I thought vampires could see in the dark....

[Budalen S-Lag]

This is a great game, but they could have added a infravision or something.

[the_limey]

Well, it depends. There is no such thing as *a* vampire myth, the creature of the night we think of when we mention "vampire" differs from person to person and culture to culture. This is because today's vampire is an amalgamation of literally scores of myths and legends dating back thousands of years. Do vampires hate running water? Can they appear in daylight? Can they eat and drink other rhan blood? These answers to these questipons vary according to what particular myth or amalgam you're looking at.
However, to actually answer your question, the Bloodlines game is based on White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade game world and if vamps can't see in the dark in their rules they can't in the game either.

[Darkstone]

Use Auspex. Very handy in Traffik.

[MrDugg]

Great question. I'd give Fat Larry $1,000 dollars for a flashlight. Some places (mostly air ducts and parts of OceanView Hotel) are so dark I have to make sure the light on my monitor is green and not yellow to make sure that its still working. I found a torch in the console, but it only works when you're in 3rd person view and it doesn't help much that I've seen. Think its just a melee weapon.

[Mavrik]

Yeah I found in certain parts of the game unless my room was in darkenss, no sunlight through the windows, then I could see. Auspex came in handy for those situations and acts like "night vision" for a vampire. You can enter a building, use that and see where everyone is on every floor and such if your Auspex level is high

[Budalen S-Lag]

Yeah, a flashlight would be great! Although a vampire with a flashlight would look kinda pathetic, hehe.

I'm playing with a brujah so no Auspex. I must say this is the most annoying thing about the game so far, besides load-times and getting stuck sometimes (I have used the noclip cheat 3 times so far)

[pennypincher]

I guess the thing about a Brujah with a flashlight is, even if you tell him it's pathetic for a vampire to need a flash light, he's already shoved the thing through your eye socket and out the back of your skull 8 times in five seconds...

[yrthwyndandfyre]

Originally Posted by MrDugg

Great question. I'd give Fat Larry $1,000 dollars for a flashlight. Some places (mostly air ducts and parts of OceanView Hotel) are so dark I have to make sure the light on my monitor is green and not yellow to make sure that its still working. I found a torch in the console, but it only works when you're in 3rd person view and it doesn't help much that I've seen. Think its just a melee weapon.

I actually used to have this problem all the time. It turned out to be my monitor. I replaced it with a better one, and all of a sudden I can see just fine. Annoying, yes, but there you go.

[Celacena]

One of the handy gangrel powers is that you get night vision when you turn into your beast-form. at first level, night vision is what you get - it is bloody handy for those dark areas.

It is really handy for seeing the doorways etc in hallowbrook, the hospital, at traffik and particularly at Ocean House.
if you brighten the monitor, you lose some atmosphere - it is meant to be dark.

I didn't bother with gangrel at first because the powers didn't look interesting, but for a combat vamp - it is very good clan.

[Faust]

White Wolf compartmentalizes vampire powers. So, no one vampire can do everything. The line of vampire powers that is suppose to increase your ability to perceive is Auspex (and to some extent Protean). Quite frankly, Auspex wasn't one of the better implemented disciplines in this game (it seems to have been spun as a support/lesser discipline), so its boost for things like night vision is not as substantial as one might like. Regardless, using it (or Protean War Form) will enable you to see somewhat better in the night. Otherwise, just get familiar with your gamma bar.

[yrthwyndandfyre]

Originally Posted by Celacena

if you brighten the monitor, you lose some atmosphere - it is meant to be dark.

I'm not certain you entirely get it. When I had the dark monitor problem, I could enter a room that was lit by table lamps, and all I could see was the lightbulb and part of the stem of the lamp. I'm talking *really* dark. So dark that in many places where you *should* be able to see, you simply can't. If this is the problem presented here, maxing out gamma and dropping contrast by about 50%, while ramping up monitor brightness and video card brightness to max is about the only way to get enough vision to be able to even play the game, much less play it well. This has to be done just before play and undone after play, because at those settings, the desktop is too bright to be useful. I played many games in what I later found was a blindfolded state.

