Got this pointed out to me in Twitter: there some interesting stuff in here.
It looks like there’s a bunch of different ways to play missions in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2, which is nice; but I’m a little curious about how high-Humanity PCs are going to do, here. I mean, I assume that the game will tell me that I’m best suite to be some sort of Toreador Bloofer Lady of the Girl Scouts, because that’s how I apparently roll, even in vampire games. I just wanna make sure that I can finish the game without actually killing anybody who didn’t need killing. That’s reasonably important to me.
Also: apparently, doing a Spider-Man up the sides of buildings does NOT count as a Masquerade violation. Good to know! That’s helpful information.
This game’s getting a bit of a backlash right now.
It went up for pre-order a couple of months ago on Steam. All well and good.
And then suddenly it got yanked off of Steam, and was listed exclusively for sale on the Epic on-line store.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Epic on-line store, so here’s a quick run-down. It’s basically similar to Steam in concept. You buy a digital copy of a game on the Epic store, and then download it to your PC. In order to improve their market share, Epic has apparently been offering lots of money to developers with anticipated titles to make those titles exclusive to the Epic store for at least a year – i.e. no sales on Steam. So players are rather cranky about that, particularly in situations such as this one where the game actually generated pre-orders on Steam before it got yanked.
Compounding that is –
1.) While I haven’t used the Epic store myself, I’ve heard that it doesn’t have a very good interface.
2.) Epic is backed by Tencent. Tencent is a Chinese company that apparently has a reputation for not keeping customer data secure.
In essence, the developers of Bloodlines 2 accepted a large chunk of money to make the digital PC version of their product exclusive to a digital storefront with an inferior interface, and that has a history of not treating customer data in a safe fashion.
Well, I did buy it on Steam, and it says that it’s in my library.
Checking the news, it appears that it’s no longer an Epic exclusive. I guess they backtracked on that due to the fan complaints.