Skyrim remake of 24-year-old Vampire RPG shows off its modern London level, and the guns are way less janky than I expected

Skyrim total conversion mod Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption Reawakened just got an updated look at its modern-day portion, with a 10-minute video showcasing London in the year 2000, as well as how the team's managed to get firearms working pretty well in the battered warhorse that is Bethesda's seminal 2011 RPG.

The original Redemption preceded its much better-known (and more beloved) CRPG sibling, VTM - Bloodlines, by a good four years. It has a fantastic premise and atmosphere, with half the game taking place in the late middle ages, while the second half sees vampire knight Christof as a fish out of water in turn of the millennium London and New York. Unfortunately, it falls victim to maybe every one of the worst trends of late '90s, early '00s RPGs, like Sideshow Bob stepping into a sea of rakes.

You had a full party with no tactical pausing or direct control of your companions, resulting in that kind of janky, mushy RPG combat where a myriad of obtuse stats are what really determine the outcome of fights⁠—basically it's just the sort of game where a serious overhaul remaster is very welcome.

We've previously reported on Redemption Reawakened's medieval portion, but this is the first good luck of the modern day we've gotten in a hot minute. The first bit of the video shows Christoff shooting his way out of a vampire hunter facility⁠—it's not the most exciting of dungeons, but the RR team's clutter game is really on-point, populating this office with all the assorted physics bits and boobahs that I crave in a first-person RPG. No Skyrim conversion can ever fully get rid of the stink of Skyrim, but the team still pulled off a believable, tactile environment in a completely different art style to the base game.

And the gunplay looks pretty good too⁠—it's hard to tell without feeling it in the hand, but the first-person animations look better and more believable to my eye than what we saw in Skyrim's contemporary first-person RPGs like Fallout 3, New Vegas, or indeed, Vampire Bloodlines. I'm curious to see where the team goes with the third person animations though⁠—right now the cops and vampire hunters Christof fights are holding their guns more or less like swords.

The demo sequence really comes alive when Christof goes topside though. Redemption Reawakened's urban zones have that same noirish vibe that I cherish from Bloodlines, and this is one area of the project that really blew my expectations of a Skyrim mod out of the water: London looks like a modern city, and not an absurd Skyrim approximation of one. The showcase also features a preview of a GTA-style police response system, with Christof shotgunning some beat cops, provoking a SWAT tactical response, complete with a helicopter dropping off riot shield-toting elites.

Progress continues apace on this seriously impressive mod, and I can't wait to play it, though it currently has no set release window. To keep up with progress on Redemption Reawakened, you can follow project lead Galejro on Twitter or YouTube.