This is just my opinion, but with it seeming like characters from other “dimensions” being the season 3 theme, I would like to see Gabriel Belmont possibly brought in as a guest character, or if they make a unique vampire, at least use him as a guide by which to build the vampire around. He had such a varied moveset that would lend well to making awesome looking combos out of, plus the light/dark magic enhancements Gabriel has would make for an interesting Instinct mode or secondary ability where when activated you could choose from either enhanced damage or healing (maybe nerfed to just enhanced defense?) & different combo enders when either are activated than normal or shadow enders.
This is what I’m afraid of with the inclusion of Rash because it is now easy to go off track. The same problem that plagued KI2 in which IG do not want to do is the Time Travel shtick and using the excuse “just because Time Travel”. Well now that is the same trap because with the Portals and the inclusion of Rash, we can just put anyone and everyone in this game why? “Just because Portals man”. This is the slippery slope that was well avoided in Season 1 and 2 and makes me uneasy now with Rash’s introduction to KI, now Gabriel Belmont and My Little Pony, and Samus Aran, Mickey Mouse are all viable characters…All they need to do is bring Gargos through that portal, maybe minions of his or those put in stasis with him (possibly Tusk, Kim Wu) and that is it
I’d rather stick to a REAL vampire!
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Me too son, me too
But what about a dhampir? We had Blade.
And I love the Underworld vampire movie series.
I like that idea too, but I don’t like Blade. I still would rather have the classy, Victorian, dangerously sexy vampire like Gary Oldman pulled off in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, or something very similar to that.
What track?? As far as I can tell there has never really been any cohesive rhyme or reason to why characters in KI exist other than just “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a robot & a werewolf fight each other?” with an extremely molecular-level thin excuse of a story to make it happen. It’s always been about the fight, the one-on-one. I mean, look at Hisako. Her story, in a nutshell, is “I’m an angry ghost & the bad guys took my stuff, I gotta get it back.” Whatever the case, it’s always been game first, reasons later.
& Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying just throw in whatever just “because Portals man”…but if it fits the KI style (& Gabriel’s plethora of attack variations would), why not? The whole idea of bringing in any sort of guest character is to draw in possible new fans by attracting them with something they already like, & new blood is always good.
Plus, like I said earlier, having a vampire character LIKE Gabriel (kinda like how Fulgore is just a terminator/predator hybrid) would be just fine as well.
On a side note: My Little Pony…really…I mean…what the…really???
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Eh… Stronger and brutal vampire are better than sexy vampire.
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Zeyol is the guy with cool character designs. This vampire art is awesome btw, but how do u pronounce his name?
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Prounounced “Kay-Or”.
A vampire/vampire-type character for Season 3: Hell yeah! Let’s make that happen now! 
I had an idea for an aerial grappler character based on El Chupacabra, the vampiric alien looking crpytid from Mexico, back on the old forums. A nice switch from the traditional vampire model.
The idea revolved around giving the character a lot of air mobility similar to Omen or Sadira, but giving them the ability to do command grabs mid air. Obviously, having a very mobile grappler would be really scary, so damage would likely need to be scaled back to keep them from being terrifyingly broken, maybe giving them really slow movement on the ground.
As far as the rest of the topic goes, I like the idea of either the classic, the monster, or the inbetween. The in between sounds like a really good one, since it can have a generally attractive outward appearance in neutral game, but when they’re on the offence or in instinct they fulfill the more monstrous archetype as well. Good call, @PuutyCuuty
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These are the most interesting suggestions for a vampire in my personal opinion. Alot of the other vampire ideas I’ve seen look like they have little to offer to the character design wise. If he is to be a monster make him one. the human with fangs is kinda…overdone I feel. The top one in particular I think would be the best one to look at because it’s clearly a monster that sticks out and retains the humanoid form most people associate with a vampire.
He just won’t stick out from the human characters if he/she is made another attractive Vampire.
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The issue I have with a monster vampire is that it kinda…muddies the idea of it being a vampire. Is it a vampire, or is it a monster which also drinks blood? That’s not how vampires are depicted, and if you go by the trends of design that KI already has, the basis for the characters are much more traditional. Warrior Monk. Killer Robot. Werewolf. Boxer. Dinosaur. They’re not just things, they’re archetypes.
That’s what turns me off from having too much of a “hyphen” character; a character which is a vampire-monster-demon-beast. That kind of character direction isn’t really in KI that much as it is, nor should it be, imo, because it makes the smaller roster that much more defined.
Riptor kinda veers towards that by being a Robot-Dinosaur, but the robot part is kinda just a visual addendum, as in, it being a robot isn’t really a big part of the presentation or gameplay (as seen when you play the classic costume). No matter how you depict it, a non-human vampire takes away from the archtypal core of what a vampire is in the first place.
