Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has cleared a big hurdle: the follow-up to a cult 2004 RPG is finally, for real, "done." Now it just has to, you know, launch. As a long-delayed October 2025 launch approaches, former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider hopes the hotly awaited sequel can tap into the same energy as RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, channeling the strengths of what inspired it and doubling down on what makes its world unique.
Speaking to PCGamesN, Gaider reckons "the hope is that we would get a new Vampire game in the same line as Expedition 33 or Baldur's Gate 3 – let's take [VTM] and see what we can do with it. Wouldn't it be great to have a full-on RPG that wasn't beholden to the fantasy or sci-fi genre, one that really leaned into the roleplaying systems of Vampire: The Masquerade?"
Gaider praises the non-combat segments of the original Bloodlines, and says those areas actually gave him "some ammunition" when he pushed for non-combat sections in Dragon Age games.
He also zeroes in on the tabletop origins of the Vampire games. "If you've played the tabletop version, it didn't do a lot of combat, but what it did with characters and inter-character relationships, as well as the various powers you had and how those changed the way you played the game completely, [had] some meat there," he says. "I wish somebody would just take that to its logical conclusion and give us the game that's meant to exist."
We previously spoke to Gaider about what, in his words, makes Expedition 33 to JRPGs almost what Baldur's Gate 3 was to CRPGs.
He reasoned that these games show not just how many people good RPGs can reach, or "what's possible when a game is given time to cook," but also how games can focus on one audience so hard "that it ends up growing that audience" rather than pursuing mass appeal from the get-go. The sequel to a game as niche as the original Bloodlines would also do well, I'd wager, to bet on specificity rather than grabbing the biggest audience possible.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 does have "vampire romance," but it's the weird, bitey kind of romance and it's "probably awful" to look at.
