Looks like they didn't drive the stake all the way through its heart after all.

ARTICLE LINK: Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 resurfaces with new developer and date


Well...huh. I don't know.

QuoteNow due for release in fall 2024, Bloodlines 2 has been taken over by The Chinese Room, a U.K. studio best known for its atmospheric and mysterious walking simulators, Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

Fall 2024. Riiiiiiiiight.

From the guys that brought you Dear Esther...

QuoteThe protagonist has also changed from a young vampire, as in the original game, to a powerful Elder, "to create something different from Bloodlines to give a different experience." This Elder has been awoken from a long slumber, so the world will still be new to them.

Different doesn't necessarily mean "better" or even "interesting," especially as compared to the work-your-way-up-from-the-bottom philosophy of the original premise, which was far more intriguing to me.

QuoteIt seems as though little remains of the Hardsuit Labs version beyond some of the game's art assets.

So forget everything you found interesting about the previous almost-incarnation.

Still, there's a developer reveal video at the end of the article that gives a bit of background or whatever to the current crop of doomed fools attempting to bring this disaster to the masses, so append your hopes and dreams to their enthusiasm, or something.

But...BUT. I will give them a chance. The new direction could be playable, even. As long as I'm not expected to stroll along a beach as a narrator rambles on about various subjects, it should be okay. We won't know any salient details until the publisher decides to impart a few in January.

I have no high hopes for it, to be honest.

Mixed feelings.  The Chinese Room is mostly known for making walking simulators; gameplay isn't exactly their forté.  Being recast as an ancient vampire doesn't bother me that much--I imagine leveling up is simply you shaking off the sluggishness of your long rest--but character-wise I find this new trailer to be underwhelming.  Remember the original Bloodlines trailer?  Jeanette instantly made an impression; this "I will wait for you" chick isn't even registering.

There's a similar situation happening with Little Nightmares III.  Tarsier Studios made the first two, while Supermassive Games is taking over for this one.  If the name sounds familiar, that's because Supermassive is the studio behind the likes of Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology.  Their choose-your-own-adventure focus is a little concerning, though they are quite familiar with the horror genre and have a history with 2.5D platforming (LittleBigPlanet DLCs).

Get mixed feeling here too. A studio specialized in walking simulators doing a VTMB so essentially a pure RPG game? Not sure it will mesh well and doesn't fill me with confidence because it will be a test for them. They don't even have a single RPG to their name. Doesn't mean they cannot get the job done, but some experience always helps. If it's just a case of "Oh, we botched that one but we learned so much from our mistakes that we'll ace the next.

The only of the game they developed that even come close to VTMB general look and feel would be Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs which I honestly didn't play so I have no opinion. And it still wasn't a RPG anyway.

Being a vampire elder... well that could be interesting... if well done. You could decide to punish all your stupid children or to frighten them to retake control and drench the world in blood. Many over scenarios could come up.

But that all depends on the studio. 1f they do intend to transform VTMB in a walk in the park with story and interactions barely above the visual novels we had for the VTM franchise those last years, I'm out.

Then again... with all the things happening in my life currently and in our lives in general (+30% food prices, +30% energy prices, no problem, we can take it with our 2 to 5% wages augmentation a year -- I'm talking Europe here, don't really know how the situation is for you guys in the US -- Fall 2024 seems very very far away right now. So far away that I'm not even really thinking about it. I'm barely thinking about next month as it is.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Reveals Its Main Character - Phyre the Elder Kindred

That sounds...interesting, I admit.

I know: outrage, bitter complaining, hopeless woe, fatalistic acceptance, death, decay, dust, a return to the cosmic soup, etc.; but it isn't a bad idea. I just hope it doesn't stray to the dark side of "interesting."

(As in: "may you live in interesting times.")

