... based on Vampire: The Masquerade. Not Requiem. Not the totally awesome and far more grown up new World of Darkness. Fiskmalks and Torridwhores for everyone.
Reading fansites to try to find out more about the announcement at the convention is giving me cooties, so this is all I have for now. Disappointment level: total.
I can't wait to see just how many pompadour options there are.
So, White Wolf publicly owning up to the fact that their fanbase hates Requiem. That's interesting, I guess.
Ok, I dredged up something else, a bad video of the terrible teaser trailer they showed.
I love the comments about the people saying its like twilight.
I could see why they would want to go with Masquerade, as it seems like they can have more combat, more abilities, and progression. I wouldn't be surprised if they messed with the rules quite a bit anyway.
Well, from what I am hearing, the game is way more focused on the social stuff. But since White Wolf's online presence is as fucking inept as ever, the website didn't update with information when it was supposed to. So I have to trust the word of people who spend money to attend a White Wolf event.
Well.. then, I don't know what's up. I haven't played Vampire since highschool (well before Requiem), I was just basing it on the wiki breakdown between the two systems.Originally Posted by Angie Gallant
My exposure to World of Darkness and Masquerade in particular comes purely from video games and reading some of the fluff but I'm pretty excited about this. If a setting as bland as EVE could create all that awesome drama, I can't imagine what a similar approach towards Masquerade would end up having.
I like Masquerade better than Requiem anyway, so it's a matter of taste in a lot of ways. I don't think Requiem is obviously the better approach. In fact, I seem to recall a good bit of backlash at Requiem.
First thing we do: let's kill all goons
That's great. I've been fairly active in the rpg.net forums sort of floating the idea that most people who are familiar with White Wolf at all are familiar with the old World of Darkness.
I wouldn't say the fanbase hates the nWoD but that many of the old fan base just played the original setting and then moved on to other games or RL caught up with them. All tabletop games have been steadily shinking in playerbase between the aging of the first wave players and the increasing attractiveness of electronic gaming (even moreso than the old CCG surge).
So if you're trying to reach out to the largest audience in total then you go with what they know. I think that's a smart choice.
However, I think this might be a good opportunity to retool the old paradigms a bit to take advantage of some of the ideas in nWoD.
I'm kinda hoping that CCP is wise to the kind of players a World of Darkness game is likely to attract and not make PvP such a central mechanic. At least not direct PvP. Indirect PvP, via PvE proxies (contacts, allies, assets that can be controlled or switch hands), would be a much better fit. Folks who live to incite weeping in other players would find that much less satisfying.
But more importantly I hope they take a good look at what's worked in roleplay friendly games to date. The two big ones are entertainment classes and storyteller tools.
In both LoTRO and SWG the main broad social hubs revolve around the social butterflies/organizers who thrive in an entertainment/event planning context. Key examples are folks like Harperella and the various bands on Landroval (LoTRO) and Lona Valamari and Holowood Galactic Studios on Starsider (SWG).
Storyteller systems in both SWG and CoH, though very different from one another, are very popular with the roleplaying community and a property like World of Darkness will draw in all kinds of folks who have stories to tell or who want to run dynamic/reactive campaigns for their guilds.
Player cities or at least claimable 'turf' of various sorts can also be helpful. On SWG's Starsider, they're still the core of roleplaying communities that go beyond individual guilds to embrace multiple player associations as well as independents. However they shouldn't (necessarily - an option to take this approach might work) be "spoils of war" in a PvP sense as continual disruptions to internal continuities are hard to sustain. In CoH, superbases also see use not only for roleplaying but also because they offer functional advantages and options. LoTRO, on the other hand, shows how not to do player housing. Instanced neighborhoods with no functional at all make access problematic and usually pointless.
I ramble, I know. But I don't think, if World of Darkness is properly designed, that the Goons will find much to do there. Some folks were spooked that the Goons would mess up STO but given that direct PvP is isolated and entirely optional they couldn't make a dent.
WoD should be the MMO players go to that aren't likely to enjoy Eve Online and visa versa. Cover more bases that way.
CCP is pretty much the only company I would trust to do something interesting with the license. If the WOD MMO is generic in any way I will eat my (metaphorical) hat.
lol. i can feel the tension that will exist between the old school LARPers and the twilight fans.
You know there will be a rush to get the name Edward. I just hope a Nosferatu gets it.
How are we going to tell the difference between someone roleplaying a shallow, emo young vampire with no personality and a twilight fan pretending to be a character in twilight though?
Isn't Twilight a Masquerade LARPing journal with some homebrew rules thrown in?
Ugh, why another MMO? I love MMOs, but I can focus only on one or two of them at most, and if you're not WoW, you're probably shit out of luck. Anyway Angie, thanks for the pic of Mel Gibson hugging Oprah Winfrey -- very hot!
Whoo ...heee ....heeee ....heeee!
People stop the negative train.
We know nothing about the game, so we are still a blank slate about it.
In videogames, is not the theme you choose to place your stuff, but how you do it, and we know nothing about it.
You can get a stupid theme, say... Clone Wars, and make a excellent game out of it.
full disclosure:
I work for the illuminati.
What negative train? this isnt the elemental thread :P
This isn't "new" - CCP have been working with White Wolf on this MMO for ages now. It's just the specifics that are new.
And I'll be amazed if this is anything like other MMOs. CCP's whole USP is that they made EVE which is utterly unlike all the dikumud clones. Hiring them to make a WoW clone would be the dumbest thing ever.
I have more confidence in CCP to do a good job with this than any other developers I can think of. Possibly Turbine, as they did a great job keep the spirit of Tolkien alive in LoTRO but there the gameplay is still too derivative of conventional MMOs.
CCP understands worldbuilding. I saw a clip of one of the guys talking about how they dreamed up the setting for Eve Online and it's clear that what people think of as Eve Online is just the "easiest" part of what they're hoping to accomplish in the long run. They think quite big and have a strong sense of style as well.
There's just a part of me that does worry that, well, to a carpenter all the world's a nail. It would be easy to just fall back on building things around a PvP assumption since that's what they've done before. I don't anticipate this but it is a concern.
CCP has done some amazing things with EVE so I have faith that they can make this game more interesting then other MMO's out there.
Explain to me how/why Requiem is "far more grown up" than the old WoD, seriously.
Not trolling, just asking, because for me Requiem is merely a watered down and simplistic version of oWoD but i'm open to constructive discussion.
Well, it's all about opinion, so not everyone is going to agree. I find that Requiem does a better job of maintaining its themes of struggle against self and isolation, whereas Masquerade almost always turned into superheroes/antiheroes with fangs. The oWoD games suffered from that, there was so much excess that almost all the lines ended up being superheroes with x monster trait.
I also like the new world of darkness being built on mortals and the incredible amount of support given to mortals. And the combat system being fast so combat doesn't put the brakes on everything for an hour. And no fishmalks.
I liked that they put in a system to enforce that Vampires distrust each other and don't get along.
I also liked that they HAD TO PUT IN A SYSTEM to enforce that.
What's this system to force distrust?
When two vampires meet, their beasts vie for dominance automatically since they are predators treading on someone's turf. If one is stronger, it wants to eat the other and the weaker wants to flee. If they're approximately the same they both get really edgy since they don't know the likely outcome of a fight.
It enforces how vampires should view one another, instead of how your average WoD "Batman with fangs and his dark Justice League" character tends to handle it.
So players are forced into conflict by the rules? You have to engage in combat?
Won't this make roleplaying into a rather solitary experience?
Conflict doesn't necessarily mean combat.
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