Nearly a month after the release of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, former Creative Director and The Chinese Room Studio Head Dan Pinchbeck opened up on the game's development phase in a video interview with YouTuber Cat Burton.
The most interesting tidbit is that Pinchbeck really didn't want to call this game Bloodlines 2. As you might recall, The Chinese Room only came in to rescue the game from cancellation after publisher Paradox Interactive split with the original developer of the sequel, Hardsuit Labs. That also meant they didn't have enough time or money to make it the true sequel fans of the original might have wanted. Apparently, it was Pinchbeck who decided to make it a more focused, Dishonored-like game, due to the constraints the developers were forced to work with.
We used to sit there and go and have these planning sessions of how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2. That feels like the most important thing we do here, is to come at this and say this isn't Bloodlines 2. You 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, when you could ship a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, was totally flawed, but the ambition was really exciting. A lot of those games, they're real cult games now, but they really weren't very good when you actually broke them apart and analyzed them. Great ideas, wonderful ideas, players loved them. You couldn't get away with it now.
So, trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded. No one would be happy. You wouldn't make people who love Bloodlines 1 happy and you wouldn't make 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 and with not enough money.
So we approached it from that point of view of, well, what can we do with the time and the money that's available, and at that point, I came in and went, 'we can't make Bloodlines 2, we can't make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.' We would look at something which 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 get a Bloodlines title out in the world, and then we'd started talking about saying, then what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that, if that happened?
It's a sound strategy, in theory. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the game is going to sell enough to warrant a bigger, better sequel. According to estimates based on SteamDB data, only between 120K and 300K copies of the game have been sold so far via PC's most popular store.
In my review of the game, I concluded that Bloodlines 2 is worth playing despite its flaws, but only for fans of the setting and once the game is significantly cheaper than the launch price. However, that might happen very soon.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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