Developer Dotnod Entertainment was kind enough to invite us to their booth to take a good long peek at their latest upcoming game Vampyr. The studio created the luke-warm received Remeber Me, and the incredibly popular and critically well-received Life Is strange, and now they’re here to deliver us a story of vampires in England.
It seems the studio is taking a bit of both of their previous projects for this one. Vampyr is an action RPG set in the Victorian era in England during the epidemic of the Spanish Flu. The demonstration started with a funeral the main character attends to in the background. The main character is a handsome looking man who’s also a doctor so you know he’s got a steady income ladies. There might be one drawback to the man depending on who you ask. He’s a vampire. Immediately, we get this great set-up of a man whose a doctor, a man who decided to cure and heal. But he’s also a vampire who needs blood to survive, killing people in the process. There is an interesting set-up at play already. Players can choose to either kill everyone they see like a vampire or try to cure people of the flu like a doctor. You can also be a bit doctor and a bit vampire if you want to. It’s up to you if you want to be good or evil or both. Going back to the demonstration our main character is approached by a woman who also seems to be a vampire. The two talk and it looked really stiff but after a few sentences I knew why. The game has a dialogue wheel which lets you ask and tell people the way you see fit.
After the conversation, the Jonathan(the main character by the way) heads out into the city. Levels are designed as districts and are fairly all hub levels. Jonathan comes across hunters who are looking to kill his kind on the street and avoids them by warping to an opening in a house nearby. What follows is a bit of walking around which shows off the visual fidelity of the game very well. The game looks really good at the moment. After some walking around and stuff happening Jonathan engages in combat. There is a lock-on, an attack with a knife and your claw and special moves. It looks like just about any other Action RPG works nowadays. But combined with the gothic English setting I got some serious Bloodborne vibes. Once Jonathan entered a new area we saw two people arguing. The player then activated some kind of vision which looks an awful lot like the whole Watch_Dogs character profile thing. It showed information of the characters like if they were infected by the flu, jobs, family or current situations they were in. We found out that one person was being extorted for money and was a shopkeeper while the extorter has a bedridden son. Killing people in the game will affect the town and its economy. The example here was that if Jonathan killed the extorter, the shopkeep would be able to afford more exclusive items but the bedridden son is now without a caretaker and will die. Or maybe Jonathan kill the shopkeeper which means he can’t buy items anymore. As people die or get cured the hub levels will start to function differently. If you choose to kill everyone in a certain section it will fall into decay and look like a post-apocalyptic hell-scape. The demo ended with Jonathan going to church and having a generic conversation to the pastor about monsters.
Vampyr is one of the games I was most impressed by this year. It’s doing some cool stuff in a cool setting. The writing seemed pretty good and on point and graphically it looked impressive. Vampyr is shaping up to become a really great title.
