Vampyr and punishment

King of Posters
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Vampyr does not want you to “save early and often” in order to find your optimal path through the game. Dontnod representatives confirmed that they’ve taken save controls out of the hands of the player to emphasize the importance and power of your choices.

As a vampire, if you feed on someone, you get a huge pile of experience at the expense of that character dying. This power boost is enough to trivialize the enemies you’re “supposed” to be fighting, and you can now stand a good chance against enemies whose main purpose is to discourage you from exploring advanced areas yet. Do this too much and you’d completely break the game, so they created a counterbalancing mechanism called “district health”.

District health is a sliding scale that evaluates and sums up factors like the health of the characters in that district, the status of quests that can be completed there, and the circumstances in that area as a consequence of the narrative. If district health is good, the merchants there will give you a discount on their wares. If it’s bad, things get more expensive. If it ever falls below 50%, the district is considered lost to chaos; all the friendly/neutral NPCs die, and tough enemies stalk the streets. Drinking folks for their XPs is a good way to damage district health: if you’re playing this to be a badass vampire with monstrous superpowers, that will eventually come at the expense of conversation and investigation, the more humanitarian aspects of the game mechanics.

While the game does briefly warn you that allowing a district to fall will kill all the conversation partners native to that region, some choices have a bit less transparent outcomes. I’m blurring this text, but in light of the Vampyr policy toward save files, I wish I’d known this in advance:

At the end of your first major trip to Whitechapel, Nurse Crane is revealed as the blackmailer you’ve been commissioned to stop. Her motives are arguably just, and your sponsor has requested discretion and a lack of violence. She asks if you’re going to go to the authorities, but her tone is one of righteous indignation. Your options are “[SPARE] No, but resign from your position with the hospital,” “[KILL] Enough of this, I’ve decided you’re more useful to me as a comestible,” and “[CHARM] You will forget what you have discovered. Your undercover days are behind you.” Complicating this is the fact that the CHARM option has an opened lock icon next to it, suggesting this option is one which has been unlocked somehow, so I picked that one. Subsequent events and some reading in the Steam community reveals that this is every bit as lethal to her character as killing her outright would have been, as she is transformed into a monstrous creature to fight on your next visit to her home.

What I’m trying to get at with these examples is that Vampyr goes to a lot of efforts to provide both in-game and metagame reasons to be enticed by your vampiric powers, and it provides both in-game and metagame reasons to regret succumbing to those temptations. I like it a lot, but I’m still gonna restart my game.

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no don’t

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This game sounds up my alley. The outright rejection of save scumming is a good choice

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I really want to play it. I guess it possible to be a heartless vampire and live with your choices or do your best to make England well again?

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More or less? Dr. Reid is a pretty specific character in conversation (Julie called him “the wokest vampire” when I picked a sympathetic response to some Romanian immigrants), but if you ignore all the lesser vampires and vampire hunters all over the place, this almost resembles a big-budget version of Undertale. It takes special efforts to save everyone or kill everyone, and it’s probably expected that you’ll wind up somewhere in the middle on your first time through.

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sold

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Lemme qualify that claim a bit: there are boss fights where you have to kill your opponent, and I’m skeptical whether it’s possible to get away from the Priwen soldiers/lesser creatures without killing them once you’re engaged in combat. It also remains to be seen how well the game handles a mix of saving some and murdering others; Undertale had huge variety in its basic ending to account for different sets of survivors. Still, I can’t help but sense a certain resemblance.

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this seems really big and weird and flawed and ambitious in a way that isn’t often done nowadays?

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observer struck me the same way though so maybe it’s just european studios have figured out how to do huge graphics in medium-sized games

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Whenever you activate your “vampire senses”, Vampyr’s take on the investigation mode which is so popular nowadays, most characters are highlighted with a visible circulatory system and an informational pop-up for this character’s basic info.

One thing visible in this information box for potential prey is a count of the number of hints you’ve revealed, versus how many in total are available for that character, alongside the gauge of how much XP you’ll gain for consuming that character. The more hints you reveal (through conversation with them or others, discovery of journals/letters/etc. in the world, a slightly finicky spying minigame, and so on), the more that gauge fills up; once you know everything about a character and they’re cured of all diseases, they’re worth max XP and you can eat them with impunity, right?

Well, no.

While the game tells you explicitly how many hints exist for each character, it gives you no indication whether that character is needed for another character’s hints, although at what is probably the half-way point through the game, these stories have so far been relatively self-contained.

The real mechanism to prevent you from prematurely murdering people you might want later on is “mesmerize level”. This is a ostensibly an indication of a character’s force of will, but in practice it’s just a number to tell you how soon you’re allowed to eat somebody. At the end of chapter 2 I gained the ability to mesmerize people of level 2 or below; I’ve seen people as high as level 5. That’s usually a strong indication of their importance to the plot.

Combat is still passable. I am convinced the post-death loading screen is deliberately slow to discourage players from taking on significantly higher-level enemies over and over in hopes of a lucky break.

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Still plugging away slowly at this, and the economy is fascinating me.

The currencies of progression in this game come in the forms of XP, money, and items. Let’s take them in turn.