Actually, it’s a pretty common misconception that vampires were originally the suave, sexy beings we know them as today.
We owe most of that to Bella Lugosi.
Vampires may have been humanoid in form, but their influence was supernatural, not simply carnal. During the “vampire hunts” in several European countries, the symptoms of vampirism (later revealed to be symptoms of just being dead) included bloating, discoloration, abnormally long hair and fingernails compared to when they were buried, and blood leaking from the mouth.
Even in the oldest example of modern vampire fiction, Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t a looker. When Nosferatu was released, the creators were actually sued by the late Stoker’s widow. Why? Because that creepy looking old creature feature not only nicked almost every plot point from the novel, but apparently it looked too much like Bram Stoker’s vision of what a vampire would look like. He never described the trademark modern pair of fangs, he described a creature with sharp teeth like a vampire bat designed to cut people open and drain them of blood.
Let’s not forget that olden day views of undeath were far less benign than out modern day interpretation. Vampirism was the work of evil spirits and, once Christianity was popularized, the influence of hellish demons. Vampires were not simply blood s ucking dudes in capes, they were the source of fatal illness. If someone was bedridden, it was believed by many that a loved one had been turned into a vampire and was slowly draining them of all life.
One final thing; there was no way to KILL a vampire in the old stories. They were dead already, and had been raised by demons of hell to wreak havoc upon the living. The only way to stop a vampire was to immobilize it. This led to bodies being buried upside down, mutilating the body and having various limbs replaced in different spots, and of course the now iconic stake through the heart; because -surprise- having a giant nail in the middle of your chest pinning you to the ground with but a few inches to maneuver made it a bit difficult to get up in the evening. They were also nocturnal not because they would be destroyed in the sun, but because they just were. Sure, a bunch of legends popped up about how they needed to remain in a coffin with their birthsoil, but we can mostly blame Stoker for that.
Back on Nosferatu, being the first vampire flick and maybe even the first horror movie ever made, it’s little surprise that it was influential. Despite basically ripping off Dracula, they changed one major element; his death. Rather than being staked through the heart like in the novel, he was the very first vampire to die in the sunlight. Thus, the vampire as we know it came to be.
Now, modern vampires have evolved quite a bit. For the longest time, they obviously have been working on the charismatic take. Vampires appear to hold eternal youth postmortem, and have become an icon of human sexuality and violence. Some works have even taken this level of seduction so far as to make the act of being fed upon by a vampire to be so pleasurable, nothing afterwards compares, netting the vampire a source of stable food as their new pet waits in the basement to get their fix.
However, recently more modern vampires movies have turned the trend right back around. In their attempt at modernism, they ironically get closer to the origins of vampires. They don’t look to humans for love or pleasure, they view us as food. This is reflected in more modern vampire designs, whether they simply be more toothy and aggressive like in 30 Days of Night, or if they become completely monstrous, taking the image of a predator and amping it to 11. In a way, it’s not so much a reimagining, despite how much they’ve changed from the norm, but it brings vampires back to the root of what they’ve always been…
Monsters.
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Right - vampires have been around for millenia. I actually did a ton of research on vampire lore and history for an old mod I made for another game, and they really have been all over the map up until around Varney and then started to crystallize a bit. But this is a game which builds on contemporary monster tropes and very defined character design. If you ask people what they see as a vampire now, they think of the modern view.
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And has KI stuck 100% to tropes? Not entirely. Like how DH described Sabrewulf’s recently acquired drug habit after the whole “robot arms” thing.
Look at the changes made to characters like Jago, Riptor, Maya, and Spinal that made them more than just the same tired trope as before. If KI is going to add in a vampire character, they should do something unique that makes them stand out from the crowd. 30 Days of Night didn’t catch on because it followed the same rules, it became a success because it changed things up and made an image for vampires that was more original, even if that originality meant tapping into even older style vampire lore to get to this more modern, edgy aesthetic.
Why make the same sort of character that’s already everywhere when we could make something you don’t see every day?
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Yes, but the deviations aren’t the kind of thing that completely changes the presentation of the character - they’re just, effectively, different skins, but the actual core design is very…pure, I guess you could say. And it’s not that different is wrong, or worse, it’s that this game already has an arc to the way it’s characters are defined, and that arc is a much more directed and contemporary style, and less of mixing all kinds of different types for a single character.
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A valid point.
Though there have been plenty of times in film I’ve seen romantic and monstrous vampires share the same screen, and even the same body. Concealing their true nature behind a guise of beauty, much like the flower mantis.
If anything, I think the idea of using Instinct to switch between sexy and savage forms was a pretty cool one, though personally I still think that the 30 Days of Night style in which they maintain their humanoid form while retaining features that would allude to their natural bloodlust.
Tantalizing yet terrifying.
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