Rob "Innerloop" Huebner posted a development update on the Nihilistic Bulletin Boards giving word on progress on Vampire The Masquerade-Redemption, their upcoming horror action/RPG. Thanks Masquerade.org. The update mentions the updates to the official Vampire-The Masquerade site, and here's a good chunk of the update discussing the game's unique multiplayer experience, non-weapon hand item holding, and more detail on cool stuff to be watch out for when the game is complete (or in screenshots):

The biggest area of programming work lately has been multiplayer. Now that our deal with WON.net has been finalized and announced, we've gone full-bore into implementing the core features of the multiplayer storyteller mode. Even at a fairly early stage, its obvious this is going to be a LOT of fun. Being able to create new items at will and place them in the world as the players are playing, or to jump into the "skin" (so to speak) of an enemy and taunt the players in real time is just a great experience. We've got some preliminary interfaces running for the storyteller now, but already we're learning more about how a game like this actually functions and what features are important for storytelling to flow smoothly, so I expect some interface revisions. Its very exciting to play with this stuff, because you really realize that you are playing a type of game over the 'net that really has never existed before. The pain of re-working a few interfaces is worth the pleasure of forging a whole new genre of game, right? Still a lot of work and debugging to be done here, but now that we have played out first few experimental rounds of multiplayer VtM, everyone is pretty excited by just how much fun this is going to be. And at the moment, we can honestly say that we are the best VtM On-line storytellers in the entire world.. so there!

On the art side, we added a cool feature that allows players to hold any item in their non-weapon hand, like a torch or a lantern. With all the possible weapon/shield/held item combinations we're probably well past 50 unique animations per character. That's because every different type of weapon has its own walk, run, stand, and attack animations, and each of those has variations depending on whether or not you are holding an item or a shield.. Its pretty insane but the artists keep cranking them out.

Other stuff to watch for (gotta summarize because this post is rambling): cool new skies, awesome new "Boss" characters with killer animations, tons of new weapons (esp. in the modern day), our first cinematic cutscene, and tons of new art and textures all over the place. Keep on eye on the screenshot releases to spot this stuff..