Interviews
Troika’s Leonard Boyarsky talks about developing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
“We took a circuitous route and amazingly we ended up where we wanted to be when we started the game”
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is set to release very soon, and while some may view this as merely a game sporting elements of role-playing and action, there is so much more behind this PC title from Activision and Troika Games.
The title is the second in the Vampire: The Masquerade videogame family, but is built on a whole set of circumstances and modern mythology created by the inventive minds at White Wolf. In the Bloodlines installment, players can pick from one of seven clans and work through a story that puts them into the vampire culture in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
The game begins with the player’s character initiated into the ranks of the undead unwillingly. But the “patron” who performed the deed did not have permission to do so, and was executed for his transgression. The prince of the L.A. vampires gives the player’s avatar a series of missions and tasks to accomplish. How far you work up the hierarchy is in your hands, but be prepared for a sometimes bloody, sometimes chilling ride.
Leonard Boyarsky, Joint CEO and Art Director for Troika Games, talked with GameZone about the title.
Troika took over the Vampire: The Masquerade title from Nihilistic Software, which had set the Redemption title in medieval Europe. The leap forward into the present day was a big one, and Leonard was asked why this particular time frame.
“We just got started fresh,” he said. “We wanted to do something where you could pick your own character, kind of like playing whichever clan you wanted as opposed to giving you a character where the story is. As in previous Troika games, we like you to be able to create your own character and have the world react to the choices you are going to make.
“And when we read through a lot of the stuff, we felt that at the core of the Vampire stuff was a modern-day experience, and we felt that to create a game that hit to the heart of what Vampire: The Masquerade was about we’d go for a more modern-day setting.
“The reason we picked L.A. was because L.A., in the White Wolf mythology, is an anarch-free state, and there was a bunch of interesting stuff going on there. The anarch leader, before the start of our game, was part of the White Wolf canon, and had just gotten killed, and so there was turmoil there. So we decided it would be really interesting to throw a prince into the mix in L.A., and when we talked to White Wolf, they were totally fine with us doing that. So it was really cool because we worked with them and they really like a lot of the stuff we were doing, and they allowed us a lot of freedom.
“So we picked a place where we could really mix it up, and show a lot of conflict and show a lot of equivocal stuff that is at the heart of the Vampire system.”
During the hands-on portion of the event in Los Angeles, it was noted that much of the gameplay seemed linear. Leonard was asked about the replayability of the game when you know what will be where in the game.
“A lot of linearity has to do with the main story-arc stuff,” he replied. “When you do a lot of side quests and how you do the quests … a place like the Ocean House, it doesn’t change all that much because it is basically you and the environment. But for the Beach House, when you go there, you can talk your way in, you can fight your way in, you can sneak your way in, you have a couple of different issues that way.
“It’s really weird, because it’s one of these things where we get feedback from people on how replayable it is. There are certain days when I think it is not that replayable because you go through a lot of the same stuff. And on other days I’m going through as a Malkavian or a Nosferatu and it feels totally different.
“The main story arc has a lot of stuff that you have to do, but the way you approach it … For instance, the ghoul Mercurio that you first talk to, you could basically piss him off but you still have to do the first step in the main story arc, which is go get the astrolyte, but if you really piss him off and tell him you are going to tell the prince that he is an ass, when you go back he attacks you. If you are nice to him, he gives you great deals on weapons later, he can procure weapons for you, he kind of approaches you later in the game and thanks you because when you go back to the prince for the first time he asks you if everything went Ok, and you can say yes or no. And if you didn’t tick him off, you can still screw him over.”
“I think that is one of the things people will find when they start playing around with the game. It kind of feels a little bit linear when you are doing one character, but when you are doing another character and approach it from a totally different way, even though you have to go through the same stuff, it can feel completely different.
“I think people will appreciate that. For people who are just into RPGs, for people who are really into White Wolf will get a lot of replayability out of it because they will want to see how the different clans feel.”
While the game allows players to allocate points toward skills, and interact with different NPCs (non-playing characters), is this a game that really treads the role-playing aspects or is it more of an action-adventure with RPG elements tossed into the mix?
“The way it is built it is a true role-play,” Leonard said. “For instance, if you are a female, you will get different responses. Because you can pick different clans, and if you get low on humanity it changes your dialogue choices; looking at the way it is constructed, it is very much based on an RPG.”
With 10,000 lines of dialogue in the game, the players will get multiple ways to interact with the NPCs in the world.
“That is really where we wanted to go with it,” Leonard stated. “Like the prince has a large sway over the things you can and cannot do, which is based on the whole White Wolf Vampire system, but just because you have to do a lot of stuff for him, how you treat him and how you react to him – whether you betray him and side with the anarchs – a lot of that stuff comes into play.
“If you go through and hit the main story arc quest, and don’t do a lot of side quests, and play it more action-oriented, then it feels more like an action-adventure thing. But you can take a totally different character and have everyone react to you differently.”
So how big is the game?
“It’s like 40 hours,” Leonard said, “if you just try to power straight through. It’s more like 60 if you do all the side quests.”
Of course when a development team puts together a game, there are certain challenges that must be overcome. Leonard was asked what the biggest hurdle was that Troika has to leap to realize the final vision and product.
“Going back and forth between the role-playing aspects and the action aspects – it took us a long time to get what we felt was the feel we were going for,” he said. “We really wanted to have the feel that you had a lot of choices, and the different clans you could play and the different choices would make a difference in you game experience. But at the same time, when we first started it, everything was taken as directly as possible from the White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade rules. And we found a lot of that, like the randomness of dice rolls in combat, because it looked like a first-person shooter and it felt more like an action game, what we were going for when some of that stuff game into play … you know you are standing in front of a guy and you get a bad dice roll and you are shooting at him with a shotgun from two feet away, it just didn’t feel right. It felt like it was broken; it felt like it was stilted. So we started paring some of that stuff down with White Wolf’s approval.
“We took a circuitous route and amazingly we ended up where we wanted to be when we started the game, but we did take a lot of long roads to get there. It was all about putting stuff in, balancing it and playing it and changing stuff. There’d be days where we’d have people play it and there would be like ‘now this feels like a first-person shooter,’ and there’d be days when ‘the combat stuff sucks but the RPG stuff is cool,’ so getting all that to work together was probably the toughest part of the whole project.”
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