It's strange to think that after years of struggling in development hell, we can finally sit down to play Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. It's not a distant pipedream, but a game you can go out and buy right this second to play on your platform. Unfortunately, it's not very good.
The Chinese Room, known for narrative adventure experiences like Still Wakes The Deep or Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, was sold up the river when they took over development from original developer Hardsuit Labs. It somehow had to create a successful sequel to a beloved cult classic RPG, despite having little experience with the genre and neither the budget nor the resources the game would need to really shine. No matter how you approached it, this was a battle waiting to be lost.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was doomed from the start
I remember attending a closed-door presentation for Bloodlines 2 at either Gamescom or E3 2019 – my brain is a bit foggy on the details – as some of its developers at the time showed us a mix of early footage, concept art and a presentation outlining the overall ambitions for the sequel. Questions from other journalists in the room asked about potential factions and how exactly this once-mythical successor would build on the original game – even in the early stages, the appetite was there.
Every response was ripe with enthusiasm, and at the time it felt like Hardsuit Labs was ready to deliver the game we all so desperately wanted to play. Behind the scenes, however, the bigger picture was far from rosy.
It wouldn't be long before the project was subject to a series of high-profile delays until publisher Paradox Interactive ended Hardsuit Labs entirely. Eventually The Chinese Room took over development, and it remains unclear how much of the original Bloodlines 2 remains in the finished product.
Our review, like many others, was not kind to the mediocre experience it offered: “The biggest frustration I have with Bloodlines 2 is that I can see a much better game hidden here. The story is complex with many moving parts, taking players through so much of VtM's history. Even the Seattle setting can be excellent under the right circumstances.”
This reception felt like a tragic inevitability. The original Bloodlines was a terrifying experience when it launched way back in 2004, representative of an era where so many games of its ilk were released with a host of mechanical and technical problems, but the ambition at their core more than compensated for such flaws.
It was a time when many genres were still finding their feet and games were cheap enough that you could take a chance and somehow gain a cult following in the process. Trying to replicate that magic two decades later is always going to be a difficult task, and I doubt players from the original even knew what they really wanted from a revival.
The Chinese room did everything it could to make Bloodlines 2 shine
During a recent appearance on the Goth Boss podcast, the former creative director of Bloodlines 2 at The Chinese Room dove deep into the difficult obstacles his studio faced when taking on the project, and how it initially felt doomed to fail.
“The tricky question around it was Bloodlines 1,” Pinchbeck explained. “Are you doing a sequel to Bloodlines 1? We used to sit there and have these planning sessions about how to get them [Paradox] to not call it Bloodlines 2? It feels like the most important thing that we're doing here is coming to this and saying this is not Bloodlines 2. We can't do Bloodlines 2; there is not enough time, there is not enough money.”
Pinchbeck went on to add: “Bloodlines 1 came out during a really interesting period in game development. At the same time as games like Stalker and Shenmue, when you could deliver a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, it was completely wrong, but the ambition was really exciting. And a lot of those games, they're real cult games, but they were very good, but they were very good ideas now, but they were really good. wonderful ideas, players love them, but you couldn't get away with it now.
“Trying to recreate that magic in another setting felt unfair. Nobody would be happy. You wouldn't make the people who liked Bloodlines 1 happy, and you wouldn't make the people who didn't know Bloodlines 1 happy, because they'd never get Bloodlines 2 and they'd always get a flawed game that was built too quickly without enough money.”
Many hardcore fans were annoyed with The Chinese Room for suddenly taking on the work of Hardsuit Labs, but the original developers were already out of the picture long before it was involved. Paradox was the one who cut out Hardsuit and knew that another studio was needed to finish things off. It didn't matter if the game was good or not, but enough money had sunk in that it had to matter.
Pinchbeck's point that The Chinese Room was desperately trying to get Paradox to leave the brand behind, because the game it would make would never be representative of what fans wanted, isn't the first of its kind in gaming.
The exact same problem plagued Arkane's Prey back in 2017. It's a great immersive sim and arguably the developer's very best work, but its entire existence is hindered by being associated with a feature it had nothing to do with. The original Prey was a first-person shooter by Human Head Studios that was released for Xbox 360 and PC back in 2006, and its sequel was canceled in 2014.
But Bethesda still owned the IP, so why not put it on a completely unrelated project to best increase brand awareness? For both developers within Arkane and fans outside of it who waited with bated breath for a successor, this was a mistake.
Lovers of the original were annoyed that their fast and frenetic shooter experience was replaced by a more contemplative game with a theme of exploration and experimentation, while the game itself suffered commercially as many who would have connected with it avoided it because Prey as a series did not appeal to them. It was filled with expectations that were all impossible to meet, which I have to imagine is how The Chinese Room felt with Bloodlines 2.
It doesn't make RPGs, and it would never make for a worthwhile sequel, so why not just cancel that project entirely and remake the remaining content into something new? The press and players were so hard on Bloodlines 2 because it was nothing like the game they wanted it to be, but with those ingrained expectations removed you have the freedom to try to change.
It feels strange to know that Bloodlines 2 is finally out in the wild after years of troubled production, and is nothing like the game I saw all those years ago. But things could have been different if some difficult, but necessary, steps had been taken by Paradox. It would have meant killing the series for good, but at least something new could have taken its place.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
- Released
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21 October 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Intense violence, blood and gore, sexual themes, nudity, drug reference, strong language
- Developer
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The Chinese Room
