And that’s totally understandable, because in the original game, the volume was not at the same level for everyone, and the sound quality could be a bit questionable (although it was a different time in 2004…).

A modder, aptly named TheAudioService, has spent a considerable amount of time improving the sound quality of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. They have balanced the volume and quality of the dialog. This is not just one file, but more than 5500 (!) lines of dialog have been restored. The description of the mod says that the changes are minor and sometimes even imperceptible, but there will be times when you will notice a significant difference. In a video (embedded below), he demonstrates how talking to Mercutio at the beginning of the game has improved the quality of the conversation.

It’s this character in particular that makes you think about how the original, released nearly twenty years ago, recorded the speech in such atrocious quality. For a game of such high caliber (and still considered a classic today), the quality is surprisingly poor, and while the mod doesn’t make everything perfect, the remastered dialog is certainly improved.

Reddit’s TheAudioService said it did not use artificial intelligence in its upgrade processes: “I fixed issues with changing recording situations between sessions, volume changes between lines, resonance issues, compression issues, [and] frequency issues. It definitely sounds like the same microphone was used for most of the lines. But it seems like they sometimes took the mic on the road and recorded somewhere else, resulting in a change in quality between lines, sometimes within the same dialog in the game.”

Mod Release: Bloodlines Voices Remastered
byu/P_Sandera invtmb

The best part is that you can use this mod (which is on Nexus Mods) in conjunction with the Bloodlines Unofficial Patch on ModDB, and there is even an optional module in TheAudioService’s mod to tweak the sound in the mod that makes the game much more playable. And today, the Unofficial Patch is really essential to install, as it really brings the game up to the standard that Fallout: New Vegas is, even though it was six years away from release.

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