Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, for all its flaws upon its release in 2004, is an RPG still celebrated to this day. Unfortunatle, based on the 4/10 I gave it in october, the sequel does not like it will achieve that same status. Part of the issue here is developer The Chinese room, brought in several years into development to take over for original developer Hardsuit Lab, ultimately did not release title that had many RPG elements, besides the fact it didn’t feel much like a sequel to the original title. According to the former Creative Director of The Chinese Room, Dan Pinchbeck, one of the worst decisions made in the development process was the choice to ultimately call the game Bloodlines 2.
Speaking to Cat Burton on The Goth Boss Podcast, Pinchbeck described the developer taking over the project from Hardsuit Labs, stating “The publisher [Paradox] was going, we want to try and keep this thing alive, we want to find a studio.” The Chinese Room has, in some part, been looking at moving beyond devoping smaller scale games, making the leap into the AAA space. At the time, developing a pre-existing IP of a fairly well known franchise, not to mention a sequel to an beloved game, seemed like a good move in that direction. The Chinese Room was also know up to that point for narrative storytelling, such as Everybody’s Gone To Rapture and Still Wakes The Deep, which seemed like a perfect fit.
Pinchbeck, then posed the core question:
It really, really was important to do justice to the world and to the mythos. And then, I suppose the tricky question around it was, ‘Are you making a sequel to Bloodlines one?
He went on to state:
Bloodlines came out at a really interesting period in game development, the same time as games like Stalker and Shenmue, when you could ship a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, was totally flawed, but the ambition was really exciting. You couldn’t get away with it now. Trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded.
Pinchbeck said on this front:
If we look at something that is not an RPG and is not fully open-world, but is really tightly focused and true to the mythos, and it’s a good ride, we’d get a Bloodlines title out in the world. And then we’d start talking about what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that, if that happened?
This solution however resulted in, what Pinchbeck called it, having to reconcile “an anaconda f***ball of competing priorities.” All this being said, Vampire: The Masquarde has struggled no matter the subtitle the game bears. Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, a narrative game similar to telltale titles, scored mid 60’s on metacritic though it does feature a more traditional stat sheet like the table top RPG. My favorites in recent memory, the Cotories of New York trilogy also recieved mixed reviews despite boasting my favorite narratives for series.
Unfortunately, The Chinese Room was handed a title that was already problematic, most likely with no additional support from publisher Paradox to create the game that was promised, as opposed to something that could be functionally released.
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