Vampyr Gets Two New Modes: Story and Baffling

It seems like DONTNOD is coming in clutch… ish. The reviews of Vampyr, their gorgeous RPG, were pretty clear: your story is pretty good, but you buried it in utterly painful combat. Taking that and player feedback into account, they’re adding a story mode to the game. In it, players can focus more on the actual story of Vampyr and less on the floaty, rage-inducing combat system. This is a great move that follows in the steps of many older games, making the game more accessible for disabled or casual players. After many hours spent playing the game for our review and my own enjoyment, I am excited to get into story mode and see how it affects immersion and character relations.

The other mode DONTNOD announced is, given the gist of all reviews, completely baffling. Hard mode does exactly what it says, and makes the combat harder. It also awards less experience for killing enemies, forcing players to rely on killing storyline citizens instead. I don’t know what masochistic Git Guders got in touch with the devs, but y’all. The combat was already hard, and not for good reasons. Awarding less experience and requiring players to kill more citizens, in a game where those choices directly alter the total amount of story you get to enjoy? Making combat with clunky mechanics and overblown street-level enemies more punishing? Who asked for this?

I suppose I’ll have to be fair and jump back in to see how this pans out, but I am not excited for hard mode. I vividly remember a certain human boss fight that needed to be revisited by everyone who touched it, save maybe the texture folks. If that fight got any “harder”, I’d ask for a refund of the purchase price. Hopefully, the optimizations rolled into this patch will help the entire combat system, since they do touch on Vampyr‘s sometimes unreliable targeting. There are a million interesting stories in Vampyr‘s streets of London, but the average player might never know without story mode. With a little luck, optimizations will make the game more enjoyable for frequent gamers, and I guess hard mode is always there for players who gauge difficulty by button mashes per second.