Vampyr Preview

Vampyr is a 3rd person action RPG set in London in the year 1918, at the end of the first world war. You play as Doctor Jonathan Reed, a surgeon who just came back from the war. He has been turned into a vampire and he has no idea who did this to him nor why. He wants to find out what happened to him and in that process has to learn how to deal with the fact that he is a vampire now. At the time the game is set, the deadly Spanish flu is ravaging London, killing thousands of people each day. As a doctor you will be asked to help the sick people, but as a vampire you might need to kill people to drink their blood in order to survive. The game will never force you to kill any citizen for their blood. And it is fully possible to finish the game without doing that. If you want to kill everybody, you can do that as well. It is your choice to determine what kind of vampire you want to be. If you don't kill any citizens for their blood, you need to feed of the rats and drink their blood instead. A side effect of using rats for drinking blood is that you don't get the experience points for killing humans. As an effect you will level up slower. Killing a citizen for blood will gain you a lot of experience points, much more than a quest or a fight would, but the game can be solved if you don't. Killing a citizen will have an effect on what happens in London. There is always a price to pay if you do.

Like their previous Dontnod games, they wanted the narration to be the core of the experience, so according to the devs you can expect strong characters with a relationship between them that will evolve during the game, based on the choices you have made. The game features a semi-open world consisting of different districts. The player is free to explore those districts in any order.

In the game you are chased by vampire hunters, who are members of a secret society. They have been hunting and fighting vampires for centuries. At the beginning of the game the vampire hunters are the only humans aware of the existence of vampires in London.

Recently a new species of vampires, who are very primitive, aggressive and dangerous have invaded the city of London. They appear to be linked to the Spanish flu and it is part of your quest to figure this out. You hope by doing so that you might even be able to find a cure and return to your human state again.

In combat you can use besides melee and ranged weapons, your vampire skills. The one that was shown is that you are able to teleport over a short distance (named shadows) and attack your opponent from really close. Using those skills will cost blood, which is a resource. If in combat your blood level drops too low, you can always sink your teeth in one of your opponents, to restore it, which is called an embrace in the game. The vampire hunters are not helpless either, they have had many years of training and they also have a powder they can throw at you and when you get in contact with it, will burn you. The game features a large bestiary of both humans and supernatural creatures, all with specific combat techniques. As the game goes on, the level of the enemies will adjust to keep a good challenge. Auto leveling isn't great in my opinion, but given that it can happen that you lock off an entire district, it is probably their solution for solving the need to go to a district that would have opponents that are too high level for you.

All citizens in the game have identities, there is no nameless character. Each of them has friends, families, jobs, activities and sometimes even personal issues. The game provides all kinds of hints on these characters in different ways, like listening in on a conversation. This allows you to determine who you will kill next for their blood, you could for example only go for the baddies. There is no requirement however to do so, you can randomly pick someone as well.

Each of the districts in London will have a health condition, based on the average health condition of its citizens. Each time they get sick or are killed by you, the health rate of the district will decrease. If a critical status is reached, which means you have been too greedy and killed off to many citizens in that district, you will lose an entire district. The effect of this is that all the people in the district will get sick or be turned into vampires. You can prevent this from happening by not feeding too much in the district or, given that you are a doctor, heal the sick to maintain a certain health balance. If the district is lost, you will lose all the secondary quests, the merchant and anything else that could have been interesting to you. You will however still be able to finish the main storyline, but the ending of the game is likely to be different.

The amount of experience you gain from killing citizens for their blood is based on the quality of it. You can also aid those who are sick, to keep them in good health before killing them, as a healthier person will give you more experience points. To determine who is sick and who is not, you have a vampire ability that will show you the quality of your potential victim's blood. To make it easier to kill someone you can mesmerize them, as long as you can match their mental resistance. You then take control of someone in the game and they will go where you want them to go, like a dark alley, where nobody will see you drinking their blood. Whenever you kill someone for their blood, just before they die, you will get their last thoughts, so that you know who you have killed. The death of that person will have an impact in the world. If you would kill an extortionist, a merchant that was extorted by him, would as a result of that have more money and as because of that will be able to sell you more interesting items. However his son might now be left alone, because his father has died, which has an effect as well.

The game is skill based, but besides the skills discussed here, they did not want to talk about any other skills than the three mentioned in this article, but there will be 15 skills separated in 3 skill trees and all of them are exploring some aspect of being a vampire. You will not be able to create a character, you start with the character provided and some basic skills.

They are trying to use a realistic vampire lore and went back to the basics and used from that what fitted the gameplay. The example that you need to be invited before you can enter a building was given, but no others.

The game is scheduled for release in 2017 for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

You can also watch the E3 trailer below, to see some of the things written here in action and to see that the game looks quite good from a graphics perspective.