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The Chinese Room co-founder, Dan Pinchbeck, says he really wanted Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 to be called anything else due to the expectations attached to the name.
After what felt like an eternity in development hell, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 finally released this year, with developer The Chinese Room getting it over the finish line after Hardsuit Labs' years of development. Unfortunately, it was on the Duke Nukem Forever side of "games that took forever to come out" rather than the Final Fantasy 7 Remake side, receiving poor reviews and player feedback.
In our Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 review, we called it "a half-baked, blunt-toothed action-mystery hybrid that disappoints at almost every turn."
Speaking to Cat Burton on The Goth Boss Podcast, Pinchbeck explains, "right from the word go," he and a now-former Paradox producer used to sit there and "have these planning sessions of how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2," presumably instead making it a different game in the Vampire: The Masquerade canon.
Given that the original Bloodlines is an enduring cult classic, any sequel would have massive expectations. Pinchbeck adds, "That feels like the most important thing we do here is to come at this and say this isn't Bloodlines 2. You can't make Bloodlines 2. There's not enough time. There's not enough money."
Pinchbeck says that Bloodlines "came out at a really interesting period in game development." With the likes of Stalker and Shenmue also coming out, "you could ship a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, was totally flawed, but the ambition was really exciting." He says that even with having great ideas, "You couldn't get away with it now."
Had The Chinese Room aimed to recreate Bloodlines, Pinchbeck says that, "No one would be happy. You wouldn't make people who love Bloodlines 1 happy, and you wouldn't make people who didn't know about Bloodlines 1 happy. Because they'd never get Bloodlines 2 and they'd always get a flawed game that was built too fast and with not enough money." He adds that that led to the team approaching Bloodlines with the point of view of "what can we do with the time and the money that's available?"
Pinchbeck says that when development was ramping up, he pitched that, "We can't make Bloodlines 2, we can't make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored." He adds, "If we sort of look at something which is not an RPG and is not fully open-world – but is really tightly focused and true to the mythos, and it's a good ride – we get a Bloodlines title out in the world" and then after that, everyone could look at what the next Bloodlines game may look like.
