Vampyr E3 Previews

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Written by BuckGB on July 4th, 2017

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In Vampyr, players take on the role of Dr. Jonathan Reid, a World War I veteran practicing medicine in early 20th century London. The city is in the grips of the Spanish flu, which is somewhat complicated by the rise in canibalism. Not only are citizens dying from illness, they’re also prone to being turned into “skals,” a mutation that eats away at the mind while giving people a taste for human flesh. All along the Thames, in fact, skals lurk below the piers ready to leap out and devour passersby.

But Reid has his own set of problems. There’s an order of vampire hunters hot on his trail, and in order to survive he must grow more powerful by feeding on the citizens of London. It’s up to players to determine who lives or dies.

Of all the options at your disposal, none are particularly pleasant. For example, you may opt to feed on an awful murderer. Sounds like a great target, right? The only problem is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. This murder, as cruel as he may have been in life, still has a loving mother. If her only son suddenly disappears, there will be ramifications for both her and the general sentiment of the town. What about feeding on the mother instead? Well, aside from potentially setting off her homicidal son, it would also harm the young orphan who looked up to her. These interpersonal relationships are key to Vampyr.

You’ll be able to pry into these relationships by interacting with the characters. They’re not just prey for Dr. Reid, but characters with stories to unravel. Chatting up folks offers up dialogue choices and the potential to positively (or negatively) influence their lives. With that said, all this town management is but one component of Vampyr’s gameplay. The other aspect involves fighting in action-packed battles against folks who seek to kill off vampires.

There are some great benefits to sacrificing someone, however. Obviously, there is a big chunk of experience coming your way if you do, but you also absorb all of the memories of a person you sacrifice. This is important as there is a lot of locked dialogue with NPCs that you can only select if you have collected the correct information. While not all of that information comes from people, as you can find it out in the world, a great deal of it does. And, the more information you have on an individual when you choose to sacrifice them, the more experience you get.

For example, while playing we participated in a quick sidequest. Jonathan talked to a guy who seemed a little perturbed. We found out he lost his mother’s necklace and needed it returned, so we agreed to help him out. Well, the necklace was found in a pile of dead bodies, so Jonathan confronts him about it. Turns out the guy is a serial killer. That sounds like a good candidate for a sacrifice, right? Well, there’s still some more information to find out, so the demo went to go talk to this guy’s mother. She knows what he does but hasn’t done anything to stop it. We take a look at her profile and she has a higher blood quality than her son (more experience), so she gets killed. We swing by later and her son has taken over the house and it’s trashed.

You know, it sucks having an insatiable lust for blood and being an undead creature of the night. Imagine you’re a physician who’s been recently turned into such a beast and you decide to feast on a couple patients to satisfy your hunger. But your heinous and desperate act attracts the attention of an ancient faction of Vampire hunters who would love nothing more than to find you and put a stake through your heart. That’s where you find yourself at the beginning of Vampyr, an upcoming narrative RPG from Focus Interactive.

Much like in popular titles like Mass Effect or the Dragon Age series, all actions and dialog choices will have consequences. Every NPC ties into a social web and choosing one over the other to feed upon when your bloodlust becomes uncontrollable. You could choose to try and play through without ever eating a single person but it will be a serious uphill battle. In practice it’s much more reliable to investigate the characters inhabiting the various neighborhoods or boroughs and using the information you find to select the right victim.

As you talk to citizens, do quests for them, and get more info about the world around you, you'll unlock bits of info about everyone. This information is presented in a menu to help make it easier for you to figure out if sacrificing a particular person is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply so tempting that it doesn't matter.

You see, while it's easy to justify sucking the blood of bad people, good people have higher quality blood and thus are worth much more experience. Once you've chosen your victims and drained out their blood, you can rest in a hideout to spend that experience in skill trees; your choice of skills can drastically alter how you play the game.

The combat was probably the least interesting thing in the demo. If you've played a 3rd person action RPG in the past few years, you've seen everything the combat in Vampyr has to offer already. Not only that but enemies seemed to soak up a ton of damage, that "squishy" feeling you often get in games like this.

