The original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which was released in 2004, is widely celebrated as one of the best role-playing games ever created. Its sequel, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, not so much. This may have to do with the fact that Bloodlines 2 isn’t much of an RPG, and neither is it really a sequel. In fact, as Dan Pinchbeck, former Creative Director of Bloodlines 2 developer The Chinese Room, has recently stated, Bloodlines 2 should never have been called Bloodlines 2 at all.
Speaking with Cat Burton on The Goth Boss Podcast, Pinchbeck describes how The Chinese Room took over the Bloodlines 2 project from the initial developer studio, Hardsuit Labs: “The publisher [Paradox] was going, ‘we want to try and keep this thing alive, we want to find a studio.’”
Working on a pre-existing IP, Pinchbeck thought, could be the studio’s stepping stone into the AAA space. Being a studio that prides itself on storytelling, Bloodlines 2 seemed like a great opportunity for The Chinese Room.
“It really, really was important to do justice to the world and to the mythos,” Pinchbeck says. “And then, I suppose the tricky question around it was, ‘Are you making a sequel to Bloodlines one?’”
Pinchbeck explains that he and a former Paradox producer tried to convince others not to call the game Bloodlines 2. Recalling planning sessions, he remembers feeling that “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 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,” Pinchbeck says. “You couldn’t get away with it now. Trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded.”
As a result, the team had to approach the development from a “what can we do?” angle. At that point, Pinchbeck recalls, they concluded that “We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.”
“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,” Pinchbeck says. “And then we’d start talking about ‘what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that,’ if that happened?”
But this initial solution to the Bloodlines 2 problem, as Pinchbeck describes, eventually resulted in having to untangle “an anaconda fuckball of competing priorities.”
Although it’s by no means certain that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 would have received a more positive reception had it carried a different title, it might’ve avoided at least part of the negative feedback, as some of it undoubtedly resulted from expectations raised by its name. At the moment of writing, Bloodlines 2 stands at 56% upvotes on Steam.