First, XP: use this to buy active vampire abilities like claw attacks, temporary paralysis, your healing ability, etc., as well as your passive traits like greater max health/stamina/blood, greater blood gain per bite, better ammo capacity (?!), and so on. The costs increase sharply: your first claw attack costs 1000 XP, while the first upgrade for that ability costs 2000 XP, and so on. You get a lot from exsanguinating your friends and patients, a fair bit from completing quests and unlocking hints, and a little bit from exploration and combat. Combat rewards in particular diminish sharply with repetition; this is not a game in which you can meaningfully grind for levels, as that would undermine the temptation to drink blood. As you buy abilities, the game assigns you a level, but it doesn’t feel quite 1-to-1; sometimes I’ve spent just a few hundred XP for some minor benefits, and my level didn’t change, even though I was more powerful. Based on my district populace charts, I think I’m maybe 60-70% through the game, and I’m level 15 at the moment; most enemies along the appropriate path are 16 to 18, with offshoots I’m not “supposed” to explore yet showing enemies at an unapproachable 22+. The tight limitations on XP gain is why the developers can claim that your decision to feed is the only difficulty setting they need to include.

Money and items don’t need to quite as rigidly controlled, because you’re expending those resources for temporary benefits. You can find both resources just by wandering through the world: there’s a chest with some gun upgrade parts. That cabinet opens for drug ingredients. Here’s a pile of 15 shillings on this counter. Any time you sleep to spend your XP, the people you know may develop an illness, or an existing illness may worsen, so you constantly need to be replenishing your stock of drug components. While weapon upgrades are permanent, you can collect a lot more weapons than you can reasonably upgrade to your current maximum, and since upgrades beyond that require access to improved materials that won’t start appearing until you enter your next chapter, you can’t get an overpowered weapon just because of the fact that you can find more items in areas you’ve already depleted after some time passes.

I guess this means you should put me down as somebody who likes the combat and progression systems available here.

As for the story and characters–despite the mechanisms I described in my last post, the novelty is wearing a bit thin. This part of town is full of gangsters, but their threats ring really hollow; I know my precious XP Friends will never get so mad that they earnestly attack me. People may have more things to say even after you’ve finished the main story in a district, but so far it’s never been more than a single line of dialogue. The “main” story is pretty standard “the ecology and politics of vampires” stuff like who-sired-who and whether there can be a scientific explanation for why a brandished holy symbol will drain your stamina, yet the crosses in the graveyard have no adverse effect.

I do still enjoy the little puzzles of how to get characters to open up to you completely; I’ve failed several of these now, so if I were going to be drinking from those folks in this playthrough, they’d never be worth max XP. That’s something for the future, though.

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The best thing about this is that knowing people better makes them worth more to eat. Very vampiric behavior - seduce and exsanguinate.

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It’s true, and it’s very thematically appropriate! You also get a flash of insight into that character’s last memories as you drain their living blood, which is gonna make it real frustrating when a huge batch of my victims spontaneously die before I can drink them when their district collapses on my next playthrough. I’ll probable find the scenes I miss on YouTube afterward.

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Near the end of chapter 3, and I goofed pretty good this time. A decision I made severely damaged the health of a district, which appears to have killed off half a dozen characters or so. Things had been going so well, too! I’m not going to restart again, though, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with it.

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Last year I told someone that Shinji Mikami’s The Evil Within 2 would be my Tax Redemption game. I couldn’t bring myself to not buy Monster Hunter World instead. I am a coward and a liar, basically.

Vampyr though is somewhere special on my “list” where even though I know I don’t have an actual job right now, live in a hospital, can’t afford food, but I will do something stupid and possibly illegal to get this game.

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There’s supposedly going to be a “Story Mode” added in an update, will this game hold up with lessened/removed combat?

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That’s an interesting question.

While the combat works for me, it’s not too sophisticated; if you can figure out or read about certain quirks of the system, it’s possible to trivialize the vast majority of combat encounters. Plus, there’s a pretty sharp division between the parts of the game where you fight and the parts of the game where you talk. You might encounter a friendly character in a hostile area, but you’re never blindsided by enemies on your way out of the hospital, for example. Removing combat altogether doesn’t seem like it’d break anything.

That still leaves the bigger question of whether the story is worth it, and that’s a hard question to answer. Life Is Strange worked for me because I was invested in the mystery it built up, because I enjoyed and related to its characters, and because I wanted to see the outcome of the choices I was making. Vampyr falls far short on the mystery and I find its characters less compelling, but the choices do intrigue me. LIS got a lot of flak because it presented a whole series of lesser and greater Choices which were ultimately washed away in the storm of one final choice. While I wasn’t bothered by this structure, Vampyr dodges that both by eschewing time travel altogether—you can’t even revert to an earlier save to undo an error—and by setting up most of your choices at a granularity too fine to much play into the overarching plot. Few of the citizens over whom you hold the power of life and death are so important that their expiration will affect the entire course of London, but in the aggregate, lives matter. Some lives do matter a little more; on more than one occasion, I made a choice that changed one or more of the seemingly-innocuous citizens under my sway into powerful enemies. I am very curious how a story-mode version of this game will handle such transformations.

In other news, I’m creeping closer to the end of my first playthrough. I’ve met every citizen in every district and only a few subquests remain unfinished before I make my final push for the ending.

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THE PUREST DESIRE IS THE LUST OF FLESH

i cant wait to get more into this

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Curious how your playthrough is going @jsnlv!

I’ve noticed and fallen in loven with hownthe game tries to give even the most awful characters some kind of trait that seemingly anchors them in the world so you can’t easily pick who should live or die, but that just could be me.

i made sure Clay Cox was healed and had most of his hints uncovered before I fed on him. I will probably go down the list and go for that preacher and the doctor who runs the morgue next.

i did write an article that covers most of my thoughts so far too: http://deep-hell.com/vampyr

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Still working on this! We had some other games come out that interrupted me, and then our shows went back on the air, meaning most of my recent play time has been confined to the laptop. Once we work through our TV backlog, the PS4 should come back into rotation.