Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong Previews
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With Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong launching in less than two months, on May 19, 2022, we're treated to a series of hands-on previews for Big Bad Wolf Studio's narrative RPG. Let's start with ScreenRant's preview featuring a number of quotes from the game's lead quest designer Eliott Hipeau:
Elliot Hipeau - Yes, a lot [of ending possibilities]. There is like fifteen different endings just for the main characters and there's six of them for the factions. There's like a combination of which ending you can have for your main character and which ending you can have for the secondary characters, and the factions, and the clans. So there's like, many combinations you can get in the end. It's hard to have the same ending after playing through.
Then, there's also IGN:
It also draws heavily from lore established in the World of Darkness tabletop RPG, and as such, you can spot the long-running politics between vampire families interweaving across Swansong’s many dialogues. For instance, Galeb’s ability to detect other vampires allowed me to interrogate a certain witness during the murder investigation that’s centric to the second quest, and I wouldn’t have been able to discern that they were a lesser vampire’s thrall without Galeb’s special power and the high social standing he holds within the vampire world as a member of the Ventrue family. Doing so allowed me to find an important clue that I may not have discovered conventionally.
From a technical standpoint, Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong didn't exactly shine. Granted, the preview was conducted through Shadow (the cloud streaming service), which made everything look blurrier. But even taking that into account, the overall level of detail seemed relatively modest for an Unreal Engine 4 game, and performance was far from perfect, too. While facial animations are rather well done (understandably so, given the game's strong focus on dialogues), the same cannot be said for the stiff movement animations. It is unclear whether this was a recent build or not, though.
One of my favourite things about The World Of Darkness is that vampires come in different flavours according to their Clan (which is what accounts for, basically, your character class). You can level up each of the three player characters in Swansong with detectivey skills, social skills and vampire powers. Galeb is a Tory Ventrue. He is haughty and has a very neat beard, and has abilities like Dominate and Presence to impose his will on humans. It's suggested you put points in dialogue skills, because you butt up against people in talk-fights quite a lot (much like you did in The Council), and for this level I found Deduction was important in putting information together or spotting more clues. I was happy to paw through everything myself to find, for example, phone unlock codes, but if you can't be arsed you can use a kind of vampire magic sight to highlight clues, or put points into Security and Technology to brute force things.
And GameSpot:
These abilities come to the forefront in Swansong's take on combat: verbal sparring. Occasionally, you'll meet a character who doesn't just tell you what you want to know or require light prodding through dialogue options and vampiric skills. These moments are called Confrontations, and require you to pay attention to the other person to reason out how you can best get your way--whether through specific dialogue choices that will convince them, using your skills like intimidation, or leveraging your monstrous capabilities. The scene we played included a couple of these moments, like one in which you discover the parking attendant of Moore's apartment building is also a low-level vampire. After following a blood trail to the apartment's garbage chute, you discover the parking attendant is the only one with a key, and he's unwilling to part with it, for...reasons.
