‘How do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2?’ Chinese Room co-founder reveals early Masquerade doubts

The former creative director of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has revealed how he initially wanted publisher Paradox to drop the ‘Bloodlines 2’ name, because he felt his project didn’t have enough time or resources to deliver a worthy sequel.

Following years of delays and a change of developer, Bloodlines 2 finally released in October and was widely criticized by critics and users, many of whom disliked its RPG offering, combat, and more linear gameplay.

It was initially in development at Seattle-based Hardsuit Labs and scheduled for release in 2020. However, after many delays, the project was internally pulled from its developer by publisher Paradox, and eventually picked up by Sumo-owned The Chinese Room, developer of acclaimed story games Everybody’s Gone to Rapture and Still Wakes the Deep.

The game’s writer and creative director was initially TCR co-founder Dan Pinchbeck. In a new interview with Cat Burton, he revealed how, from the start of his involvement, he was sceptical whether the studio could develop a worthy sequel to the 20-year-old original.

“Right from the word go, there was one of the producers, then at Paradox, who I’m still friends with, who’s now with another publisher,” he explained. “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’.”

He continued: “And Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting period in game development, when it was 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.

“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. They had great ideas, wonderful ideas, players loved them. But 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 loved 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.”

Pinchbeck’s original pitch, he revealed, was to make a more linear type of game. “I came in and went, ‘we can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored’,” he recalled.

However, he claimed that due to the many interests from the various stakeholders, Bloodlines 2 became like “untangling an anaconda fuckball of competing priorities and what everybody wants and things like that”.

“So it was always going to be tricky, but I had a lot of fun writing the story on that one. It was really good. And because the mythos around the RPG is so brilliant, it’s really dark, contemporary, political, queer, it’s got such a modern mythos and such a rare depth and detail to it that being buried in that for a couple of years was probably the best part of the project for me.”

Pinchbeck eventually left partway through development, citing burnout and a lack of satisfaction working across multiple projects at the studio.

“It felt like [The Chinese Room] had evolved into something that wasn’t the same thing that Jess and I started,” he said. “And that’s okay. That happens. Evolutions happen. But at the same time, you kind of have to, from a personal point of view, go, this isn’t what I want to be doing anymore.”