After a very long wait, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was released last October. Unfortunately, after several delays and a change of developer along the way, the final game was disappointing.
The Chinese Room, the company behind Still Wakes the Deep and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, was responsible for creating the title. In a recent interview, Dan Pinchbeck, the studio’s co-founder, revealed some interesting details.
He and his team had tried to convince publisher Paradox Interactive to change the name of the game by dropping “Bloodlines 2.” Pinchbeck said that they lacked the resources to create a sequel worthy of the excellent first Bloodlines.
“What seems most important to us here is to approach this project by saying: ‘This isn’t Bloodlines 2. We can’t make Bloodlines 2. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money.’
And Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting time in video game development, alongside games like Stalker and Shenmue. Back then, you could release a very ambitious game, admittedly riddled with bugs and flaws, totally imperfect, but whose ambition was truly exciting.
Many of these games became cult classics, but in reality, they weren’t very good when you analyzed them in detail. They had excellent ideas, great ideas, and players loved them. But we couldn’t get away with that today.
Trying to recreate that magic in a different context seemed like a mistake. No one would benefit from it. We wouldn’t satisfy fans of Bloodlines 1, nor those who didn’t know it, because they would never have access to Bloodlines 2 and would end up with an imperfect game, developed too quickly and with an insufficient budget.
I arrived and said: “We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.”
Dan Pinchbeck left during development due to burnout and dissatisfaction with the projects produced by The Chinese Room at the time.
