Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 won’t be an “open sim” like the 2004 original game, according to Paradox Interactive. Now in development at The Chinese Room, it’ll be an action-RPG with a relatively linear story set in the World Of Darkness universe. This obviously plays to The Chinese Room’s strengths – they’re better known for melancholy or horrifying strolls through broken spaces than the Dishonorable massaging of intricate systems. But it also reflects Paradox’s view that the original Bloodlines has been “mythologised” a bit: people love the memory of it more than the reality, and there are aspects of the 2004 game, according to Paradox’s deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja, that simply “wouldn’t fly today”.
All this comes from my interview with Lilja at Paradox’s Media Day – unofficial working title, Please Stop Poking Us – last week. To recap my previous article about Life By You, Paradox have spent much of the past two years pushing back release dates, cancelling things, publishing other things in a less-than-satisfactory state, and closing or parting ways with developers – a regular conga line of mishaps that have contributed to a 90% drop in operating profit for the second quarter of 2024.
Bloodlines 2 in particular has long travelled under a cloud of bats. It was announced in 2019 with Hardsuit Labs at the wheel and the original game’s lead writer Brian Mitsoda as narrative director. “This is the sequel you have been waiting for,” he said at the time. “It is going to be Bloodlines, as you remember it. But better.” Alice B (RPS in peace) thought the preview build she saw in 2019 looked ace, offering a familiar morass of factions and approaches but slathered in high-end visuals, with spruced-up combat. I liked what I saw of it myself at the company’s PDXCON expo. But then came delays, Mitsoda’s abrupt firing, a change of studio in 2021 that led to layoffs, and more delays. So how confident are Paradox that Bloodlines 2 will stick the landing, at this point? The answer, more or less, is “quietly”, but it won’t be the “same but better” sequel elder Nosferatus are hankering for.
“With Hardsuit Labs, we agreed on a vision of what they were gonna make, [and] they had a problem delivering on that,” Lilja told me. “We were in agreement, we moved [development] to The Chinese Room and we said, this is the vision and this is what Hardsuit Labs have made. And of course, we gave them quite a lot of freedom to interpret the vision, based on what Hardsuit Labs had made, or change or remove whatever they didn’t like.
“We have a high trust in The Chinese Room, given what they’ve done,” he went on. “We’ve announced again a delay, into the first half of next year. I would stand by that. I’m pretty confident that that’s going to work. I’ve seen the game now. The Chinese Room is really invested in it. They’re taking a lot of initiatives. They like some things that Hardsuit did, they’re changing some other things, and they’re making their own game, that’s still the vision that we had.
“So it’s going to be an action-RPG in the World Of Darkness. If you’ve seen Still Wakes The Deep, they know how to do story-driven action games with good voice-acting, all of that, which is basically what we’re looking for in this game. I hope and feel that we will be able to deliver a game that puts you in the World Of Darkness.”
Those gifted with preternatural vision may detect a careful qualification there. Not “a sequel to Bloodlines” but “a game that puts you in the World Of Darkness”. And indeed, Lilja downplayed associations with the original game when I asked whether Bloodlines 2 would still be some kind of immersive sim (piggybacking on a comment made to TheGamer in 2023). He also suggested that Bloodlines hasn’t aged all that well, and that taking inspiration from it too zealously could be counter-productive.
“It’s about setting the right expectations,” he said. “The first Bloodlines game – it is what it is, and people who’ve played it recently will see that it’s a game from 2004, that is now patched so that it works. But there’s also a lot of ideas about what that game was, that are more, not to offend anyone, mythical.
“I like the first game as well a lot, but we want to clarify what this game is, so people have a clear understanding of what they’re buying, so they don’t come in with weird expectations – because we don’t want that, we want them to understand that this is an action RPG with a storyline that is more fixed. It’s not the open sim it maybe shouldn’t be compared to. Again, we want people to understand what they’re getting into.”
I’m sympathetic to the idea that older games tend to disappear beneath a cloud of nostalgic make-believe – we’re seeing it right now, with certain chunderhead reactions to Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake. So which aspects of the original Bloodlines does Lilja think people are mythologising? Sadly, he didn’t go into much detail.
“I actually played Bloodlines 1 quite recently, and it is a good game, but it is also an old game, and there are many things that would not fly today,” Lilja said. “But I understand why people were super psyched by it in 2004, because it had a lot of cool [elements], and the feeling of being a vampire is really strong, regardless of other features. But I think people, they remember their feelings about it. And if they replayed it, I think they would see that it’s a competently good game by 2004 standards, now that it’s patched.
“But mainly we want to clarify that we’re making a spiritual successor, not an actual same blueprint type of game, so people don’t get disappointed and feel cheated,” Lilja went on. “We really don’t want that.”
If Paradox have learned anything from the past few years of delays and cancellations, it’s that making or publishing games outside their traditional grand strategy dominions is a risky business. During our chat, Lilja spoke at length about the need to refocus and make smaller bets on projects in future. With regard to Bloodlines 2, we shouldn’t expect another action-RPG from Paradox in the near future, though Paradox do expect the game to at least break even.
“We do expect it to recover its investment,” Lilja said, somewhat to my surprise. “But also saying that, it has changed studios, been in production a long time. My expectation is we will release a good game.” He added, however, that “the continuation of this type of games for Paradox should probably be done in a different setup – again, going back to taking risks, how to invest when we’re not sure that we exactly know what we’re doing.”
Fingers crossed that Bloodlines 2’s most recent delay is the final delay, and that it doesn’t immediately turn to dust on arrival. I’m disappointed that it won’t be the frothing cauldron of vampire variables we were promised in 2019, but The Chinese Room do fine work – if nothing else, Bloodlines 2 should have atmosphere and sense-of-place in spades.