While I'm sure having a stranger's teeth plunged into your neck and waking up as a frightfully gorgeous vampire person is a harrowing experience in its own right, you have to admit, the developers behind Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 haven't had the easiest time, either. I'm not surprised that The Chinese Room, which recently left Sumo Digital to operate independently, doesn't want to discuss it.
As the story with many games stuck in perpetual limbo goes, Bloodlines 2 was supposed to come out a few years ago. Helldivers 2 boss Shams Jorjani was originally involved in signing the game to Paradox while he was an executive there in 2016, but the game has skipped milestones since then like a pebble across lakewater: it was going to come out in 2019, then it was delayed in 2020, then it was delayed indefinitely, exhumed in 2023, and, finally, it's meant to come out at some point this year. In a new Game Informer interview, currently available only to subscribers, creative director Alex Skidmore is vague about the moments in between.
"The two games are not alike," Skidmore says about the Bloodlines 2 Paradox started with and the one it has now. "We have the code base and everything, but we basically started again because we had a very different vision, I think."
"There's more visceral combat," he explains, though "we share Seattle," Skidmore says of Bloodlines 2's Christmastime location. "Some of the art we used to give us a sort of leap forward."
But "we very much wanted to make it our own game," Skidmore concludes. Sounds good, Mr. Bloodlines – I'm happy as long as I can play it.
