Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 has a new developer, and Digital Trends spoke to the team behind the game to learn how that happened.
Few games have as wild of a development journey as Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2.
A sequel to a cult-classic vampire RPG from the mid-2000s, Bloodlines 2 began its life as a 2016 pitch from developer Hardsuit Labs and Brian Mitsoda, writer of the original game, to IP owner and game publisher Paradox Interactive. Initially slated for release in early 2020, it was delayed multiple times before Paradox fired Mitsoda and took Hardsuit Labs off the project by mid-2021. Paradox chose not to cancel the game, though, instead finding a new studio to take it over the finish line.
During its PAX West 2023 keynote, Paradox announced the new studio working on Bloodlines 2 is The Chinese Room, best-known for games like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Ahead of this announcement, Digital Trends had the chance to speak to Sean Greaney, Paradox Interactive’s World of Darkness vice president, and The Chinese Room studio design director Alex Skidmore to learn more about what the vision for Bloodlines 2 that caused Paradox to shift developers, as well as what the vampire RPG now looks like under a new developer.Bloodlines 2’s bad breakup
It’s rare for a game as seemingly far along in development and publicly shown off as Bloodlines 2 to lose its developer. While former Hardsuit Labs developers and Mitsoda have voiced that they were “disappointed and frustrated” at the deterioration of that partnership, Greaney defended Paradox’s decision during our discussion.
“Hardsuit Labs is a great studio, and they did a lot of good work on this project. We just had a very different vision for the final product, and we couldn’t align on that vision,” Greaney tells Digital Trends. “And so the right thing to do was to end the collaboration and find a studio that shared that vision.”
Because that clash in vision was big enough to cause Paradox Interactive to change development partners and delay the game’s release by several years, it begs the question of what Paradox’s overarching vision is for Bloodlines 2. According to Greaney, it’s a Bloodlines 2 that “nails the player fantasy [of] being a vampire in a video game and also brought Vampire the Masquerade V5 [a role-playing game] to a video game and showed us what that feels like.
