Saturday, April 21, 2012

Ancient Heroes in the Digital Age

Question: I'm a long time fan of White Wolf. I really liked the game Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines. So my question (silly though it is) is this, do you think Scion would transfer well into a video game? Why or why not?

Hey, we're long-time fans of White Wolf, too! (You can tell because sometimes we refer to combo disciplines or what a given god has "in-clan".) We've both played Bloodlines and enjoyed it. In fact, we've also played Redemption, seen all of Kindred: the Embraced and not only play Vampire: the Eternal Struggle but also have an inordinate number of cards old enough to still have the Jyhad and Rage logos on them, but now we're just dating ourselves. We're pretty jazzed to see what the good folks at WW and CCP come up with for the forthcoming V:tM MMORPG, as well.

As far as Scion goes, we have pretty solid faith that video games, as a medium, can do almost any amazing thing you want them to. We definitely think a great Scion video game could be made - but, sadly, we don't think one will. For one thing, much as we love Scion to bits, we're aware that it's not WW's bread and butter - the World of Darkness is where most of their hype and money comes from (with Exalted a close second), so it's unlikely that they'll sink any significant investment into Scion or any of the other less popular lines. It's probably not the most sound financial decision they could make, especially since there are tons of mythology-based video games already out there, and they don't have much in the way of proprietary copyright the way they do with their other properties.

There's also the issue of the fact that, while an awesome Scion video game definitely could be made, it'd be a very expensive, very complicated endeavor, and we fear that it's more likely that it'd end up substandard. For all the reasons above, it probably wouldn't have the financial backing to go 100% as badass as it needs to, and we wouldn't want to see something that could have been awesome be demoted to flawed and serviceable (again, we've already played Redemption - zing).

I totally think it's possible. I'd love to see it someday - you better believe I'd be the first in line to get a copy the second it came out! But I don't know if I believe there's really any chance of it happening, and I'm not sure I have faith in WW, at this time, to really give it the love it'd need to be great.

That's a Kickstarter campaign I'd totally donate to, though.

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