Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Games full of bugs that players loved anyway
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Some of you may be surprised: how did a game that suffered a financial disaster and ultimately led to the closure of the studio that created it ends up on the list of titles beloved by gamers? Well, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines didn't really break sales records or even gain much popularity after its premiere. But you only have to look at the community that has gathered around the latest and perhaps the best work of the Troika Games team to realize that one cannot deny the fans' sympathy towards the game. And it was the fans who gave it a second life after strict publisher deadlines forced the studio to release the game in an unfinished form.
You can scoff at how raw was the premiere version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Time and again the game gave the players reasons to complain. What is definitely more interesting, though, is how it was patched – because it's actually a really endearing story. Because of Bloodlines, Troika Games ran into financial trouble and had to lay off most of its employees... which didn't stop some of them from fixing the game.
Eventually, in early 2005, the team was disbanded, but the players themselves stepped in. For more than a decade, they have been releasing unofficial patches that not only removed numerous bugs but also restored content that developers have had to remove in the face of strict deadlines.
Leonard Boyarsky played a key role in the creation of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. He previously worked on the first two parts of the Fallout and Arcanum series, and later also on Diablo 3.
