Short article with more information:
TLDR: Dev is The Chinese Room, developer of Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. They still won't say what happened with Hardsuit Labs, the OG dev, and the mechanics and system will be totally different.
Instead of a thin-blood, you're an Elder fresh from torpor.
Instead of a thin-blood, you’re an Elder fresh from torpor.
How do people feel about that? I have mixed feelings, but I think mostly negative. In an RPG, thin-bloods just seem to have the most room for growth. It lets the player learn about the setting alongside the character (in the way novels frequently use an "outsider" to the world as the POV), and lets them have the maximum control over how their character develops and define who their character is.
But on the other hand, the narrative potential for a story about a Kindred who wakes up from torpor after a really long time is really rich. A character who was embraced at a time when the height of technology was the steam engine, and presumably spent the next couple of centuries becoming extremely powerful both within Kindred society and in the broader sense, but now wakes up in the 21st century in the middle of the Second Inquisition? You could do a lot with that that's really interesting. I'm just not sure if an RPG which is our first exposure to the character, is the best way to do that. Two or three earlier games with the same character, with each one moving forward in time from the character's first embrace up until the height of their power, and then this game, would intuitively strike me a lot better.
I think being an Elder would fit better for the amount of power you'll have as a PC, it makes more sense for an Elder to be carving up other Elders rather than a fresh embrace.
The technology learning curve will be very interesting if they don't handwave it away with "you spent the last month privately coming up to date on tech" or something similar. The PC mirroring the immortal words of my grandfather when I once asked for his WiFi password: "What's a WiFi?" would be hilarious
If this was a well planned out AAA series, a game or two as a prequel would be awesome, I'm all for a Cowboys and Kindred game. Maybe they could've had an import save system like they did in Witcher3 so your choices impacted the game.
I think being an Elder would fit better for the amount of power you’ll have as a PC, it makes more sense for an Elder to be carving up other Elders rather than a fresh embrace.
But presumably at the start of the game you won't be carving up Elders. I feel like, narratively, it's easier to justify an unusually quick growth in power than it is to explain a dramatic reduction in power from where you should be.
I'm going to be real, this is a "Gamepass game" for me. No shot I purchase it.
I'm in full on "I'll believe it is real when it is available and well reviewed" mode