Vampire the maquerade bloodlines patch

The game has the established blood-sucking, sun-fearing vampire in center stage, but the World of Darkness universe does so much more by throwing the player into an intricately carved gothic-punk setting replete with rivaling factions, complex politics and some of the most sublime horror in gaming.

The series was originally restricted to the pen and paper realm until Nihilistic made a computer rendition of the game: VTM: Redemption. Although by no means a bad game, Redemption was more or less an action-oriented RPG that just tentatively flirted with vampiric politics. Bloodlines is an almost polar opposite, drawing its kicks from directly meddling in secretive Kindred society, taking on its complex strifes and soaking in that excellent Vampire mythology that so masterfully animates Los Angeles by night.

You spend most of the game tracking down a missing sarcophagus that could potentially bring about the end of all vampires in a spectacular apocalyptic showdown called Gehenna. The superb plot and characters continually evolve and always captivate, and the choices you make within the game — including which faction you decide to join — will have a profound effect on how everything plays out in the end days. Although each hub is extremely small merely spanning one or two streets , the attention to detail around every corner is astounding courtesy of the modified Half-Life 2 engine under the hood.

The seven requisite traditional clans alone justify going through the game again and again, as each is fundamentally different as far as outward appearance, demeanor, dialogue options and even their outlook on Kindred society. Contrast the Brujah — rebellious idealists and anarchists — to the calculated and double-dealing Ventrue, who constitute the political elites of the Camarilla, a sort of vampiric Bilderberg aristocracy that pulls the strings behind closed doors.

Or the loathsome, horribly disfigured Nosferatu to the cultured and enchanting Toreader, who fancy themselves as esteemed artists and have high regard for their Humanity. Add to the seven clans the choice of either playing as male or female this has a great effect on how NPCs treat you and you have every reason to replay Bloodlines at least a few times. XP is handed out sparsely whenever you complete a quest or defeat a powerful enemy, which, combined with the multitude of skills at your disposal, make smart character development a real challenge.

In more recent versions the patch is distributed in form of a configurable installer which allows deactivating certain features more about that in the Plus Patch section further below. And unlike early versions, which simply overwrote the original game data, it now uses a structure inspired by mods for other Source Engine games, which keeps the base game intact and allows to parallelly use other mods, which may be incompatible with the Unofficial Patch, without having to maintain a separate Bloodlines installation for each one.

As the original game's release was heavily rushed and Troika Games , the studio that created Bloodlines, was shut down by Activision almost the moment the game was released, the official technical support was extremely brief, with only a single official patch having been released. As a result, the game was left in a comparably bad state, with many bugs left in the game and many of them being potentially game-breaking.

With the lack of long-running official technical support the Unofficial Patch quickly established itself as a de facto standard in the Bloodlines community. As the patch grew over the years more and more changes and additions were made to the game which are widely considered controversial, particularly by players only interested in fixes to problems still present in the final official version of the game.

This even lead to an alternate series of patches known as the True Patch. To counter this the Unofficial Patch was eventually divided into two separate versions, a "basic" version and a "plus" version, the latter of which contains major additions to the game which arguably do not represent the creative vision of the game's original developers.

At this point the patch is distributed in form of a configurable installer and the desired version can be selected during the installation process.

Having been in development for more than ten years the patch covers massive amounts of changes which can't all be summarized in a comprehensible list but a brief rundown of the nature of the changes is listed below changes exclusive to the plus patch are marked with a plus sign :.

As a long-running project the Unofficial Patch has several places where it is officially distributed and the project itself represented:. Bloodlines 1. Bloodlines 2. General Info. Game Mechanics Glossary Soundtracks Lyrics.