New Gameplay Reveal Trailer for Vampire the Masquerade Swansong

Lesquin, France, March 18, 2022 – The release of Narrative RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is just over two months away. Now players can finally learn about the unprecedented crisis lashing the Boston vampire community. NACON, Big Bad Wolf Studio, and Hazel Iversen, Prince of the Boston Camarilla, have released a brand-new gameplay video that takes place when the critical emergency starts to unfold.

Mysterious assassins have attacked the Boston Camarilla - a secret society comprising most of the vampires in the city. Galeb Bazory, Emem Louis, and Leysha are tasked by Hazel Iversen with learning the identity of the attackers as well as the motives underlying the large-scale attack. The orders are simple: infiltrate, investigate and get answers, using supernatural powers if necessary.

As in a game involving investigation, the player visits various locations in search of precious clues, solves puzzles and interacts with a wide range of characters in order to advance within the game. But just like in a Narrative RPG, a genre pioneered by Big Bad Wolf in The Council, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong introduces a variety of gameplay mechanics.

Each of the three heroes has a character sheet that the player can fully customize. You can be an expert in speech and persuasion and dominate others, or you can develop your technology skills so you can hack computers and locks. The heroes also have vampire powers of their own: the Disciplines. For example, Leysha can Obfuscate to conceal her presence, Emem uses Celerity to reach otherwise inaccessible locations and Galeb makes others his puppet using Domination.

Some particularly twisted NPCs trigger Confrontations, combat in the form of dialogue in which the player has to find the right arguments and use Skills and Disciplines to convince the other person to reveal their secrets.

Intensively using vampire powers carries a high price: hunger for blood. If one of your heroes is short of blood, their inner beast takes control, directly affecting your possible actions. To prevent this from happening, you can prey upon one of the humans, feeding upon their blood. But make sure you do this out of sight, to maintain the Masquerade, the vampire law that hides the existence of the creatures of the night from humans.

In some situations, scripted action phases are triggered during which you have to keep your head and make the right choices despite the time pressure. Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a story-based game with multiple story branches, in which certain choices permanently affect the fate of your heroes and the Boston vampire community!

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong will be available on PC (Epic Games Store) and consoles on May 19, 2022.

• Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

• Add Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong to your EGS wishlist

• All NACON games and accessories: nacongaming.com

About Nacon

NACON is a company of the BIGBEN Group founded in 2019 to optimize its know-how through strong synergies in the video game market. By bringing together its 11 development studios, the publishing of AA video games, the design and distribution of premium gaming devices, NACON focuses 20 years of expertise at the service of players. https://www.nacongaming.com/

About Cyanide Studio and Big Bad Wolf

Cyanide is a French video game development studio created in 2000 and based in Nanterre. It has two subsidiaries located in Montreal and Bordeaux (Big Bad Wolf). The studio is known Games Workshop board game Blood Bowl, but also fantasy ad RPG games. Since 2018, NACON, one of Europe's leading video game publishers, holds a 100% stake in the company. More information can be found at www.cyanide-studio.com

About World of Darkness

World of Darkness is a transmedia entertainment brand encompassing a number of modern fantasy horror franchises, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and more. Through tabletop roleplaying games, video games, board games, literature, comic books, and more, these franchises tell mature stories in a dark supernatural fantasy layered over our modern world. Since 1991, World of Darkness has defined monster-perspective entertainment for a generation of fans. For more information visit www.worldofdarkness.com.

Article by: Susan N.

Read More

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood - PS5 Review

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood by developer Cyanide Studio and publisher Nacon—Sony Playstation 5 Review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is a perfectly adequate action-RPG title. That being said, given the rich source material of the tabletop roleplaying games this is based on, I can’t help but feel as though it could have been so much more.

Things start well enough, with an entertaining introductory movie that soon gives way to a much rougher looking in-game engine that sets the stage for our protagonist, Cahal. In a burst of dialogue-heavy exposition, we learn that Cahal is part of a group that includes members of his family as they go about trying to battle an evil corporation named Endron. With almost painful predictability, what begins as a stealth operation quickly goes south as we are introduced to the game’s core mechanics in a training stage that culminates in an unhappy turn of events that sets Cahal off on a loner’s path.

