Beginner’s Guide to Vampire: The Masquerade
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Vampire: The Masquerade – The Swan Song is the latest game in the long-running World Of Darkness series. Set in the heart of vampire society in Boston, he tasks Emem, Galeb, and Leysha with uncovering the reason behind a recent attack that has caused major tensions between various factions.
Swansong is both an RPG and a game heavily focused on its plot. While there’s no combat in the traditional sense, your stats, skills, talents, and disciplines will all be put to good use. Whether it’s winning a battle of wits, interrogating a prisoner, or bending mortals to your will. This freedom can be somewhat overwhelming, so we’ve put together some tips to help you get started.
Updated May 31, 2022: We’ve updated this guide to include a helpful video that covers our top tips to get you started in Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong.
Explore everything and take a notebook
Early, Swansong scenes can get quite long. They often hit the several hour mark and your diary is pretty darn useless. Nothing is recorded, and you have to pay attention to everything if you want to progress. Basically, this could mean reading documents and uncovering secrets with your intuition.
How about noticing a strange set of posters on a wall, or a set of books on a shelf in an unusual order. Almost everything in Swansong can be opened, unlocked or hacked, without using skills. You can even complete scenes in multiple ways. You can find clues everywhere – just look for them.
Once you think you’ve found something, you still need to make the connections. Often there will be multiple pieces to a puzzle, and manually figuring out how everything fits together is an important part of the game.. Because of this, you will need a notebook to write down potential pin codes and secure combinations.
Do not neglect your disciplines
There are two ways to activate your characters in Swansong. You can increase your stats or improve your disciplines. Your stats directly influence your ability to communicate and interact with the world. It’s things like Persuasion Where Technology. They can even be knowledge-based, such as an affinity for Deduction.
These all seem like useful abilities you should focus on, but it leaves you neglecting your Disciplines. These are the vampiric powers that allow you to bend reality, the spiritsand even time. You can get through the game without investing heavily in them, but you’re missing something.
leysha may perfectly imitate characters using Doppelganger. Emem can use Auspex to trace memories of an object or see visions of the future. galeb can Dominate people’s minds and force them to do whatever they want – overcome conversational statistics checks. This is just a small sample of what you can do, so don’t overlook them.
Don’t be afraid to use your resources
Swansong has two major resources: Will and Hunger. They both fulfill fairly similar roles but interact with different abilities. Willpower influences your ability to Hack, Hook, or Persuade. Hunger on the other hand dictates how many times you can use your vampiric powers. Both are limited, but both are essential to your success.
By using the Will, you can circumvent the need to find a pin code in a safe or increase your natural ability to communicate. This can open doors or reveal information that would otherwise be hidden from the player. They can also help you pass levels faster if you don’t want to bother with key hunting..
Hunger fills up as you use your abilities, and overusing it can leave you with no way out when it comes to achieving your goals.. Unlike Willpower, however, Hunger is easily satisfied by eating, and most scenes have plenty of opportunities to do this. Your resources are always limited, but never to the point of starvation.
Keep your hunger level low when you complete a level
One thing you should make a habit of is keeping your hunger low when you’re about to cross a point of no return.. These can be at the end of a level, or sometimes in the middle of one. In all cases, you want to opt for a last-minute feed to keep you up to date.
There are several instances where having low Hunger will open up additional options between transitions, and these can sometimes have serious plot implications.. Stay fed at the end and you won’t have any problems. Go hungry, and things could go dramatically wrong.
Hunt down thin blood artifacts
To be an RPG, Swansong has equipable items called Artifacts. These are powerfully enchanted items that grant bonuses to the wearer, such as facilitating conversations. They usually have drawbacks, but the benefits far outweigh them. The problem? They are hard to find.
These items are often found at the end of a long chain of optional content in a scene and are easily missed.. It’s very possible to go through the entire game and never come across one. While that’s not the end of the game as they’re optional, you’d definitely be better off doing your best to find them whenever possible.
Use your consumables
There are consumables scattered around Swansong, and they’re all very useful – if not downright powerful. These can range from a stack of old coins that replenish willpower, to much rarer concoctions that restore hunger. At the most extreme end of things, you might find an item that temporarily boosts your statslike a Lockpick or a vial of ancient vampire blood.
Storing these items won’t do you any good. Using a consumable to temporarily boost your ability to hack could open up areas of the game that were locked to you because you didn’t invest enough. Downing a concoction to restore hunger could give you that extra edge when you need it most.
Not only that, there are parts of the game that can strip you of all your gearso if you’re not using them and you fall into one of these scenarios, well, you wasted them all.
play the game again
Swansong is a game full of interesting choices. Not all of them are significant, but they all at least give the illusion of being something game-changing. Damn, some of them are game changers. You won’t be able to see everything on your first playthrough. Things are very well hidden, so you might miss them.
Other times you have no choice – you have to make a decision and it sets you on one path while locking another.. Going through Swansong more than once can give you more perspective on what’s really going on, and allows you to find any secondary objectives the game told you about after you failed to find them the first time around.
The best part? Replaying the game lets you fast forward through dialogue you’ve already seen. This makes replaying the game much faster. This will pass in a flash if you were also taking notes, because you can just reference all those PINs and passwords and type them in when needed.
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