Shortly after my hunt for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines in the shops (I like to have legitimate versions of games where possible), and having purchased a copy and started playing (I chose to go with the Malkavian clan, in case anyone cares), I now see that it’s been brought out on Steam, Valve’s content delivery service. In a way I’m not too bothered… it would only have saved me tuppence or so over buying it in the shops (after tax), and it’s nice to have the CD’s and manual at my disposal. However there are a couple potential issues I have with this release. Firstly, will the Steam release include all of the hard work done by the community? The last “official” patch for V:TMB brought it up to version 1.2, but the community has worked hard to recently release patch 3.6 (!!), fixing a large number of issues with the game. Hopefully the community will continue with this work, as it’s very much appreciated.
Secondly, and more importantly from my viewpoint is that V:TMB uses the Source engine, a’la Half-Life 2. With the game now being available on Steam, will it be modified to use the latest version of the Source engine, which should fix additional problems and also run better? And if it is… will this new-engine update be available to us people who bought the CD version? We can only hope.
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HELP! I have bought this game myself, and I can’t get it to run. Each time I run it I get the message “failed to Load VPHYSICS.DLL”.
I have been looking forward to playing this for ages… can you help or point me in the right direction please?
Hi. I’ve not seen the problem you have (the worst problem I’ve seen was that V:TMB would try to set my monitor to some stupid resolution by default).
All I can suggest is that you check for the file vphysics.dll in your Vampire/bin directory (not sure of the actual location as I’m at work).
Oddly, looking around the ‘net, vphysics.dll issues are usually related to the use of the SDK (in Source-engined games).
Do you get as far as the menus? If so, put all of your settings to minimum and see if it’ll run. If not, try running the game in safe mode.
Thanks for your sdvice. O did het it running and it is an awesome game. Sorry it took me two years to respond!
By the way – can I say that the scary haunted house sequence has to be one of my all time scariest game sections ever! I used to play resident evil the origiinal and that was brutal, but this is really really good. The story just makes it more terifying than any other game sequence I have played to date!