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".
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.
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