Cult classic Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines is getting a sequel. The 2004 roleplaying game left a lasting impression on roleplaying fans despite some clumsy gameplay. I spent time with the folks at Paradox Interactive and developer Hardsuit Labs to ask questions and see the game in action. It captures much of the original’s mysterious mood, with some modern flourishes.
Publisher Paradox Interactive purchased White Wolf Publishing’s assets in 2015, including the World of Darkness setting which Vampire the Masquerade is set in. The team at Hardsuit Labs has been working on a proper sequel (or, as they call it a “true descendant”) of the cult classic. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is awash with vampiric intrigue and blood and appears to live up to its pedigree.
Set in Seattle, Bloodlines 2 focuses on an event called the “Mass Embrace,” a bloody night where countless fledgling vampires were created.
The player character is among the new vampires born from this event. Siring a new vampire with approval is a big no-no in the World of Darkness setting, and the player—like in the first game— is brought before a court of prominent vampires to recount what they remember of the Mass Embrace before being executed. Luckily, the court is firebombed before that can happen and the player is thrust into Seattle to find out who is responsible while also learning the ropes as a fresh-faced vampire.
In a demonstration of a pre-alpha build, I watched Paradox QA Project Coordinator Kimberly Stinson explore underground ruins beneath Seattle and the city above. These ruins were a fictional take on the portion of Seattle destroyed in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, and while the mood captured the noir feel of Vampire the Masquerade, the exploration felt more like I was watching a new Dishonored game. Players don’t choose which vampire clan they’re a part of during character creation, although they can choose a background, such as a police officer or barista, that informs some of the choices they have and reactions characters have.
Clans are joined later on. Instead, player start as a “thinblood” vampire. This limits their early powers to certain ability trees like the Chiropteran tree which allows for levitation or the Mentalism tree, which grants access to telekinesis. It affects how you might deal with exploration.
If a door is blocked, you could use your mentalism abilities to remove the barricade. Or maybe you spec into the Nebulation tree, turn into mist, and sneak through an air vent. The goal of this power-focused exploration, according to Paradox Lead Producer Christian Schlütter, is to make sure players “don’t see the world like a human.”
Combat wasn’t great in Vampire: the Masquerade– Bloodlines. Clumsy and stilted animations made melee attacks frustrating to perform, while gunplay was heavily dependent on pouring your stats into a Firearms trait. The combat I saw for Bloodlines 2 seemed much more fluid. Stinson dashed about, using vampiric speed to slide into melee range and slash at enemies or execute them with melee weapons.
In certain cases, the camera pulled back to showcase narrow dodges or special executions. Guns exist but are treated as temporary opportunities; you grab them (perhaps even directly out of enemy hands thanks to your telekinesis powers) and use them until your ammo’s dried up and you can discard them. It’s hard to say if that’s simply flair without playing the game myself, but combat definitely looks more involved this time around.
Flashy combat and navigation is fine, but Vampire: the Masquerade lives or dies by the roleplaying. There was less to see here in this demonstration, although there was still plenty of character to the dialogue options. Choices ran the gamut from snarky to serious to profanity laced rants.
What seemed more impressive was how Bloodlines 2 plans to approaches its hub world. Seattle was active, with plenty of neon signs and nightlife. Crowds gathered outside clubs and muggers preyed on victims in side allies. The player can scale buildings, their verticality offering new paths through the world or secrets to find.
“You want to capture the essence of a location. Rather than an open world with a lot of stuff but not a lot going on block for block,” lead narrative designer Brian Mitsoda explained. Mitsoda designed and wrote story for the first game, and has been guiding Bloodline 2’s voice and tone. “It’s making sure that the player isn’t walking for a while with nothing to do.”
“It always felt like you were stumbling upon a secret,” senior writer Cara Ellison said, referring to the first game. Ellison is no stranger to interesting worlds, having worked as a narrative consultant on 2016’s Dishonored 2.
“Going down a back alley and coming across something no one’s ever seen before—even if it was designed that way. We wanted to preserve that and plan for a lot of World of Darkness supernatural bits and pieces.”
The team was quick to highlight two features meant to add spice to the world. The first is a massive side-questline, written by Ellison, that allows the player to hunt down and find all of the other thinblood created during the Mass Embrace. Each will have their own story about entering into their new life.
For instance, you might find a married thinblood struggling to deal with their newfound powers.
“We’re looking at introducing you to the idea that lots of different people will have a different experience of being a vampire,” Ellison said. “And their vampire puberty might be a bit more difficult or more fraught.”
Another system gives all NPCs a different aura called a “resonance.” Each colour indicates an emotional state, allowing players to get a sense of each character while also deciding who to feed on. Depending on a character’s resonance, their blood can grant various buffs or, in cases of excessive feeding on specific kinds of blood, “merits” that greatly affect what players can do. The team declined to answer if players from different clans would be given incentives to feast on certain resonances.
These quests and systems come paired with the first game’s systems: humanity and the masquerade. Players who perform too many cruel deeds, such as sucking someone’s blood until they die, will receive a penalty to their humanity.
This will affect their available dialog options and actions they can perform. Meanwhile, actions that reveal your vampiric nature will result in masquerade violations which affect your reputation among vampires and could get you into trouble. Fans of the setting will be familiar with these systems, but Bloodlines 2 expands on them for more immediate impact.
If you’re running around and sucking blood where lots of people can see for instance, expect less citizens wandering Seattle’s streets.
The World of Darkness can be fraught at times. The original game traded in careless depictions of sex work and some tired writing about mental illnesses like disassociative identity disorder. You could play as a member of the mentally-addled but prophecy-gifted Malkavian clan, with altered dialogue that, while humorous, danced a fine line in terms of taste.
