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[Shakanaka]

It's not as if these "new" (and I put new in quotations because I doubt World of Darkness is seeing any real advent of new players to the franchise at all. Maybe a minutiae amount at best) players will be totally insulated away from the "old" fanbase. Remember, most discourse nowadays, especially in something niche as this franchise, is done so over the internet. Anyone halfway smart will begin to realize the issues between the old editions and this current ongoing one; either from "old" fans informing them, or people taking the time to learn for themselves.
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[Shakanaka]

To be honest, these Parawolf writers should just be making CofD games and let oWoD die peacefully. W5 is going to be horrible and M5 is going to be a nuclear wasteland....

[Shakanaka]

Honestly, they should bring back the people who have the most experience with the gameline, to actually write and develop the gameline. I don't know why Parawolf only brought back one person who only worked on Vampire, to now work on all these other titles they never done before (but even then, he apparently had a lot of experience developing the Sabbat.. but now they're just unplayable NPCs by V5 RAW.. great). I already know Mage 5 is going to be biggest disaster, more-so than how Werewolf 5 is being presented right now from the Q&A alone....

[Shakanaka]

The critical problem is that I don't think Paradox can pull off a major WoD game at all. Most of their game development acumen is steeped into Grand Strategy games, and even then, the quality of the mainline games as of late is.. to be desired (*cough* Victoria 3 at a consistent 63% Steam score for about a week now). They have zero experience in making full-on RPGs, with the closest they've done to that being the Crusader Kings franchise.

To circumvent this, they got Hardsuit Labs (a mostly unknown company, hated by a Playstation console community for ruining a game called Blacklight:...

[Shakanaka]

A 6th edition this soon depends on how badly W5, then subsequently afterward, M5 does. If it gets to that dire point, Paradox will just directly intervene and nuke a lot of the stuff that was decided in 5th edition that made it so unpopular....

[Shakanaka]

I disagree with everyone saying they'll tone down the Technocracy in the coming dreaded "5th Edition" Mage. Parawolf hates everything too complex or non-"street-level", so I believe they're going to do the opposite of what everyone is saying: they're going to tone down the Traditions and make the Technocracy even more overpowered than what we saw in Revised. The Technocracy will fill-out the writer's proxy role of making Mage harder to play for the Traditions, just like what went on in Revised.

There would be no benefit for Parawolf to weaken the Technocracy, considering...

[Shakanaka]

The reason why Werewolf is in this schema of being "scaled back," harkens toward Parawolf's now universal philosophy toward the WoD franchise: everything needs to be brought down toward the "street level". By doing this, it invokes an artificial "grittiness" that can make the "horror" in the franchise "personal". Parawolf looks at the fact that since all the gamelines are composed of monsters that you play as; everything MUST be horror-based and nothing in between.

Werewolf at its core, was a roleplaying action game at heart. The Garou...

[Shakanaka]

What about the Fomori?

[Shakanaka]

Making everything in WoD increasingly culturally agnostic.. is just completely idiotic in my opinion.

What makes WoD interesting is how all the various splats intertwine with world history and environment. Hence the calling-card moniker "World of Darkness". It's a take on our already dark IRL earth history made even more darker with the introduction of all these fictional high-powered supernatural beings and organizations. That's what makes pre-WoD 5 such a draw to me over other urban fantasy series; WoD had a slight high fantasy feel to it, that also felt realistic (to...

[Shakanaka]

You know, I wonder if all this axing of past material is due to the new Parawolf writers just not wanting to read past material and properly adapt it. Instead, they'd rather just throw everything down the chute.. and come up with whatever they're coming up with now, which.. to be honest.. lol...

[Shakanaka]

Hmmm.. the recently (as in last year 2021 recent) canceled and completely forgotten about Bloodlines 2 begs to differ.

And Werewolf Earthblood was not received well at, with middling-to-negative reviews. It also generally was not marketed well, so I doubt it had a wide reach (spoiler: the same thing is going to happen to its tabletop counterpart, for reasons that I broached in the previous parts of the thread).

Wraith Afterlife had some positive reviews floating around, but since it's a VR game, it's a niche-within-a-niche in a specific gameline that was the most niche...

[Shakanaka]

I feel like Paradox stopped making CofD content because classic World of Darkness has a massive legacy cultural imprint. Especially in regard to Vampire the Masquerade, and more especially, Bloodlines.

With Paradox being a game developer / publishing company, it wants to shift all the branding and developmental resources purely to WoD. They could care less about CofD. Hell, I don't even particularly favor CofD in the first place - but even I have to point what the oddities of what's going on here. CofD fans could likewise care less about WoD, which is fair.

The problem...

[Shakanaka]

W5 is going to be a complete disaster....