https://www.ign.com/articles/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-delayed-again-this-time-to-the-first-half-of-2025
Mobile game studio has trouble with a bleeding edge (heh) blockbuster AAA RPG, I’m sure this will be a BG3-tier banger.
The funny part is I’m also unironically hoping it’s good 🤡
They could be your favourite football team, too, that still doesn't fill me with confidence on their level of preparation for this.
Bloodlines was an extremely ambitious mix of immersive sim and RPG, in the same vein as early Deus Ex, TCR's most gameplay heavy game has an ineffective monster that takes several seconds to kill you and myst style puzzles.
There's a mismatch in milieus here.
Luckily they have a hundred employees and are under Sumo, so lots of resources and people experienced in creating lots of types of games.
Maybe the real Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 was the friends we bit along the way.
With no Brian Mitsoda and no Rik Schaffer I have a hard time seeing this ever being a true sequel, no matter how much extra dev time they get.
I'm gonna be real, as just a casual follower of this game, I kinda assumed it already came out a while ago and was just so meh nobody talked about it. I'm shocked it's still not out yet
Don't be, this game won't quietly peep its way into obscurity, it will be an uproarious fart all the way across the halls of the internet.
If it even does, it will come out and literally nobody will like it because a) it has an impossibly high bar to clear even in the hands of competent devs and b) it's been made by walking sim developers as their first attempt at a real game with gameplay beyond simple puzzles.
I will literally slice off my own asscheeks, cure them into honey glazed ham, and serve them on rye if it comes out as anything resembling the success of the first.
Is there a preferred metric to measure this by? I didn't play the first one, but Wikipedia says "polarizing but ultimately positive," and there's an 80/100 metacritic score, for whatever that's worth.
Your word picture is just so funny that I want to root for the game's success just to be the person that quotes this comment and @s you, even if I tend to agree with your assessment.
Metacritic is not the good gauge for the original, given the circumstances of its release. The game was made on an alpha version of Source without any devkit as Valve were developing Source/HL2. Its development was also troubled, and ultimately pushed out the door before it was ready. It's a miracle the game even runs at all. Not only is the final third of the game notoriously lacking compared to the early parts, but the game is literally unplayable without the fan made unofficial patch. You run into a bug that hard locks your progression like 80% of the time and cannot finish the playthrough.
Despite all that it has become a true cult classic for its writing, dialogue and characters, its humour, impeccable atmosphere and fantastic sound track. It's been cited as one of the design inspirations for Cyberpunk 2077, among others.
These are the things the sequel will struggle living up to. The entire thing that got people excited about it was bringing back the original writer/lead designer and composer.
Sort of the thing that makes me think this one still has a ghost of a chance, but then I've liked the games The Chinese Room has made before mostly for their writing and music. I'll probably be disappointed, but them at the helm doesn't kill it for me like it probably does for people who wanted more of the original.
Oh I might have forgot to put it in my post, but the original writer/lead and composer got kicked off the project when they dumped Hard Suit labs and gave the project to The Chinese Room. That - combined with the latest trailers - is why people who like the original have very little hope of the sequel recapturing the magic.
Is there a preferred metric to measure this by?
For the sake of my asscheeks' preservation, I'd say "if in ~20 years (that's how long it's been, god I feel old) it's regarded with the same high praise and fondness as Bloodlines."
Preferred by me of course.
But honestly, I'm definitely going to at least pirate and play it, and I'm a man of principle, so I'll own it if i think I was wrong.
Your word picture is just so funny that I want to root for the game's success just to be the person that quotes this comment and @s you, even if I tend to agree with your assessment.
Nobody ever spares a thought for my asscheeks! Everyone just wants to see me fail! Assless and suffering! But I'll show you!
I’m excited to see it have less content than the original even with this absurd amount of delays.
You're thinking about it wrong. How much content it has is not the problem. The problem is we've seen gameplay and it looks nothing like its predecessor.
Hasn't it been bought and sold a bunch now? I want to say this is like the 4 dev or something to take it over.
Paradox Interactive has too much money into Bloodlines 2 to let it die. But we all know this is dead. Even if it comes out.
Paradox didn't spend $18 million dollars making a dick and boob slider in Crusader Kings 3 for just one game. Let them cook.
I wrote this game off years ago. As far as I'm concerned, even if they ever release something, it doesn't exist.
Well, my expectations for this game were already on the floor. Guess it's time to put them in the basement. I mean I want a good sequel to Bloodlines, but that's looking less and less likely.