Never played the first Vampire. But the second got a great style. Very stylish and creepy.
My theory is that Troika had problems with valve. Troika was developing Vampire with the early HL2 enginge and while Valve was that dump to let somebody steal their code Troika never get a full help for the code they got from valve...
Troika is closed and fucking valve not...
´The character creation could have been more in depth? Yeah, sure they planned that. But they hadn't enough time to balance it. I don't know wich you had to do, but i think there's a mod out with wich you could see that they had planned to add a char background, like a Malcavian Ninja wich fears rubber ducks (so a real crazy background for them) and alot of other things, like they had in Arcanum ....
I'm really upset that Vampires Bloodlines is that bad, because it had a lot of potential... great facial expression of the chars, good voices, great music, a fine story, a creepy style of graphic... etc.
But if you ever opened the console and saw the hundreds of errors you can imagine what went wrong. Ant also the game length, it could have been alot more (for my taste)...
GTA like... only the engine...