOM games start you out with. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Nov 29, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 18:58
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https://gaiafiorenza.itch.io/waning-crescent Another that has nice art. https://hikezi.itch.io/prodigal And a point and click with very cool art. Fuzz fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Nov 29, 2021 |
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Nov 29, 2021 19:32
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Inzombiac posted:Some folks see them as lesser because you don't usually have to do any modeling, animation or rigging, which are seen as the "hard" parts of gamedev. There are two options for video games: Have a game with good technical presentation that is badly written or Have a game with bad technical presentation that is badly written
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Nov 29, 2021 20:08
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dead gay comedy forums posted:playing shadows of new york and so far much better than coteries I just bought coteries and i really like it actually. This thread made me buy night road and while it's really fun and an actual game, I like the atmosphere of Coterie. the music is nice and I like all the character portraits and the backgrounds. I don't care that it doesn't have choice but i'm not really far enough to get any real story yet. The worst part of new old world though is the second inquisition. I hate that plot so much and agree with whoever said it's annoyingly pervasive.
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Dec 4, 2021 21:46
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for bloodlines2
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MonsieurChoc posted:I'm still waiting for a Wraith: the Great War soulslike. Right there with you. Hell I'd even be happy with an Orpheus CYOA.
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Dec 4, 2021 21:58
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I hope Outstar is doing alright. She upended her life to move and pursue her dream and this is the result?
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Dec 4, 2021 22:06
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Plan R posted:I hope Outstar is doing alright. She upended her life to move and pursue her dream and this is the result? She's been hosting the offical WoD news stream things on I think twitch and the WoD Youtube channel. I don't remember exactly what her position is with WW/Paradox but my understanding is she's working as part of the WW brand team or something like that.
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Dec 4, 2021 22:28
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Up Circle posted:I just bought coteries and i really like it actually. This thread made me buy night road and while it's really fun and an actual game, I like the atmosphere of Coterie. the music is nice and I like all the character portraits and the backgrounds. I don't care that it doesn't have choice but i'm not really far enough to get any real story yet. Coteries felt like a fairly solid "Toss a newbie into the world" story, and yeah the music kicks rear end. Shadows is even better and I think the score is way better, not to say the Coteries score is bad, but Julias theme from Shadows is heartbreaking and beautiful. And Shadows builds on some of the plot bits from Coteries and gives you a few different views of other characters who popped up in Coteries. And Coteries gave us Hope, the best Malkavian.
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Dec 4, 2021 22:31
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I feel like shadows is stronger because the main character is fixed.
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Dec 4, 2021 22:46
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I really disliked the ending of Coteries, but Shadows was 100% my jam. Definitely one to watch. Also seconding the desire for an Orpheus game. Definitely my favorite WoD title.
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Dec 4, 2021 23:25
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joylessdivision posted:Coteries felt like a fairly solid "Toss a newbie into the world" story, and yeah the music kicks rear end. Shadows is even better and I think the score is way better, not to say the Coteries score is bad, but Julias theme from Shadows is heartbreaking and beautiful. Night Road is fantastic though.
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Dec 4, 2021 23:39
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I'd pay far too much money for the Choice of Games Vampire games but with the presentation of Coteries and Shadows. The art and music is really well done in those games and really nails the feel of VTM, at least for me.
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Dec 6, 2021 01:07
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https://entaltostudios.itch.io/vtm-heartless-lullaby So this is one of the Vampire game jam entries and I'm like halfway through it and it's actually like... really cool and good.
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Dec 10, 2021 00:49
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Fuzz posted:https://entaltostudios.itch.io/vtm-heartless-lullaby ... so is the comparison to Disco Elysium legit?
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Dec 10, 2021 02:36
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citybeatnik posted:... so is the comparison to Disco Elysium legit? WHAT motherfuck I'm downloading this
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Dec 10, 2021 04:36
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some screencaps and commentary for your benefit     definitely follows very much Disco's structure, which is something that I'll always justpost about being THE FUTURE for Storyteller PC games. It's a very rough sketch of a game, as to be expected for a game jam dev challenge. That said, it offers a glimpse of what a game with the proper development money and the proper writers to work with would offer. The writing is very, uh, vampire, like you can read above. While I found it way too tryhard, I can't find any fault in the terms of what is trying to achieve, and a good part of the audience loves that poo poo. Here is where it should have followed Disco more for S+ tier effect: there's too much narration, very little of the dynamism from other possible inputs (such as auspex or presence) then again, this is a game jam effort and as such, hell yeah, it's a good one and definitely shows one great avenue of possibility to make Storyteller games. The other absolutely relevant point to make is that this, like DE, was made in Unity; Harebrained Schemes is right there, Paradox. Ask ZA/UM to help along and look for the best writers of the Choice of Games' VtM games (or bring Cara and Mitsoda back) and you have at least a sleeper hit waiting to happen edit: of loving course I have to post this one  clenching hard my teeth here to then lol with abandon. However, at the same time, it might be hitting the tone of a toreador extremely well, lol again dead gay comedy forums fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Dec 10, 2021 |
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Dec 10, 2021 05:44
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No, that's note perfect for an Artist.
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Dec 10, 2021 15:08
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Yeah, I tried the demo too and I'd be totally down for a full vampire game following this format, hope this one gets picked up by PDX. Thanks for the rec, Fuzz!
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Dec 10, 2021 18:42
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The other good one I played was Blood Frontier, which is straight up almost as good as Night Road. Really drat good border story about patrolling the US border hunting Sabbat. Sadly only runs in browser, though.
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Dec 10, 2021 21:12
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dead gay comedy forums posted:some screencaps and commentary for your benefit I did say this would be a good idea for an rpg on the discord (along with an acknowledgement that I've been spoiled by DE) and people were arguing 'na this is too much work for the writers' (though they may have read this as asking for a rewrite of the bl2 script since this was back in 2020)
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Dec 13, 2021 12:55
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A DE style rpg is a lot of writing work. It takes a lot to do it right.
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Dec 13, 2021 19:34
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I think I'm going to try the Clan Quest mod for Bloodlines after having only played with vanilla and Wesp's unofficial patch. What are some thoughts on the assorted optional mods that are included with it like Camarilla Edition, companion mod, and arsenal? I see the recommended setting in the installer has them unchecked by default.
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Dec 17, 2021 03:19
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