This one's a damn shame. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines has just about everything one could want in a PC role-playing game: an excellent story, top-notch atmosphere driven by superb voice acting and a cinema-worthy script, and a wide-open world with lots of things to uncover.
But the glitches. Oh, the glitches.
Maybe it has to do with this game being the first on the market to use Valve's Source engine outside of Half-Life 2. Indeed, Bloodlines made it to shelves before the game that its engine was built for. And though the game does look pretty, the rush to be first definitely is apparent here.
Simply put, Bloodlines has more quest-ending glitches than most betas. For instance – in one quest, I was scouting the homeless population of a city for information related to a mystery plague that could only be transmitted by a vampire. One bum told me to ask another bum for info, as he could help me out. I go to the location where the first bum tells me to look, and there is nobody there. It was just a side quest, so I went along my way, slightly miffed.
A few hours later, I had yet another encounter with a quest-ender. The mission was simple: go into a parking garage, kill some thugs, retrieve a briefcase. Okay, I can do this. I fight my way to the fourth level of the garage, kill everyone, and go to retrieve the case.
It falls through the floor, and vanishes.
I look up the reports on Activision's support site. It says to reload the last autosave before the glitch occurred, and try again. I do this, replay the entire sequence over again, and the same thing happens.
This is the point where I stopped playing. I'm mad anytime a game is shipped with a bug that actually blocks progress, but Bloodlines especially ticked me off, since it is actually a good game underneath the sloppy code, a game that I would have bought with my own money had I not received a press copy. And with developer Troika now officially shut down, a third patch is not in the cards to fix these problems. Buyer beware.
-George
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