I encountered the World of Darkness after 2nd edition AD&D stopped being fun in the 90's. It was this deep, rich setting full of lore and mysteries, and I found it tragically cool.
The rules were utter garbage, of course, and I've never encountered a more frustrating, poorly written game in my life (I could debate Fantasy Craft, but that game's problem had more to do with terrible formatting than the rules themselves being arcane- for the most part).
The different Clans of vampires were cool, even if some of their concepts were...built on shaky ground ("We're the vampires from Bram Stoker's Dracula!" "We're the vampires from Nosferatu!" "We're Set-worshippers from the Hyborian Age!" "We're a bad take on Muslims/Romani!" "We're werewolves in every way but werewolves are also a thing!" "We're vampires that like art!" "We're vampires that like money!" "We're vampires that are CRAZY!").
The core Clans mostly share powers, which is neat, but hit the splatbooks, and everyone has a unique power that you can't have unless you belong to that group.
Despite using the same rules as a base, crossovers were a bloody mess (pun intended), when a starting vampire has three weak powers and a starting werewolf can turn into a wolf man and double their strength and deal unsoakable damage to anything that moves!
Then of course, even though everyone is supernatural, they create "magicians" who have every conceivable magic spell and can break the game in half.
Then, suddenly, they turned around and said "all that lore? Forget it! All those mysteries? Here's the answers! Oh and the world is ending!"
All to sell us a new game, suspiciously like the old game, but different for reasons. I'm sure that sounds familiar!
If you want to try it, I'd seek out the 20th Anniversary editions. The rules are still a bit...obscure...but it really captures the best parts of the original setting.
The 5th edition tries to insist that vampires are actually weak, have to worry about cops and drug dealers, find that using their powers suddenly makes them unable to use their powers, but still has ancient vampires running everything behind the scenes.
I mean, if you're playing a game about vampires, you should at least feel like you're more powerful than the Scooby Doo gang, but that's just my opinion.