The former creative director of The Chinese Room’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has finally said the quiet part loud and agreed that the game really shouldn’t have been called Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Have you played Bloodlines 2? What would you have called it? I’m going with Vampire: The Masquerade – Third Cousin Twice Removed.
Speaking to Cat Burford in an hour-long career retrospective passed along by VGC, The Chinese Room’s departed co-founder Dan Pinchbeck revealed that getting publishers Paradox to change the name was an unofficial priority after the Dear Esther studio took charge in 2023.
“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,” Pinchbeck 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’.”
As such, Pinchbeck’s pitch to Paradox was for a less open-ended experience. “I came in and went, ‘we can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored’.”
If Pinchbeck was unsuccessful at getting Bloodlines 2 renamed, The Chinese Room did apparently succeed in persuading Paradox to publish a more constricting breed of bloodsucker. In our own review, Dominic Tarason called Bloodlines 2 “a blend of Batman: Arkham City, Dishonored and a first-person Streets Of Rage”.
Paradox themselves downplayed the idea that Bloodlines 2 was a direct continuation of the old Bloodlines style when we spoke to them in October 2024, with Paradox’s deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja calling the new game a “spiritual successor”.
In the same interview, Lilja also opined that aspects of the original Bloodlines “wouldn’t fly today”, though he didn’t go into much detail beyond noting that the 2004 CRPG had a bunch of technical problems. In this week’s interview with Burford, Pinchbeck made the same argument a little more colourfully.
“Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting period in game development,” he said, “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 analysed them,” Pinchbeck continued. “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.”
The worryingly pale elephant in the room here is, of course, the earlier version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 that was in development at ill-fated Hardsuit Labs under the narrative leadership of original Bloodlines designer and writer Brian Mitsoda, with former RPS contributor Cara Ellison pitching in as senior narrative designer.
I saw a bit of Hardsuit’s game at preview stage in 2019 – as did Alice Bee (RPS in peace). Inasmuch as I can still make out the details of that preview session through my rose-tinted goggles, I thought it seemed quite promising. I’m keen to learn how the project stood when Paradox pulled the plug. Back in October 2024, Lilja told me only that “with Hardsuit Labs, we agreed on a vision of what they were gonna make, [and] they had a problem delivering on that.”
