Even a few days out from release next week, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is, to me, one of the more intriguing games of 2025. There’s so many layers to why that’s the case, from it nominally being a sequel to a decades old cult classic, to the protracted, rebooted development cycle, and then how The Chinese Room has gone about creating their own rendition of Hardsuit Labs’ original pitch, keeping some elements and changing others.
Through August and September, I had the opportunity to play through the game’s opening hours, experiencing Phyre’s reawakening from torpor, how they’ve been bonded to the mind of the merely century old Fabian, and the pair of them thrown into a rendition of Seattle’s vampiric night life that is in complete and utter turmoil.
Having an already created character is a bit of a bone of contention for fans of the original or the TTRPG, where you would create your own vampire.
Jey Hicks, Design Director at The Chinese Room, sets the scene. “The big thing is tying in with you being The Beast, right? In the first game you were a fledgling, and so that whole story was about you progressing from nothing upwards. Our game is that, oh, you were the Big Daddy Beast! You are the renowned, well known Nomad, right? You have taken a hit – you’ve come out of Torpor, and you’ve forgotten your abilities because of whatever this is – but, I mean, we painted the picture right from the get go. You walk out that door and there’s that guard coming towards you, and you punch him so bloody hard!”
Jason Carl, Brand Marketing Manager for White Wolf, and the voice of the weather radio you’ll hear when you start the game, chimed in, “The Chinese Room could have told that [newcomer vampire] story again, but we have told that story already, and I think everyone felt very strongly that it was time to tell a new vampire story in the same tradition.
“In some ways, there are parallels. Phyre is also dropped into a situation they didn’t ask for. They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know what happened to them. They don’t know who’s in charge, and they’ve got to puzzle out what’s going on before is too late. So there aren’t parallel stories here, but they’re seen through very different ends of the Vampire: The Masquerade spectrum.”
Phyre, then, is a centuries old vampire who’s woken up in modern day Seattle. You might expect that would make them massively powerful and already set in their capabilities, but in true video game fashion, they’re mysteriously de-powered. Still hugely powerful as a vampire compared to a regular human, and already with some core abilities like telekinesis and the ability to glide, but without the bulk of their once mighty powers. That gives you the opportunity to remake them in your own image and style.
Jey explained “The main thing for us is that, as you’re at this elder vampire, you had way more abilities before, and the whole thing later on in the game will be that you awaken these abilities from the other clans and you can use them as your own. So you can feed those in so you’re not stuck to that same path that you were on.”
He continues, “Each clan has a set of powers that is there clan affinity, so as Ventrue, you are better at certain powers than others because they are intrinsic to your blood. You can learn any power from any vampire clan, but it costs you more. You have to pay more for it because it’s not your affinity as a venture and you have to find someone to help you learn it as well. And you need to hunt the correct flavour, emotional flavour of blood, from mortals to make it easier to get.”
Of course, from what I experienced of the game’s opening hours, my options were constrained to a single path. Playing as a Tremere, for example, I was using blood magics to curse someone to explode if they took damage, to be able to torture an enemy from within, to dive in to strike and then teleport back out of trouble. Basically, I was playing as a really bitey version of Batman. Vampire Batman.
That strike and retreat approach in a scaffolding-filled building site saw me cut my way through batches of tough Anarch ghouls fairly well. Even without teleporting, I’m thankful that Jey stood his ground about having stairs. “Time and time again we would find characters getting stuck and stuff like that, and so people were like, ‘Can’t we just get rid of the staircases and stuff like that, and just force you to drop in?’ And I was like, no, because I actually really like being able to use that as like a strategy or just just a place to have a break, to get a breather from the fight, to reassess the situation. I’m so glad that you started doing that!”
I was also using telekinesis to pick up guns and blast away at enemies, without getting my hands dirty.
But as I came up against Benny, the Sheriff gone rogue, and had to go toe-to-toe with a powerful combatant, I had to find a different approach, since this was set in an arena with little escape. It reminded me a little of the issue of games, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where pacifist players were forced to kill during boss fights. How does Bloodlines 2 aid players with that sneakier approach?
“We have elixirs there to really boost you up, and so typically, the type of player you’re talking about also coincided with the more exploratory type of player. […] So yeah, probably a lot of players would come into this with a significant inventory of elixirs to fall back on that. Using the Brujah one alone, you can do a huge chunk of damage to Benny just with that. And additionally, dare I say it, there’s always the ability to fall back on an an easier difficulty. We allow that as the game is running, so if you do get stuck we’re not that cruel.”
Your choice of clan is just one aspect of Phyre’s characterisation, though – and actually, being able to unlock abilities from other clans down the line will let you shift your playstyle if you want to – because there’s also their view on the power vacuum that’s suddenly opened and been filled at the top of the Seattle nightlife.
Jason said, “We’ve said many times you’re an elder, you’ve been around for centuries. You’re more and less than human at the same time. You’re more powerful than humans, you’re faster, you’re stronger, you have all these powers, but you’re less than human. You don’t care as much about morality and humanity as you used to. Depending on how you choose to play as Phyre, you may follow a more humane way of dealing with the city and the mortals, and the vampires around you, or you may stay on that rather cold, distant Elder path.
“The contrast to that is Fabian. Fabian is still very much fascinated by mortal life. He loves it, loves mortals, loves interacting with them and engaging them, and he’s barely a century dead, or undead, as the case may be, so he hasn’t lost that spark of humanity that all kindred have when they’re first embraced. So he’s on a very different journey in the struggle between his humanity and his beast, the struggle that all vampires in Vampire: The Masquerade face.
“It’s more than just a buddy cop vampire story. It really is how to look at vampires and their humanity and their beast, very different ends of the telescope.”
It’s effectively a meme to describe a city as being a character in a story, but Seattle in Bloodlines 2 will inevitably give it a distinctive flavour, at least. In the grip of a winter that has blanketed the city in snow, the open setting takes a chunk of the downtown area to be your playground.
“I’ve lived in Seattle most of my life,” Jason said, “and the downtown core, in which much of our action takes place – although not all of it – is a fairly small, concentrated area. It’s not as broad as some cities. There’s a lot of people, mortals, living in quite a small contained place, and to me it feels like downtown Seattle very much. I could easily imagine myself going, ‘Oh, look, there’s that hotel I know. There’s that bar I will never go into again. Ah, the waterfront.” So it does feel, I think, fairly true to the city.”
Exploring that as a vampire, you can’t use your full powers in the open, or you’d be breaking The Masquerade and become hunted, but you do need to feast here, both to power up before reaching a potential confrontation, and to find those of the right resonance to match what you need to power up.
Cat Martins, level designer, noted, “So you broke The Masquerade, so you might think, OK, the safest place to be would be on rooftops, for example, but that’s not necessarily true because the rooftops are also where the Rules are going to be – you could use that as a way to farm XP, if you want.”
Jey added, “But those encounters on the roof, they’re not the same every time you go up there, right? So, different rooftops at different times of the game, you’re going to encounter different enemy types. And let’s just say that it fits with the point of the narrative as well. So say a certain events happens or something like that. You’d expect to see more of a certain type of enemy up there to have a little play with!
It’s fair to say that Bloodlines 2 will inevitably be a thoroughly different game to Bloodlines – inevitably so, with over 20 years between them and different creative choices – and it’s one that I’m very intrigued to see how it’s come together because of that. We won’t have long to wait to find out, with the game out next week on 21st October.
