Like many, I have waited years for Vampire to be released: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. I absolutely love the first game and have been anxious to see what a 2025 version of it would look like. But more than that I am a vampire: Masquerade table top RPG player. So believe me when I say I have expectations and so far they are not met.
Play Vampire: Masquerade, but in real life
I love RPG, but there are very special settings that I have almost zero interest in. Dungeons and Dragons is fantastic, but for the most part I don't want to go adventure through a traditional fantasy world – it's just not my style. I also don't like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, despite how good they can look.
When the RPG group had fallen in decided that the next game we would deal with was a homebrewed Vampire: The Masquerade campaign written by our GM and sat in the 1980s Chicago, I knew very little about the game. In fact, the only thing I knew was that a WWE wrestler from the 90s got his name after one of the VTM clans.
Gangrel is both a vampire theme wrestler in wwe history and a clan of vamps in VTM.
Of course, it led to me choosing Gangrel when my clan, who built my character-Ronnie, a 20-year-old college student in Chicago, turned against his will for a vampire. Now he runs a vamp -friendly pub in the neighborhood his Coterie claimed as their domain. Throughout their vampire adventures with his equally fang -tastic friends, Ronnie hates her vampirism, falls in love with a human woman and must protect her and her young son from the Vampire Society. Oh, and he has a pet hawk called Elton. It gets intense.
However, it is the beauty of role play. While playing in a set of world is so much of what happens based on the decisions you make and how you form the essence of your character. I did not have any of the planned for Ronnie until a side issue took us to a dream dimension where I was a man who fell in love with the same woman I met just a few days later.
Play Vampire: Masquerade, but as a video game
I loved playing VTM with my friends, but schedules get a little crazy, people develop and slowly the time between the sessions will be longer and longer. So at some point I wanted my VTM fix and gave blood lines a shot. And to be fair, vampire: Masquerade – Bloodlines is not a complete adaptation of TTRPG, because how can it be?
In role play, the story is determined by the choices you make and how GM rolls with the pans. You can't really do it in a video game. There must be a limited number of choices because how can you program it in some other way?
And yet the first Bloodlines game managed to reason with me at a similar level to TTRPG. I thought the attitude is engrossing and I appreciated the choices I made and the character I could build. Basically, it felt like a proper CRPG, because it was.
That's all RPG fans want in video game adjustments. We know that the game will not have the endless amounts of imagination that comes from a group of friends who sit around a table thinking about stories from the cuff. We know that studios must work in parameters to release a completed game. And that was why in the end was such an exciting game to play, especially as a VTM fan. If only it had been more successful with mainstream.
In 2019, the wait for Bloodlines 2. And I was excited. But then the wait continued and went. Eventually, the game was moved to another developer – always a good sign – and has seen a lot of delays. Now it will come out in October this year, and I am very worried.
Not playing vampire: masquerade, but as a video game
Bloodlines 2 is simply not vampire: the masquerade. You may think I overreact, but so much of what makes VTM what it is has been removed. The role -playing elements were largely removed. Creating your own vampire hero (or villain) is gone, although you can unlock certain cosmetics for the player's characters. Some of the clans are even paid for day one, with what looks like it may change, thanks to the backlash.
Lasombra and Toreador are both released as DLC. Given that these are two of the game's original clans, which go back to 1991, the payment wall is an unreasonable decision.
It is difficult to regard this as a VTM game, in the end. When you remove the pieces that make it an authentic adaptation, as the first blood lines were, you create something else. So cold it something else.
Does Paradox Interactive, who bought VTM creator White Wolf 2015, think to release a game that basically does not understand that the RPG title will appeal to the fans? It is difficult to imagine that it is happening, especially when the first video game in the series was sold very little and was considered a commercial failure.
Just don't make it a Bloodlines sequel
It's unfortunate because Bloodlines 2 actually looks like fun. I am sure if it was not connected to VTM and instead was just an original story, I would be excited about it. Next year's Blood of Dawnwalker is a good example of an exciting new vampire story created from the ground up. I wish Bloodlines 2 had done so.
Instead, it holds to a franchise that, even though they are loved by fans, is not a massive society in 2025. So while some elements from the series have transmitted – you interact with different clans and it is a certain degree to protect masquerade as a game mechanic – I wish this would not try approximate VTM if it would not be done.
Of course, it is not the first game in the franchise that feels like a completely different type of experience. We have seen visual novels, a narrative driven RPG without battle, and even a free to play Battle Royale during the VTM banner. Why do it this Games must be a sequel to blood lines?
Given the remote oscillation away from what blood lines were and the core of VTM, as a whole, this game better serves as its own spin-off by the franchise. As it is now, it will be labeled Bloodlines 2 only to work against it with fans of TTRPG and the first blood lines.
I might be wrong, and the game will somehow be fantastic and a love letter to VTM fans. I just doubt that. But what do I know, I'm just a dork who loves to play a vampire -based TTRPG for too many hours.
