The current custodians of the World of Darkness tabletop RPG universe are bang up for doing more video game adaptations like the troubled Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, according to White Wolf brand marketing manager Jason Carl. In fact, they may be working on a few already, with Carl naming Mage: The Ascension, Changeling: The Dreaming and the Dark Ages setting as deserving of “the Bloodlines treatment”.
People who’ve been keeping up with the vamps and their video game misadventures may find that last phrase a bit rich. For clarity, I assume that by “Bloodlines treatment” Carl means “we’re going to make a big 3D RPG with a lot of lore”. Rather than “we’re going to delay it so often it becomes a running joke, fire the original narrative director, hand it to a different studio with no real track record for RPGs, then tell people it’s more spiritual successor than sequel”.
White Wolf are the official licensing and publishing entity for all World Of Darkness adaptations. They were acquired by Crusader Kings 3 outfit Paradox Interactive in October 2015, and are now co-publishers for Bloodlines 2. As for the World of Darkness itself, this is a sprawling modern Gothic fiction analogous to Dungeons & Dragons, which encompasses several apocalypses and several table-top RPGs.
While the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is by far the most famous World Of Darkness video game adaptation, there are plenty more out there – 2003 hack-and-slash Hunter: The Reckoning and, much more recently, a bunch of Werewolf games, plus some mobile projects. In a new interview with PCGamesN, Carl made no bones of White Wolf’s desire to keep cranking out the spin-offs.
“Who says we’re not already?” he joked in a new interview with PCGamesN. “The answer is yes. All of those supernatural creatures have their own stories to tell, and many of them are just waiting their turn and for the right story to come along.
“It’s not just Hunter and Werewolf,” Carl went on. “It’s no secret that, when we set up our in-house publishing business, we’ve been exploring many of the other World of Darkness games that people have been waiting for and that are underdeveloped. We’ve got our eyes on Mage, we’ve got our eyes on The Dark Ages, we’ve got our eyes on Changeling; we’re spending a lot of time thinking about these three, and other games that people have been waiting for.”
Carl is himself a former tabletop RPG game designer, having started out at D&D creators Wizards of the Coast in the 1990s. In the chat with PCGN, he was especially enthusiastic about adapting Mage, a tabletop game that first released in 1993 and is, as you may guess, all about sorcery.
“I have spent considerable time thinking about what Mage would look like in a new edition,” he said. “The world we live in today is very different from what we imagined it would look like when the White Wolf team were building those previous editions of Mage, and I think we’re all looking forward to the challenges of figuring out how Prime and Paradox work in this world, as opposed to the world we thought we were going to get.”
I’m not that familiar with Mage, but I gather from the White Wolf wikis that Prime is one of the nine spheres of magic – it “governs the raw energy of reality”. While Paradox “is the collective force of consensual reality fighting back against the enlightened will of the mage.”
This certainly seems adventurous, for a magic system, in that I can’t quite picture how you’d translate all that into an everyday fireball spell. How am I supposed to splat cellar rats with *checks notes* an “Odyllic Force”? My goodness, could this be an arcane institution with implications for things beside combat and levelling up? I am pleased by the prospect of a video game based on such wild notions. Almost as much as I am sceptical of White Wolf’s big promises, given their and Paradox’s handling of the “spiritual successor” to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
“There’s no obstacle or gatekeeping function that would prevent any of these from making it out into a videogame and getting the Bloodlines treatment,” Carl concluded. “It’s a question of time, resources, the right development partners, and story.” I don’t know, Carl. The first three of those seem like pretty significant obstacles. They seem like much the same obstacles Bloodlines 2 has been smashing its pointy chops against since 2019, in fact. Maybe at least ship your new Vampire game – due in October, despite a recent round of layoffs at developers Chinese Room – before you make any bets on the rest of the World of Darkness.
