The word of the day is “ambitious.” It’s going to come up a lot.
On Sept. 2, 2023, fans watched the PAX West live feed with eager anticipation. News was finally coming. This time, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was really going to happen. This time, dad really would make it for his custody weekend.
VTMB2 is about as long-awaited as a game can get. By the time its newly proposed release date rolls around, it will have been 20 years since its predecessor came out. That’s the kind of wait usually reserved for Battletoads. Unlike with Battletoads, people actually liked the first Bloodlines.
More than liked – they loved it. They still love it. Grown human beings who figured out a while ago that nobody wants to hear their recommendations for weird old games will still catch themselves saying “you should play Bloodlines if you haven’t” now and again. It was an ambitious game – too ambitious. Even after years in development, aspects of the triple-A Dracula simulator barely worked when it hit store shelves. Lots of parts didn’t work at all.
But the open world RPG from 2004 had so much to offer that fans have been patching its rushed-to-market code together ever since it debuted, trying to sand down the rough edges and make it fully playable. Think about how many glitchy games come out before they’re ready for public consumption. They’re usually abandoned. This one was adopted by hundreds of nerds and nursed back to health over the course of the next two decades, thanks to its compelling characters, wild plot twists, bonkers open-ended gameplay options, and at least to some degree, Futurama’s own John DiMaggio.
The road to a sequel was long and dumb. Bloodlines took some time to find its audience, and by the time it was a cult hit, its production studio — Troika Games — had folded. Luckily, recognizable I.P. is the last immutable force in the universe, and in 2019, Paradox Interactive and Hardsuit Labs announced their next big tentpole, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which would definitely be coming in March of 2020.
In late 2019, the development team announced that it was definitely coming in 2020.
In late 2020, it was definitely coming in 2021.
In 2021, that date was pushed to “shrug emoji.”
And that brings us to the present day, and the announcement that VTMB2 is definitely coming in late 2024. This time, there’s a new studio in charge: The Chinese Room, the folks behind critically middling titles like Dear Esther, Little Orpheus, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. They will, according to the PAX West announcement, be overhauling the game’s original story, gameplay, and roleplaying mechanics, opting for a wholly different experience using recycled assets from the last team’s run at the project. The whole thing sounds wildly ambitious, and ambition is great. The weird kid in my band class was ambitious enough to want to build a lightsaber over summer vacation, and she talked about it a lot. More pertinently, a studio called Spark Plug Games had ambition back in 2014, and I can’t stop thinking about them.
Spark Plug Games was a small company, with previously shipped games of the “pop balloons on your phone while you go to the bathroom” variety. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there was something wrong with the studio picking up the contract for Firefly Online, which was very ambitious. According to their updates, the game would allow players to purchase and customize their own ships, hire crews, and explore the universe of Joss Whedon’s cult sci-fi program, freely switching between controlling their ships and putting boots on the ground. It was going to feature the voices of the entire original cast of the series, and even better, it would be cross-platform. You could play it on your PC and your phone. It was a lot for any developer to promise, especially the tiny team behind fast food simulator DQ Tycoon. Original release window: spring of 2015. In a March 2016 update, Spark Plug promised, simply, “We’re still here. We’re still flyin’. Game is still in development. Stay tuned.”
It still hasn’t come out.
And that’s what worries me about Bloodlines 2. The Chinese Room has made some compelling, emotionally charged games in the past, but never anything on the scale of a city-wide action RPG. Even utilizing the visuals that former developer Hardsuit Labs already put a bow on, the promise that the entirely new RPG system is being worked into the game – especially after half a decade of development already on the books – feels ambitious. Maybe that’s just in keeping with the spirit of the franchise. Maybe it’s a scrappy company biting off more than it can chew. For now, after years of delays and drama, the game’s still in development. Still flying.
I’ll stay tuned.
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