| If you've watched the walkthrough videos of Vampire:Bloodlines and wanted a little meatier example of what Troika rpgs are like, I think Arcanum is a good introduction. Its a fun game if you approach it without thinking of games like Baldur's Gate and just play it for what it is and I think you'll find that Bloodlines will play somewhat similarly. The character system is almost identical between the games with skill points, races (vampire clans) and even 'backgrounds'.
If you love being able to drag around 5 other player characters with your own player character, then Arcanum is not what you're looking for. I found BG2 too frequently a bore, forever managing all those npcs at once rather than focusing on the game and enjoying MY role in the story.
I loved the Arcanum character system, and I had the most fun in the game not using any npc's at all but challenging myself to complete the quests myself with a well built and equipped character. Something you can build along the way to meet the different quest demands.
In contrast the BG games where primarily party balance games, knowing who you're going to meet and build a character who does 'stuff' the npcs don't. I was having to share my adventure with braindead npc's who did far too much of the quests for me and interrupted me every hour on the hour to fish for compliments with some of the most inane dialogue I've ever read.
In a BG like game (D&D license) you're guaranteed to get inflexible quests that demand certain skills you don't have and battles you don't want to fight (I don't want to have to kill the ****ing dragon but you always MAKE me -BG2, NWN, HOTU...). The restrictive character system means branching out to develop certain skills yourself can be impractical so you either build the standard fare D&D hero, whom the majority of one-solution-quests cater for or drag along npcs and let them play the game for you.
Arcanum's quests tend to have multiple solutions to cater for different character builds, and its something Troika are touting rather loudly about Bloodlines too.  |