The more I played, the bigger the changes got. It’s like returning to your hometown, only to discover it changed while you were away - familiar, but different.
In fact, over the last 12 years, the patch has reworked the game in all kinds of ways. But at some point since my last playthrough, it had added, without my involvement, this weird, tiny detail. I’d used the patch before, and largely thought of it as a fixed quantity. The patch fixes a handful of irritating flaws, but it also optionally restores old content that was cut during Bloodlines’ troubled development process. Then it struck me: in order to play the notoriously buggy Bloodlines, especially on modern computers, it’s practically mandatory to download a fan-made patch. I’ve never seen th is before.Įven the game hadn’t been so familiar, I knew I would have remembered something this annoying. Then I left his building, ambled into a nightclub, and nearly got stuck in a huge metal turnstile.
After being unceremoniously dropped in Santa Monica, I worked my way through the ranks by running errands for the city’s vampire prince, who invited me to visit him downtown. For all the time I’d spent away from it, I was surprised how well I remember its distinctive dark fantasy version of Los Angeles. A couple of weeks ago, I booted up a game I hadn’t touched in years: the 2004 RPG Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines.