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/bloodlines-2-is-more-spiritual-successor-than-sequel-to-a-a-competently-good-game-by-2004-standards-say-paradox

Welp, that just about kills any hope I had for this.  It's the exact same drivel the developers of the 2014 Thief were spewing, that the original game wasn't actually any good and you're just viewing it with rose-tinted glasses.  Not to mention the fact that they--despite having not even released Bloodlines 2 yet--have gone on record to say they want nothing to do with making a Bloodlines 3, which should tell you all you need to know about how they really feel about it.

Well, crap. And just when I am replaying VTMB too...

I wanted to be optimistic for that one, I really did, but let's face it, none of what is mentioned in this article gives me any particular hope. That The Chinese Room doesn't even want to be near a possible Bloodlines 3... What does that even say? That they will wrap up the current project quickly with minimal ornaments and be done with it?

Here's another idea... Take the original Bloodlines and have a remake. A true remake. better graphics, smoother gameplay, better audio, maybe switch the engine because the Source Engine they used back then was still in beta (which explains a number of the bugs), maybe even add some side quests (if they are interesting, I won't mind), add all the cut content that the unofficial patch already added...

If Bloodlines 2 is going to be what Paradox suggests, then better to forget about it and have the remake adapted to modern computers. I don't want Bloodlines to be turned into a freaking walking simulator however atmospheric it may be. "Oh look, the Elder is walking the Earth for 5 hours wondering what happened to his children with some interactions here and there" is definitely not my idea of a good VTMB game. Although the idea of playing as an Elder is still intriguing to me... It could have been a good one, if the game was up to the challenge.

We started with a project worked by a talented and up to the task studio, with writers already familiar with Bloodlines as they already worked on the first one and we slowly got to... this? The writers were dismissed, the studio was swapped with another that, sure, is good as what they're doing but have zero experience with the kind of game Bloodlines is (or is supposed to be in this case because I don't think we'll get what we wished for).

OK, that's enough depressing stuff for one day... I'm out.

And as the comments from that article point out, if you're so convinced it isn't going to live up to people's expectations as a sequel to Bloodlines, why the hell are you calling it Bloodlines 2 then?  Vampire: The Masquerade is a franchise that includes, amongst other things, multiple other games.  No one would bat an eye if they called it something else, so they're deliberately setting themselves up for failure by sticking to the name.

Quote from: Doc_Brown on Oct 10, 2024, 11:20 PMVampire: The Masquerade is a franchise that includes, amongst other things, multiple other games.

Very true. Among the games I played in the franchise there was VTM: Redemption (isometric, not terribly good, not completely awful either), VTM: Coteries of New York which is OK I guess, if you like the interactive novel "games", not really my vibe but to each their own.

My guess is that they're trying to bank on the name. They wouldn't be the first either. Thief (2014) comes to mind. It also could have been called something else seeing as the content has so little to do with the trilogy.

Quote from: Starfox on Oct 11, 2024, 01:17 PMMy guess is that they're trying to bank on the name. They wouldn't be the first either.

You see it all the time with film adaptations.  They assume they've got a built-in audience that will watch whatever they put out, so they start making changes to it in an effort to appeal to the wider moviegoing audience.  Inevitably, this pisses off their preexisting fanbase, creating negative word of mouth, which then contributes to its failure to draw in much of a new crowd.  I've never understood it--why throw away a guaranteed group of fans by trying to appeal to a hypothetically larger one?

Quote from: Doc_Brown on Oct 11, 2024, 10:32 PMYou see it all the time with film adaptations.

Or series. I think The Witcher on Netflix was the perfect example of that. The producers even got the lead actor playing Geralt (who was, incidentally, a fan of both the books and games) to quit the show so disgusted he was by the direction writers were going for after season 1. That perfectly demonstrates what is wrong there. And of course, all the fanbase was pissed too.

Note that Netflix had absolutely zero interest for The Witcher franchise before the overwhelming success of The Witcher 3. That was no coincidence.

Most disturbing though is that Andrej Sapkowski, the very man who created the Witcher universe and characters in his books, saw what Netflix was doing to his baby and just said nothing. I guess money can buy a lot of things today, including author's integrity...