The Source engine gave the designers some powerful tools to work with, and it was impressive to see how they were put to use. Bloodlines takes place in the seedy underworld of modern-day Los Angeles, and the environment we saw in our demo was appropriately urban. On either side of a cracked street with filth-caked gutters loomed decrepit inner-city buildings lashed together with countless electrical wires. Fierce reds and greens of neon and stoplights pierced the darkness, with pools of pale light forming around the ornate streetlamps. The sun had set, and Los Angeles was your playground.
The characters were equally detailed. Our demo took us inside a seedy strip club, where pole-dancers gyrated in blood-red lights and the bartender looked as though he'd crawled out of a Star Wars movie. As he spoke to us, his lips moved in tune with the dialogue and his eyes blinked and moved realistically. The Source technology allows the characters to lip-sync to speech dynamically, so the developers were free to pile on tons of dialogue. The conversations in the demo were superbly written to fit the milieu. The branching dialogue tree was tailored to specific clans, so the Malkavians would speak in riddles and NPCs would withdraw in horror at the sight of a Nosferatu.