Supporting Bloodlines character Beckett gives the player a reconstructed quest. But Spahl’s the project’s sole manager, and for over a decade, his vision has shaped what might be the gaming world’s ultimate - albeit unofficial - attempt at a Director’s Cut sans director. He took it over from the original creator, Dan Upright, in 2005, and he’s enlisted help from the game’s active modding community, which spots bugs, creates new content, and develops tools for building things like game maps.
Spahl is far from the only person who’s contributed to Bloodlines’ unofficial patch. It’s a window into all the directions the original project could have gone, as interpreted by one man: a German analytical chemist and longtime video game modder named Werner Spahl, or wesp5. But it isn’t simply excavating old items, either. The patch wasn’t originally, and still isn’t, like playing a mod that adds all-new material to an old game. An addition I did remember, which restored an entire quest line, had a different villain at the end - although I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory, until my confused Google searches confirmed the switch. There were whole areas I’d never seen before, and items I couldn’t recall receiving. The more I played, the bigger the changes got. It’s like returning to your hometown, only to discover it changed while you were away - familiar, but different. In fact, over the last 12 years, the patch has reworked the game in all kinds of ways. But at some point since my last playthrough, it had added, without my involvement, this weird, tiny detail. I’d used the patch before, and largely thought of it as a fixed quantity. The patch fixes a handful of irritating flaws, but it also optionally restores old content that was cut during Bloodlines’ troubled development process. Then it struck me: in order to play the notoriously buggy Bloodlines, especially on modern computers, it’s practically mandatory to download a fan-made patch. I’ve never seen th is before.Įven the game hadn’t been so familiar, I knew I would have remembered something this annoying. Then I left his building, ambled into a nightclub, and nearly got stuck in a huge metal turnstile.
After being unceremoniously dropped in Santa Monica, I worked my way through the ranks by running errands for the city’s vampire prince, who invited me to visit him downtown. For all the time I’d spent away from it, I was surprised how well I remember its distinctive dark fantasy version of Los Angeles. A couple of weeks ago, I booted up a game I hadn’t touched in years: the 2004 RPG Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines.
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