Former BioWare lead writer says the best level in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines gave him ‘ammunition’ to argue that story can be just as engaging as combat

You ever get sick of trashmob fights? I admit it: sometimes I just want to run from A to B without massacring half a village, cutting down group after group of bandits, goblins, and imps who have only really been placed there to stop me from getting bored.

I am, apparently, joined in this philosophy by David Gaider, former BioWare lead writer and creator of the Dragon Age setting, who apparently spent a fair bit of time at the studio trying to stop people sprinkling those kinds of things everywhere. Even better, the game he used to support his point was none other than Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

Speaking to PCGN, Gaider recalled Bloodlines’ Ocean House Hotel level, a regular spook-a-thon that emotionally scarred me at the tender age of 15 or so. “There’s a whole plot that takes place in a haunted hotel,” said Gaider, “where, unlike the rest of the game, there’s no actual combat, but it’s tense from beginning to end.”

Apparently, Ocean House sunk its claws pretty deep at the studio, to the extent that it was “all anybody on the BioWare team could talk about” for a good while. That level gave Gaider “some ammunition” to push back on demands for more combat: “Whenever the level designers would be like ‘we have to sprinkle some popcorn fights everywhere because players get bored,’ I was like ‘no, they don’t! That doesn’t need to be a thing!'”

Not that it always worked. During his time on Dragon Age: Inquisition, Gaider recalls wanting its Val Royeaux masquerade ball to be totally combat-free. “I just couldn’t convince everybody. So you kept having to duck out of the masquerade, go have a fight, then come back into it.” To be fair, I’ve been to parties like that.

“Players need to be kept interested, absolutely,” concedes Gaider, but adds that he thinks “it’s always underestimated that part of that can be story—politics can keep people interested. What the player doesn’t need to do is just fight, even if it’s an RPG.” Frankly, I agree. When I look back on the stuff that’s truly gripped me in RPGs over the years, the nameless bandit fights tend not to rank.