In Night Road you use cars to make your courier runs, you use people to get the blood you need to survive, you use other vampires before they can use you. There’s a lot of William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer in Night Road, partly because we’re very consciously living in an 80s future here in 2020-even the vampires-and partly because it’s a story about manipulating things. I mostly write fantasy and pulp, so I’ve consciously tried to avoid the noir-ish tone of cyberpunk, but with Night Road I’ve let myself embrace that style. Richard Kadrey is one: his early work, Metrophage, is a defining cyberpunk novel, but his big project now is the tough-guy demon hunter of the Sandman Slim series. Is there anything that’s influenced your overall style of writing?Ī lot of urban fantasy (of which Vampire: The Masquerade is a part) emerged in the wake of the cyberpunk movement, and many authors I first encountered in science fiction eventually made the jump to urban fantasy. You’ve stated before that Night Road was inspired partly by the works of Jack Kerouac and Richard Kadrey. The result is a massive and complex game.ģ. Night Road is even more complex: between courier runs, you can buy and upgrade cars, acquire property, learn new disciplines (vampire powers everything from super-strength to mind control to turning into a coyote), and even go on mini-missions. Silverworld is a time travel adventure in which you can shape a Stone Age village in between going on journeys to repair your time machine. Both games have something else in common, too: both have a “home base” that you can build up and develop to your satisfaction. I wish there were more of a process to it-these games have a habit of growing if you’re not careful, and it’s never easy! I know because Night Road is even longer than Silverworld, at least 600k. Can you describe the process of creating something of that magnitude? Your longest game, Silverworld, clocks in at 560,000 words. You might end up respected by your fellow undead but broke, or on the run but backed up by your closest friends…or just a greasy pile of ash. It also means that Night Road has not just multiple endings, but multiple, overlapping kinds of endings based on different measures of success. How do you introduce real choices if every choice creates a new chapter? Well, rather than creating a new chapter, Night Road tracks those ending variables to determine how well you’re doing. This neatly solves the problem of branching plotlines that early choose-your-path books suffered from. Your choices throughout the game test various stats, and how well you do influences those ending variables. Night Road features multiple playable vampire clans and supernatural powers that will be familiar to any Vampire: The Masquerade player, and the game engine tracks multiple “ending variables” like your popularity with different factions, your resources, and how well you’ve preserved the Masquerade (the iron law of secrecy that prevails in undead society). You may remember these from various choose-your-path books, but a full programming language lets us do things a Choose Your Own Adventure book or even a book-and-dice game like Fighting Fantasy can’t. How would you describe the style of games made by Choice of Games, for someone who wasn’t familiar?Ĭhoice of Games creates branching, interactive stories. I was fortunate enough to get in touch with the author of Night Road, the spectacular Kyle Marquis, to discuss not only this incredible project, but also his many other works and upcoming projects, all of which will surely interest any fans of great fiction writing.ġ. The game, Vampire: The Masquerade-Night Road, is a gargantuan original tale, clocking in at over 600,000 words. It’s already been 16 years since the release of the original Bloodlines, so World of Darkness fans are no strangers to waiting, but with the new game so tantalizingly close, it begs the question what can fans of the series do to sate their thirst for Vampire content? Well, fret not, as September 24th will see the release of the first in a trio of text-based adventure games set in the World of Darkness, all published by Choice of Games LLC, an established and well-respected name in the interactive fiction genre. Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 is set to finally release sometime in 2021.
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