Jonric: What kind of feel does Bloodlines' combat system aim for, what has been most challenging about designing and implementing it, and how does it compare to the same aspect in other Troika RPGs?

Leonard Boyarsky: Well, first off, we wanted combat to be fun and engaging, while keeping as much of the feel of Vampire as possible. Another goal was to have your Attributes and Abilities affect your combat without being intrusive. A big problem with going to real-time is the feedback for the player to be able to determine why things are happening the way they are.

The most challenging aspect of our combat was to make it work in a way that people would expect it to work in a game of this type, without sacrificing the RPG elements. For instance, if when we were adhering too closely to the pen and paper rules for guns, where it's a contest of rolls between your skill and your opponents' defense, our guns felt broken, as a lot of the time you weren't hitting what you were aiming at, and it was impossible to convey the interaction of all the different factors in a real-time setting.

In all other Troika RPGs to date, there's either been a turn-based option, or they were only turn-based. It's much easier to convey all the different factors involved in a turn-based scenario than it is a real-time one. What this system has in common with previous Troika titles is that it still factors in your Attributes and Abilities, but in a different way.