We’ve put together a new round-up of impressions for Vampyr, DONTNOD’s latest upcoming title and their first action-RPG, still courtesy of last month’s E3 expo. While it’s not the Bloodlines successor some people were hoping for, it does sound like Vampyr might be a title worth keeping an eye on.
Of course, what would a vampire game be without enemies? Vampyr seems to have a decent amount of those, in the form of vampire hunters who’ve returned to the city after hearing about its worsening infestation. Combat between Dr. Reid and said hunters was briefly shown, and it involved some stealth (including bat-based teleportation mechanics) and some more in-your-face attacking, through a decent-looking system that promotes timing and verticality.
One of the best ways to accomplish your goals is to mesmerize a human and have him follow you into the shadows before you feast. Before you do that, though, you’ll want to try your best to gain intelligence about each and every person you encounter, in order to figure out who’s best for eating. Generally speaking, doing research helps you find out who the scumbags are, and can make your choices easier for that reason. You have to eat, after all, and it’s not always easy, especially since vampires must be invited into someone’s home before they can enter.
Many game designers have intertwined the moral opportunities in their games with rewards systems, though the most prominent examples tend to balance the consequences of making either choice. Ruthlessly “harvesting” the “little sisters” in 2007’s BioShock may have netted twice the immediate reward as rescuing them did, but other rewards for the rescue option made both options similarly viable. The Paragon/Renegade morality system of the Mass Effect games gave players distinct but balanced options, offering the greatest rewards to people who went far in either direction.
In Vampyr, much of the gameplay advantage will come from killing civilians. The reason not to do so will simply be because it might feel wrong. That’s the idea behind giving each of the game’s civilians a backstory. You might feel bad about the families you’re hurting or, say, the child you’re leaving without a dad.
“Each time you kill someone you have access to his last thought,” Beauverger said. “We want this to impact the player. We want them to not just feel like each kill gives them an amount of blood but that they’ve destroyed a life, [a person] who was worrying about something.”
Stephane Beauverger, the writer of the story said that the game is more about a tragic figure than about a horror setting. The creators only wanted the gothic atmosphere but you won’t get jumpscares here. Instead, you get to develop the character and make choices that are always going to be difficult.
The way the vampires appear here is inspired from the gothic novels more than from contemporary sources like the Twilight saga or similar things, so you get many of the tropes we were used to. For example you cannot enter into someone’s home without being invited there and this limits the things you can do in the beginning.
And it seems like one of the major themes in that system of choices is the self-loathing inspired by the protagonist’s need to feed. He’s a doctor, actually (he fights with what seems to be a comedically gigantic doctor’s bonesaw) and he views his vampirism as a disease that needs to be cured. His chief quest in the game is to research the origins of vampirism so that he can figure out how to eradicate it. Meanwhile, the Spanish flu epidemic is in full swing, and people who are exposed to both vampirism and the flu are transforming into wild, feral vampires.
I’m not going to lie: this looks like a game where the protagonist will spend a lot of time agonizing over his vampire guilt and misery. And frankly, since it’s a game about vampires, that’s what I hoped for: some super dark and overwrought emotions. The demo opened with our hero gazing down at the funeral of a young girl– a relative of his whom he’d actually killed. Afterwards, a woman vampire in a snazzy Victorian suit asked him how he felt; when he refused to be honest with her, she told him he’d need to open up emotionally or he’d turn into a ravenous fiend. Nice!!
The game features a dialogue wheel pretty similar to the ones in Bioware games– but this one doesn’t seem to have any kind of icon-system telling you what category your choices belong in. To this I also say: nice!! I am a huge fan of unlabelled choices in RPGs– and for a game where you spend all your time deciding who to unwillingly murder for their XP, morally-ambiguous choice systems seem like a good idea.
Your actions or inaction can also contribute to a district’s stability rating, similar to Dishonored’s chaos rating. Kill too many and you’ll lose your humanity as the streets pool with blood and more ravenous monsters. Save too few and the plague will likewise devour the population, leaving bloated corpses rotting in the streets.
It’s not enough to be a doctor trying to save everyone, nor is it enough to be a creature of the night growing in power – in Vampyr, you are the giver of life and the bringer of death. You’ll need to heal and harm strategically, not just to earn arbitrary good guy points and/or bad guy points.
The complex web of relationships between NPCs also makes the decisions you make infinitely more interesting than choosing between mustache-twirling evil and halo-on-head good. Who deserves to be spared, and who deserves to be food? Do you sacrifice someone with the intention of using your dark powers to save the city, or do you hold onto your humanity as tightly as possible, even if it means dooming those around you?
The hands-off demo started out at a funeral of a girl, seemingly buried after dying under mysterious circumstances. Jonathan Reid, former surgeon turned vampire, watches from afar, hiding in the shadows, before approaching the casket and questioning his life choices and eventual fate.
Things aren’t just hinged on drama, though, placing a heavy load on fighting against enemies such as vampire hunters, members of an ancient order hell bent on eliminating the fanged treat from the face of the earth. From watching the pre-alpha demo being shown, the combat seemed very fluid, making use of the fiction in order to infuse some vampiric excuses for some ridiculous moves, like turning into mist in between combos and such.
Engadget has an interview that deals with the choice of going with a fixed male protagonist:
“To be historically accurate, if we’d created a female character, each time she went to a house and said, ‘Hello, I’m a doctor,’ she wouldn’t be believed,” Beauverger said. This plays a direct role in vampire fiction in general: Unless bloodsuckers are invited inside, they can’t cross the threshold of someone’s door.
“Normally as a doctor at this time, when you knock on the door you’re invited in. That makes it very easy for a vampire to enter a house,” he said.
“We needed [Reid] to already have influence over people because of where he comes from and where he was born, his place in society, his being a doctor, all before he was a vampire,” Szucs added.
That’s not to say that there aren’t prominent female characters in Vampyr. Your main point of contact with the underworld, for instance, is an ancient vampire named Lady Ashbury. She’s a sort of matriarch who deals with sexism even in the game’s vampire society. Her role here is to guide Reid through his new life. She’s essentially his moral compass.
Finally, we have some video content. First, we have 15 minutes of footage and interview from IGN:
Then we have some impressions from Dread Central and PlayStation Universe:
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