The Chinese Room – the studio behind a host of games including the recent Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 – was seemingly trying to figure out a way to convince publisher Paradox to name the game something else. In an interview with Cat Burton, studio co-founder Dan Pinchbeck spoke about how difficult the prospect of making a sequel to cult classic RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was to begin with, and how the studio was not equipped to do it.
Pinchbeck noted that a large part of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines getting the cult following it got was thanks to the unique time period during which it was released. It was a much more experimental time for video game releases, and he believes that more ambitious games could ship and still see their ambition celebrated despite them having numerous bugs and glitches. Along with 2004’s Bloodlines, Pinchbeck also pointed to 1999’s Shenmue and 2007’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl as examples of this.
“There was one of the producers – then at Paradox – I’m still friends with, he’s now with another publisher,” recounted Pinchbeck. “We used to sit there and go and have these planning sessions of how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2. 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. And Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting period in game development when it was the same time as games like [S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl] and Shenmue when you could ship a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, was totally flawed, but the ambition was really exciting.”
“A lot of those games, they’re real cult games now, but they really weren’t very good when you actually broke them apart and analyzed them. Great ideas, wonderful ideas, players loved them. You couldn’t get away with it now. So trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded. 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.”
Ultimately, while The Chinese Room wasn’t quite equipped to make a Bloodlines sequel that fans would like, Pinchbeck said that the studio instead decided to go with a smaller-scale game that offered more dense gameplay, comparing it to Arkane’s Dishonored. To achieve this, he noted that the studio would have to cut back on the RPG and more open world from the original Bloodlines and instead offer a more focused experience that still appreciates the source material.
“So we kind of approached it from that point of view really of going well what can we do with the time and the money that’s available and at that point what actually pitched weirdly was kind of which you’ll probably make I mean the psychic scream of Bloodlines 1 players from across the net but I came in and went ‘We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.’ And if we kinda 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 we’d started talking about saying, then what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that, if that happened?”
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was released just last month to middling reviews. The title is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and you can check out more details in our review, where we gave it a score of 4 out of 10.