[pennypincher]

I guess the real issue with Auspex being not as powerful in the PC game rather then the PnP one, is that it would have been kinda rough to implement things like spirits touch in anything but a "This item may be spirits touched, this one may not... This one may.. This one may not" sorta way... And what about Astral Porjoection? PPHHHEEWW!!
For those not in the know, Auspex goes a little like this:
1: You can see, hear, smell, taste, feel and even sometimes just sorta sense things better then just about any creature on earth. You can smell a wolf before it can smell you, you can snipe people without a scope and can touch solid pavement and tell that a baby is walking towards you by the vibrations.

2: You can see Auras, and as such, read a lot about peoples hidden emotoins and intentions. Different colours meaning different things, allowing you to tell if someone is angry, happy, horny, confused, on drugs, crazy.. Or even what kind of supernatural creature they are.

3: You can now touch objects and gleam hidden information via the emotoinal imprint left on them by their last user. So touching a knife might show you the face and name of the murder and why he did it, as well as the pain and last few thoughts of the victim as it sat inside them... While touching a hanky really doesn't give you much, as very few people are really closely emotoinaly attached to their hanky...

4: Now you can just out and out read minds! Does this really need explination? They think, you hear. You can even, if you want, project a thought back to them, allowing limited comuincation bewteen you without sound.

5: Okay, so why don't you just leave your body behind and travle totaly invisable, ehteral, and except for a small silver cord that links you to your body, invincable? Sound good.. Sure, go ahead! Depends on how good you are at getting out of your body, you can even pop into the real world for a few moments and use certain discplines still.. Like dominate.. "POP, Hi, kill the president..POP" "Who was that?" "Who was what??" "I dunno, but if you'll excuse me, I hve to go kill the president"

[Shellhead]

Pennypincher, they could have handled Auspex better in the game, if they had really wanted to make the effort. Working off your summaries of how Auspex works in the pnp rpg:

1. Leave the initial level the same, it's a reasonable proxy for the several senses not transmitted through the computer screen.

2. They could have done the auras, or at least a simplified color scheme, using the same screen effect as Fortitude. None of the Camarilla clans have both Auspex and Fortitude, so it would work with this game.

3. They could have some key objects in this game get cinematic sequences to convey a clue. This would be especially useful in the haunted hotel, or with those jade statues in the temple. I know that Troika could have done this, because they did it with a key artifact in The Temple of Elemental Evil. Or, more easily, they could update quest cues in the log with clues from the Spirit's Touch.

4. Read minds... hmm, maybe you could get that ankh targeting symbol like with the other active disciplines... activate Auspex 4 and you get a though balloon over the npc's head, or better yet, a voiceover revealing current state of mind. This could be very amusing at times, like having male mortal npcs pondering the rack of a female character, or zombies thinking just "brains", or random pedestrians thinking about groceries to get. The telepathic communication would about the same as a regular dialogue, only maybe no sound and most mortals would freak out.

5. Let characters with Auspex 5 access the no_clip cheat, only they have to come back to their body when they want to revert back to normal, and said body is vulnerable to npc attacks while it lies there.

[Faust]

I'm of mixed feelings as to whether or not it should have been made better. Auspex is quite balanced when you think of it terms of "Discipline sets." Certainly, individually its not as powerful as many other disciplines, but it's not suppose to be.

Regardless, it is a discipline they could have done more with. The major thing I would have liked to see with it is even further increased night vision, and, perhaps, the ability to use the discipline to get a layout of the battle scene (i.e. projected vision). I suppose it might have made sense to allow certain levels of it to give you added insight into certain conversations (i.e. discern lies easier, etc.), much as dominate and dementation functins. These are at least little things that could have been tweaked. Certainly, more substantial changes like what Shell suggests could have made the discipline really cool, but I don't think this was necessary.

[pennypincher]

Yeah, agreed!