Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has had one of the messiest development histories of the last few years, and now the co-founder of The Chinese Room has come out and said it plainly: the team was not ready in time, budget, or experience for a huge, big-budget sequel. Dan Pinchbeck recalls that they originally pitched a much smaller, more focused World of Darkness project and even tried to convince Paradox not to call the game Bloodlines 2 at all.

It is hard to find another recent title whose development has twisted and turned as much as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The World of Darkness RPG started life at Hardsuit Labs, was handed over to The Chinese Room in 2021, and finally launched last October, splitting opinion among fans and critics. According to the studio’s co-founder, The Chinese Room was never truly set up to build a full-scale AAA project that could stand as a worthy successor to the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. That is the picture he paints in a new interview, where he also talks openly about the team’s first plan for the game.

Dan Pinchbeck, who helped found The Chinese Room, appeared on Cat Burton’s YouTube channel to talk about his career, the impact of AI on the industry, and how he ended up working on Bloodlines 2. There, he admitted that the team really wanted to do something different in the World of Darkness, rather than a straight sequel to the 2004 cult classic. “There was a producer who was at Paradox at the time; we are still friends, and now he is at another publisher,” Pinchbeck recalled. “We used to sit down for planning sessions and talk about how we could make sure [Paradox] did not call it Bloodlines 2.”

From Pinchbeck’s point of view, “you cannot make Bloodlines 2. There is not enough time. There is not enough money.” He argues that the first game was born in a very particular era, when releases like STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and Shenmue could come out as wildly ambitious projects, full of bugs and rough edges, that still won players over because of how much they were trying to do. That mix of broken systems and bold ideas is what many fans hoped to see again, but in his view, the current market and development reality do not allow for the same kind of gamble.

The co-founder believes that although these games became cult favorites, they are not necessarily “good” in every strict design sense when you take them apart. Each one was packed with brilliant concepts and captured the imagination of players at the time, yet “trying to recreate that magic in a completely different context felt like a mistake.” In his words, nobody would walk away happy: long-time fans of the first Bloodlines would feel let down, and newcomers would get a rushed, compromised sequel. That is why The Chinese Room originally wanted to make a smaller-scale experience that did real justice to the World of Darkness setting.

A Vampire: The Masquerade Game In The Style Of Dishonored

It is well known that Paradox seriously considered cancelling Bloodlines 2 outright after deciding that Hardsuit Labs’ work was going nowhere. At that point, the Chinese Room stepped in with a pitch strong enough to convince the publisher to hand them the project. So what was the studio’s initial plan, if they did not want to build a direct sequel to Vampire: The Masquerade? “We came at it from the angle of asking what we could realistically deliver with the time and money we had,” Pinchbeck said. “I went in and said, we cannot make Bloodlines 2, we cannot make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.”

“If we look at something that is not a full-blown RPG and open world, but is very focused, true to the [World of Darkness] mythology, and a really good ride from start to finish, we can put a Bloodlines title out into the world and then start talking about what the next big Bloodlines game might look like after that, if it ever happens,” he continued. That original direction, however, slowly shifted and eventually turned into the game we now know as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

The Chinese Room was very pleased with this more modest, contained vision for its World of Darkness project, but the reality of production quickly became extremely complicated. “Like any other game, it turns into this big ball of competing priorities and things everybody wants,” Pinchbeck said in the interview. “It was always going to be complicated, but I really enjoyed writing the story. The role-playing game’s mythos is fantastic; it is dark, contemporary, political, queer, it has such a modern mythology and such rare depth and detail that being buried in that for a couple of years was probably the best part of the project for me, knowing there was something genuinely interesting to dig into.”

Even so, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has not managed to live up to the reputation of the 2004 original and has sparked plenty of debate among World of Darkness fans. On Steam, it is barely holding on to a “Mixed” user rating, with only about 55 percent positive reviews out of more than 8,100 opinions. In that context, the odds of Paradox greenlighting another attempt at a sequel that truly matches the legacy of Bloodlines do not look particularly strong right now.

Source: 3djuegos