Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a 2004 action role-playing video game developed by Troika Games and published by Activision for PC's.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The game is set in The World of Darkness, a popular dark/urban fantasy tabletop RPG setting.
 * 2) The game features a mature and intricate storyline that explores the politics of a ancient vampiric society in 2000's California.
 * 3) Conversations with NPC's and cutscenes have a nice cinematic feeling to them.
 * 4) The game has a variety of skills for the player to learn that can unlock alternate paths and solutions to quests, some of which are hidden to the player.
 * 5) The game features various factions that the player can align themselves with their own path and ending like in Fallout: New Vegas.
 * 6) Great characters like Jeanette/Therese Voerman, Smiling Jack, and Bertram Tung.
 * 7) The game tackles mature themes without coming across as too heavy handed such as Dissociative identity disorder, class struggles, and familicide.
 * 8) Each of the 7 vampire clans the player can choose at the start have their own defined strengths and weaknesses. Your choice of vampire clan can also affect NPC interactions. All of the dialogue options in conversations can be sometimes different depending on your clan.
 * 9) Plenty of funny moments, especially if the player is a Malkavian.
 * 10) There is a great in depth tutorial the player can experience at the beginning of the game. However, the player can skip it if they wish.
 * 11) There is a popular mod called the Clan Quest Mod that adds in scrapped content, a new path where the player joins the Sabbat with 3 endings, and numerous bugfixes making it the definitive version.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The vanilla game without mods is very glitchy.
 * 2) Tons of content was cut from the game due to the deadline imposed on Troika.

Reception
Although at launch there was some criticism due to the amount of bugs, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is considering to be among the greatest RPG's of all time with a Metacritic score of 80%.

Trivia

 * The game is referenced in the creepypasta BEN DROWNED.