After some more exploration Reed found the serial killer's mother, who knew of her son's crimes but protected him from the authorities all the same. The developer from Dontnod narrating this demo informed us that a boss battle with the serial killer was coming up soon and we needed to level Reed up in order to take on the challenge.

As an action RPG, Vampyr has a level system. Ried was at level 13 when we got started, and encountered a point in his journey towards Hampton where the enemies around him were too strong to take down in his current state. This was the point where we were told how experience is laid out. In Vampyr, the main source of experience points and growth isn’t combat, but straight-up seduction and blood-sucking. Every single NPC in DONTNOD’s rendition of London has a name, a backstory, and most importantly, a lot of blood. All of London’s citizens are potential victims. It’s up to the player, then, to figure out whose life to take.

We watch as Reid meets a random man on the street. We learn that the man’s name is Seymour, and that he is taking care of his ailing mother. He mentions having lost a necklace he had bought for her. Using a Detective Mode-esque scan mode to follow a trail of blood, Reid discovers the missing article. The twist is that the dang thing is under a pile of fresh corpses. It comes out that Seymour is a murderer, a crime he readily admits to.

Avoiding the Guard while roaming the streets is generally a good idea. When you do get into combat, you are equipped with standard weapons, as well as your vampire abilities. Your blood vision lets you track down potential targets, and using your speed you can overwhelm groups of enemies. Enemies are equipped with all sorts of vampire hunting gear, from wooden stakes to gas grenades that can render your powers useless. Damage is intended on Jonathan as he takes beatings, but his health will regenerate outside of combat. While this is one way to earn potential experience to gain additional powers, there is a much faster and lucrative approach.

The second half of the gameplay presentation focused on the social aspects. We came across a fellow, drunk, talking about a lost piece of jewelry. Being a kind person, we located it in an alley, surrounded by dead bodies. When confronted, he confessed to the crimes without remorse. Instead of feeding on the heartless murderer right away, we decided to visit his home, speaking to his mother about her son’s troubled lifestyle. It became evident through the conversation choices made that the mother has been covering up the deaths for quite some time. A third pillar to the story adds someone else that the mother takes care of, a young boy, who the son passionately despises.

The most concerning thing for me right now is that Vampyr doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on either concept, and I'd need a great deal of time to see if the jack-of-all-trades approach ends up working out. The combat looks quite rough, with a stamina bar à la Dark Souls and tons of unique vampire abilities that all seem to fling and fly without serious impact or sense of satisfying connection. Granted, Vampyr isn't billing itself as Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but what I'm seeing is much more in line with DONTNOD's more forgettable Remember Me (gee, that's ironic) in terms of action. It doesn't help matters that things look quite rough in this current build. Character faces in particular lack any real detail, and some of the animations were distracting in places.

The city and NPC interaction, however, should be advertised and seen as Vampyr's true selling point. London itself is the main character, featuring districts that will deteriorate should you choose to make the citizens your preferred food source to power up your abilities for tougher encounters. Every character is named and has a set of relationships that you can use to exploit and manipulate. It's a bit strange that you can increase the experience bonus by learning more about your potential prey, but it gives you an incentive to investigate and interact with the world. In our demo, Dr. Reid spends a lot of time learning about a sweet old lady before finally doing her in so he can gain new powers in a pretty expansive skill tree. You'll have to be careful, however, as bleeding a district dry could eventually cut it off completely from the rest of London and lead to the rise of ghoulish vampire-like creatures called Skals that make life quite difficult for Jonathan.

With a little investigation, thanks to a blood-seeking vision mode unique to vampires, Reid tracked the locket to a murder scene. It turns out that Seymour is a menace to society as well as a devoted son, two facts the game logged on a special menu devoted to Seymour (there’s one for each citizen, it seems). Tracking Seymour back to his house, Reid was able to eavesdrop on his conversation. Reid discovered that while Seymour loved his mother, he was also a bit of a hothead, angry that his mom was caring for a local homeless kid called Rufus.

It was looking more and more like Seymour might make a good snack. Next, Reid mesmerized his way into Seymour’s mom’s house in order to ask her more about her son. Vampyr uses a conversation system similar one to what you might expect from a BioWare game. As you learn more about a given citizen, more options make themselves available to you.

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