Is World of Darkness really still relevant? I was under the impression that their sales collapsed in the late 90s and they never recovered (last I heard they sold a total of 6-7 million books lifetime). White Wolf doesn’t even exist as a company anymore since it was bought, dissolved, and sold by video game companies. Their recent werewolf video game was a disaster, their big vampire game is in development hell after an extremely tumultuous development cycle that scrapped most of their work, and their remaining titles on Steam are low budget text adventure shovelware that are eclipsed in quality by indie mockbuster titles like Red Embrace: Hollywood.
Depends. I'm currently playing Werewolf the Apocalypse 20th on Telegram with several others and all we ever use is the dice rolling bot I added to the group; we don't follow any canon details White Wolf set up for the world as a whole, so the Wyrm has been severely weakened and there's a possibility we may find one of the White Howlers or the Apis. As for who plays this IP besides us, if the most recent books are any hint, and I mostly use 1D4chan for info on those releases, only the most slavering SJW tards play beyond the 20th Anniversary (4th Edition) versions, or maybe Revised AKA their 3rd Edition if they have those books. (I still find it hilarious how White Wolf thought framing the president of Chechnya as a literal monster and encouraging violence against him would go over well. Idiots.)
Otherwise, yeah. Earthblood was a letdown. I was expecting at least an action-RPG like Bound by Flame or Technomancer, but no, it's just an action brawler game with a stealth system that is weaker than the Styx games, which were developed by the same company no less. How does that work? Heart of the Forest is typical text adventure dross, just with the Werewolf lore and some WOD systems in place. Hell, the devs even praised it as helping feminist causes after it came out. Ugh, gag me.
Vampire the Masquerade 2 probably won't ever come out without severe compromises or buggy code. The game has been moved to another developer, and as I hear, the script might be getting a rewrite, even though it was already done, so make of that what you will.
The guys who made the original back in 2004 were at least held in place by the understanding that unless they made the best game they possibly could, Troika would go out of business. The devs now are being held up by Paradox, the company that bought them, so they could produce something like Cyberpunk 2077, something worthy of an hour long AVGN episode, and barely lose any people.
I'm just not interested in the lore and activism baked into the games, so they're basically useless to me. I don't like being constantly pipelined toward them either, since there's basically no notable urban fantasy tabletop community outside that (aside from
Shadowrun and maybe
Dresden Files).
With something like D&D you have plenty of freedom to create your own worlds and are encouraged to do so. The classes, monsters, etc are very modular in that respect. Even in the canonical settings, the same monster or class might be completely different between worlds.
You don't have that with urban fantasy. There are a bunch of dead 90s games and a handful of indie games being sold on digital. No single game that provides the kind of freedom comparable to D&D. Even when WotC tried to do
Urban Arcana, it still failed. The majority of interest seems to be in high fantasy, with every other genre being drops in the bucket.
The guys who made the original back in 2004 were at least held in place by the understanding that unless they made the best game they possibly could, Troika would go out of business. The devs now are being held up by Paradox, the company that bought them, so they could produce something like Cyberpunk 2077, something worthy of an hour long AVGN episode, and barely lose any people.
What is strange is that they produced a very interesting "actual gameplay" video (like CP 2077 did) only to suddenly fire, IIRC, the lead creative guy and either the producer or one of the developing houses (I could check but I'm lazy). The crowds became restless but I fear that they looked at the real product, then at CP 2077, and realised that for no reason in the world they wanted that. Someone messed up. I hope that the Publisher's intervention will be out of good sense.
I would actually be quite relieved if they fail. If the WoD games go under and become permanently unsupported because the IP owner doesn't care, then it might allow somebody else to move in on the market. I know RPG fans have this extreme brand loyalty compared to other markets, but I've never heard of a years OOP game maintaining a huge community to the present without the aid of retrocloning. If WotC hadn't stepped in, how likely do you think that D&D would've survived to the present? There's pretty much no reason to buy the WoD IP compared to writing your own, either. All of the worthwhile material was either pulled from public domain sources or rip-offed from other authors like Anne Rice and Brian Lumley.