Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will feature a Cyberpunk-esque fully-voiced protagonist
The Chinese Room has unveiled some interesting details, but so far Bloodlines 2 looks more like another Swansong than a successor to the original.
If Halloween wish-lists were a thing, then news about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 would likely have been what many of us wrote about in our letters to Santa Pumpkin. And even though I just made him up, maybe he really does exist after all, because that's exactly what we just got: a surprise stream granting a first-look at the narrative and RPG elements of one of gaming's most long-awaited sequels.
The 18 minute video, which you can watch below, is the first proper look we've had at the resurrected Bloodlines 2 since The Chinese Room — the indie studio behind Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and Everybody's Gone To The Rapture — were announced as the game's new developers back in early September.
Bloodlines 2 is a sequel to the 2004 PC game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a cult classic which is still intensely popular after nearly two decades, despite its infamously troubled production and launch. It's a testament to the quality of the writing and world-building that many players — myself included — still count it among the all-time greatest video games, even though you famously need to mod the living hell out of the thing to get it to run smoothly.
There have been many other officially licensed VTM video games released in the years since Bloodlines from a variety of developers, including a series of text adventures by Choice of Games, a duology of visual novels by Draw Distance, Sharkmob's short-lived live-service battle royale Bloodhunt, and isometric CRPG Heartless Lullaby from Entalto Studios. There's also Swansong, last year's adventure-RPG from The Council creators Big Bad Wolf, and upcoming VR title Justice — which is due to release tomorrow — from Fast Travel Games.
Bloodlines 2, however, is the game many long-time fans have been holding out for, and for better or worse that does mean that expectations are already sky-high for The Chinese Room's offering. The outline for the sequel during its initial development by Hardsuit Labs before their removal from the project in 2021 looked to take many cues from the original in terms of the protagonist and their story, while The Chinese Room's near-total rewrite seems to have drawn inspiration from Cyberpunk 2077 for a very different experience.
The new incarnation of Bloodlines 2 will see you playing as an elder vampire named Phyre. Their gender and clan can be chosen by the player, their outfit (although not their appearance, by the sounds of things) can be customised, and they will be fully voiced throughout. But the Cyberpunk comparison really kicks in thanks to the presence of Fabien, a secondary vampiric personality who's become trapped within Phyre's consciousness, which has unmistakable overtones of Johnny Silverhand.
Needless to say, this is already proving somewhat divisive among the fans who've waited nearly three years for an update on Bloodlines 2, with some lamenting that Hardsuit Labs' idea of a newly-sired and initially near-powerless vampire attempting to unravel the mystery of their origins felt much more like a direct sequel to Bloodlines thematically.
On that I do have to agree: what we've seen of Bloodlines 2's more stage-managed story and experienced protagonist feels closer to another Swansong than the original Bloodlines, which gave up its secrets only if you chose to make your blank slate of an avatar someone who took the initiative to explore every side-street and alley in its vast (for the time) open world.
In fairness, the developers at The Chinese Room make a good case for their narrative being an inversion of Bloodlines rather than the parallel to it that Hardsuit Labs had planned, and therefore just as deliberately tied in to the first game in its own way; but the shadow of the Bloodlines 2 we almost had still looms large. The game we saw last night looks like an intriguing and well-thought-out addition to VTM canon, but I can't help feeling that The Chinese Room would be in a better position if the "Bloodlines 2" subtitle wasn't there to dictate the audience's expectations.