One of the biggest challenges The Chinese Room faced when taking on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was, simply, the name, and the expectations that came with it. If the game was called Bloodlines 2, players would expect a sequel to the scruffy but ambitious – and fondly remembered – Troika role-playing game from 2004. But The Chinese Room, which inherited the troubled project from Hardsuit Labs, knew immediately it wouldn’t be able to make that.
“The tricky question around it was Bloodlines 1,” Dan Pinchbeck, the game’s former creative director, told the Goth Boss podcast – “are you making a sequel to Bloodlines 1? We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of how do we get them [publisher Paradox] to not call it Bloodlines 2? That feels like the most important thing we do here, to come at this and say this isn’t Bloodlines 2. We can’t make Bloodlines 2; there’s not enough time, there’s not enough money.
“Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting period in game development,” Pinchbeck went on to say, “at 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. And a lot of those games, they’re real cult games now, but they really weren’t very good when you broke them apart and analysed them. Great ideas, wonderful ideas, players love them, but you couldn’t get away with it now.
“Trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrong-headed. No one would be happy. You wouldn’t make the people who liked Bloodlines 1 happy, and you wouldn’t make the people who didn’t know about Bloodlines 1 happy, because they’d never get Bloodlines 2 and they’d always get a flawed game that was built too fast with not enough money.”
Paradox pulled development of Bloodlines 2 from originating developer Hardsuit Labs – and a team made up of some of the people who’d made Bloodlines 1 – back in 2021. Hardsuit’s version of the game was unveiled to the world in 2019; Martin Robinson saw a hands-off demo of Bloodlines 2 at GDC 2019, and talked to the team making it.
That original version of the game featured a more traditional RPG set-up: a sort of zero-to-hero idea whereby you’d play as a recently turned vampire, who would then rise slowly through the ranks of the Seattle-based vampire society. The Chinese Room’s eventual idea fast-tracked that, hemming the game into a more linear action-based shape whereby you play from the beginning as a super-powerful elder vampire. As I discovered in my Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 review, the game lacked breadth and character development.
So why not keep the original idea? There’s a few points to make here. One, The Chinese Room didn’t snatch the project out of Hardsuit Labs’ hands. “It was being taken off Hardsuit [Labs],” Pinchbeck said. “That was done and dusted. I know that a lot of people were like, ‘How could you take another studio’s work?’ Nobody took another studio’s work – that had already happened. The publisher was going, ‘We want to try and keep this thing alive; we want to find a studio.'”
Pinchbeck liked Vampire: The Masquerade, the role-playing game, and it represented an opportunity for The Chinese Room to transition into triple-A game development. “I’d been pitching around a triple-A that I really wanted us to make and we were getting a lot of the ‘but your team haven’t made a triple-A yet’ kind of response,” he said, “even though our team was basically made up of triple-A veterans. So I was like, ‘Okay, we need a stepping stone.'”
The Chinese Room was also a studio that had a reputation for producing original games, like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, so Pinchbeck was fundamentally opposed to simply finishing off someone else’s idea. Before he’d even seen the Hardsuit Labs build of the game, he told Paradox: “The only way we’re going to want to do this is if we are able to… We’ll take everything that’s there and use as much as we can, but we don’t just want to finish someone else’s game. And if you want someone to finish someone else’s game, that’s fine, that’s just not us. And they said, ‘We don’t; we want to really pull it apart and put it back together again.”
“We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored”
The final point to make is the project The Chinese Room inherited from Hardsuit Labs was a fractured thing. The engine was dated, ideas were unfinished. It wasn’t something that simply needed finishing. “So in some ways it was like working on an original IP,” Pinchbeck said. “And you could feel the frustration in the game of a team who were desperately trying to finish something and really make their mark on it. But it had just gone south.”
With time and resources against Pinchbeck’s team, The Chinese Room made a difficult but understandable choice. “We approached it from that point of view of: what can we do with the time and money that’s available? We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored,” Pinchbeck said. “And if we look at something that’s not an RPG and not a fully open world, but is really tightly focused and true to the mythos, and it’s a good ride, we get a Bloodlines title out in the world.”
Only then could The Chinese Room and Paradox potentially look to the future of the IP and to making something that would more closely constitute a proper sequel to Bloodlines 1. “Then we [could] start talking about ‘what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that?’, if that happened,” he said.”
Dan Pinchbeck created a new direction for Bloodlines 2 and wrote most, if not all, of the story for it, but he wouldn’t see development through. He left the studio he co-founded in 2023 as a result of intense burnout, it sounds like. “Priorities change,” he said, “and you look at things and go, ‘This is what’s going on outside; I’m killing myself at work, I’m working stupid hours, I’m working seven days a week, I’m trying to keep multiple projects afloat.’ The clock was ticking. You leave before you collapse.”
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was released at the end of October and, even with a tighter, more linear focus, struggled to impress. Generally, it was a hollow-feeling experience, although there were some wonderful characters and performances in it – it wasn’t without redeeming qualities. Nevertheless, the game seems to have commercially flopped, casting a fairly impenetrable shadow of doubt over the future of the Bloodlines series.
Perhaps it’s to other games, such as the upcoming The Blood of Dawnwalker – a part-human, part-vampire RPG being made by former Witcher developers – we should look instead.