There was even some racial stereotyping for good measure. Meanwhile, White Wolf’s management of the World of Darkness setting has not been without controversy. Last November, the Paradox subsidiary drew criticism for using the real-life persecution and murder of Chechnya’s LGBTQA population as a plot-point in the setting’s vampiric politicking. Paradox fully integrated White Wolf after this incident.
When asked about their approach to the setting, the team outlined how they wanted to handle the World of Darkness in 2019.
“It was very of its time,” Ellison said of the first game. “It approached certain topics differently. How we look at stuff has matured since then.”
“It’s fifteen years later and things have changed,” Mitsoda said. “We have to be very sensitive about how we handle things like mental illness and that was a concern for us and for Paradox, in how we can make a mature story but if we do anything, we do our homework and make sure that we are punching up and not punching down.”
“We talk about these issues constantly,” Ellison added. “Because we care about including people, we want them to feel powerful and sexy, and we don’t want them to feel like it’s not for them.”
I’m cautiously optimistic about Bloodlines 2. The gameplay’s emphasis on exploration and Hardsuit’s goal of building a vibrant Seattle are compelling. The team’s willingness to talk about the first game’s stumbles was good to see. And it’s exciting to have a Vampire game that appears to play well.
It could be the expansive vampire RPG that players have craved for over a decade, even if they’ll have to wait until 2020 to play it. There’s challenges to the World of Darkness setting and plenty of baggage from the first game, but also a lot of potential for engrossing stories. Also, I might get to smooch a vampire. Or at least use my Seduction skill from time to time.
“We have lots of conversations about who is everyone’s ship,” Ellison said.
Comments
15 responses to “Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines Is Getting A Sequel, And It Looks Pretty Good”
FUCK TO THE YEAHHHHHH.
I was expecting a remaster first, but jumping straight in is more than welcome.
It sounds like it’s taking a lot of notes from the latest edition which is an absolute train wreck of a rule book and inferior setting to the previous editions, with players by default being pushed into an Antifa-style Vampire organisation.
The mental illness of the Malkavians =\= real world mental illness. But I suppose some folks have troubles differentiating things in fiction from reality.
Analogues are a thing, and you can’t ignore that the Malkavians have troubling shades, even if they are different. Hell, the most prevalent Malkavian in the original Bloodlines reflected (an outdated Hollywood depiction of) a real-life mental illness.
I’m wary about a new Bloodlines specifically because of that latest edition, but it sounds like it’s in good hands here; there’s a mindedness about how they’re handling the story and making it inclusive that gives me faith that it won’t be as offensive and callous as that.
Never got the love for Bloodlines. The first PC game Redemption, was way more interesting and had more options for actual game play + being a good or bad vampire. Bloodlines felt like Deus Ex 2 in comparison… just shallow and empty. But each to their own.
I did enjoy Bloodlines, but I will agree that Redemption was the far superior game. The story was better, the game play and the powers too.
Hook it to my veins!
SJW’s don’t exist you delusional, pathetically ignorant tardnugget, anyone who uses that phrase is proving their own stupidity and hate by doing so. That being said, sex work (or paying for a sex worker) will never be ok or anything less than sub-human behaviour and like being fat, should never ever be defended. Unlike mental illness, socioeconomic status, sexuality, race etc they are choices.
Lol what the fuck?
Shitting on people for sex work, thats a mad high horse you are sitting on.
I never got to play the first one unfortunately, and now the stated issues with the gameplay and other dated aspects are what have been putting me off. If this is successful I really hope they can do an ‘halo anniversary’ style remake while implementing the modern game’s combat systems etc.
Gotta love the state of sensitivity culture: “We want to be really careful and sensitive about how we depict mental illness or talk about sex workers… now watch me tear apart this human being and drink their blood. Note that I can’t drink too much of their blood or I might lose my humanity, because when it comes to drinking the blood of your murder victims, it’s a matter of degree, right?”
Seriously though, obviously the reason we can depict actual murder and stuff that gives real people really bad PTSD (like, you know, war) is that those things happen to relatively few people, and it’s good odds that someone who just lost a close friend or family member to a vicious murder, probably won’t be firing up ANY videogames to get traumatised by them.
That said it’s still kind of weird isn’t it? That you could get in trouble for writing a serial killer who is described as “schizophrenic” and has “multiple personalities” (not a thing) but if you fix him so he’s a more correct kind of mentally ill, or ideally not mentally ill at all, it’s cool that he chops up people and eats them.
A cynical person might say that the community has always felt this urge or instinct to criticise and attempt to “correct” or “censor” work, but in the good old days society was so buttoned down all the complaints were about descriptions of kissing or implications that people of different races were sleeping together, or that… uh… Lucille Ball had a toilet in her bathroom.
It’s undeniable progress. From “you’re not allowed to actually say Lucille is pregnant or suggest that she and her husband would even have… you know… relations” to “you’re not allowed to blame your serial killer’s sadistic sex murders on erroneously stereotypical depictions of mental illness.”
JEANETTE!!!
My first love – I can’t wait to see your awesome 2.0 version of yourself
I get chills when I remember the hotel mission in the first game.
I got to Chinatown in the first, and the Hotel was definitely my favourite part of the game. I always played a Toreador tho, so I missed out what sounded the true fun of playing a Malkavian and seeing how much more perception was warped throughout the game.
seriously fuck that hotel. I was playing with headphones and it was terrifying.
I hope there’s a similar experience.
HELL YEAH! Please be good, do me this one solid Paradox.
I have played both of the vampire games and I really like swinging around a broadsword in the modern era.
I love Bloodlines with the different routes for the different vampires.
and i did like some of the choices in that game (such as the non-weird ending)
I hope the blood sucking animations look cool.
And if I can’t dance like how I could in the first game – hard pass 😉