Fast forward a bit, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood shows Cahal getting reconnected to his old group as they go about a rather unremarkable narrative. Given that the tabletop game has such a heavy focus on the different clans, it is a little surprising and disappointing that the story in Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood never really explores that aspect of the game’s lore.

This and the character progression probably stand out as two of my biggest disappointments. Werewolf: The Apocalypse is part of the well-known World of Darkness series that already has a dedicated following and makes this title one that is bound to pique their interest. With such a wealth of roleplaying material to draw from however, the predictable plot points and generic character personalities failed to capture my interest for long. With this game based on an RPG, I had high hopes that the story might take some interesting narrative twists and turns based on decisions made along the way, but there’s really no ownership over how the story itself plays out.

There are some side quests along the way that do help you earn the game’s version of experience, which you can use to unlock new abilities and stat bonuses, which is certainly nice. The upgrades tend to feel pretty meaningful in combat, which is great, but outside of where you spend the points, you don’t really have any authorship over Cahal himself. You’re really just along for the ride. About the only notable part of the narrative where you have some degree of control is some of the dialogue where you can choose from a couple of options, most of which either just end in a raging battle or… not. You still progress to the next stage of the story either way.

This lack of impact on the world is felt in the game’s primary gameplay mechanics – stealth vs combat. This is where Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is actually most interesting, as most stages give you a choice between stealth or combat. The former is a bit slower paced, but actually more engaging. You can shift between human, wolf and frenzied werewolf, and the first two options have the most value in the stealth sections. As a human you can blend with your environment more, and you can interact with electronics and shoot out cameras with electric crossbow darts while avoiding guards and searchlights. Transforming to a wolf gives you access to smaller passages like vents that can give you access to parts of a building that Cahal’s human form can’t just walk over to.

However, if you get busted while trying to stealth it leads to an all-out brawl as Cahal goes werewolf mode and the game’s action elements come into play. Early on, it’s pretty cool to transform into a massive rage-beast and go Hulking out on hapless guards that usually just shoot at you, swing batons at you or try to hit you with grenades. That transformation sequence and the related initial carnage are a rush when they happen, and admittedly had me leaning towards combat over stealth more often than not.

There is not much variety to the soldier fodder and unless you are on the game’s hardest level of difficulty, they don’t offer a great deal of actual resistance along the way, especially if you make good decisions with the game’s aforementioned progression system. As you unlock new attacks, the combat games some layers of depth but most of the time? It’s not really needed. You can work yourself up into a greater rage that allows your werewolf to take on his Crinos form, which is basically a fancier, boosted stat form of your werewolf.

At the end of the day however, there’s just not much of an impact regardless of which of the two options you use for progression. You will reach some points that require successful stealth, and others that require a battle, but it’s not like the story or world really reacts any differently if you choose one option over the other during the rest of your session. Also, while the progression system does offer a bit of heft to the combat options, it does become highly repetitive by about the midpoint. Boss battles offer a bit more strategy and substance, but the hordes of soldiers thrown your way really don’t bring much variety to the combat side of things.

The presentation is a bit of a mixed bag, as visually some of the environments look nice and the monster character models are generally decent, but the human characters just look and feel rather stiff, and most of the stages have a sort of same-y repetitiveness to them before too long. How many weirdly connected, small roomed buildings can one person infiltrate after all? Apparently – a lot. There are a handful of more open-world settings along the way, and I definitely enjoyed those over the more repetitious, indoors environments I was just talking about.

The music and sound effects are fine as they typically fit what’s going on well. The voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag – never really great, seldom really bad, though some of the characters sound about as stiff as their animated models look. At the end of the day, this doesn’t really look like a PS5 game. One could argue that at times, it might not even really look like a late-era PS4 title.

Summary

There is a lot of potential in Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood, I just wish more of it had been fully realized. There are moments of excitement to be had, especially in the game’s earlier hours as you take on your werewolf form and lay waste to your opponents. However, the combat and many of the environments become repetitive relatively quick.

Score: 6 / 10

Read More