Chinese Room co-founder wanted Paradox to drop the 'Bloodlines 2' name, because "no one would be happy" with the final game

Honestly, there are a lot of disappointing things about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. Having waited far too long for a game that maybe would have been better left to our collective imagination, its performance issues, lack of stakes (pun intended), and weak RPG systems left me cold. But, as I say in my Bloodlines 2 review, the lack of connection to the first game is what kills it dead for me. Bar a somewhat meaningless throwback towards the end of the narrative, there's literally nothing connecting the two games bar disparate lore snippets scattered around the map that no one is really reading. Bloodlines 2 is a sequel in name alone, and sadly not a good enough RPG to move the needle.

Speaking to Cat Burton on The Goth Boss Podcast, Chinese Room co-founder Dan Pinchbeck (who left TCR in 2023) claims that he consistently attempted to get Paradox to change the game's name. Sure, it would have led to some disappointment in the short term - we all wanted Bloodlines 2 - but it would have shaken off the specter of Troika's epic and the eventual frustration over the sequel's lack of throughline.

Noting that, in a push to enter the triple-A space, Pinchbeck approached Paradox about picking up development on Bloodlines 2. He stresses that the team wasn't up for "finishing someone else's [Hardsuit Labs'] game," and that instead it would "use as much as it could" but put its own storytelling spin on things.

He claims that Paradox asked The Chinese Room to "really pull it apart and put it back together again," noting that he could "feel the frustration [in the Hardsuit build] of a team who were desperately trying to finish something and really, really make their mark on it but it had just gone south." He does clarify that, when referring to something "going south," he isn't speaking to publisher/developer relations.

"It really, really was important to do justice to the world and the mythos," he continues. "I suppose the tricky question around it was 'are you making a sequel to Bloodlines 1?' And right from the word go, there was one of the producers that was then at Paradox, now with another publisher; we would sit there and go and have these planning sessions on 'how do we get them [Paradox] to not call it Bloodlines 2?' That feels like the most important thing that we do here, is come at this and say this isn't Bloodlines 2, you can't make Bloodlines 2. There's not enough time, and there's not enough money."

"Bloodlines 1 came out at a really interesting time in game development… 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 are real cult games now, but they really weren't very good when you actually broke them apart and analyzed them. Great ideas, wonderful ideas, but you couldn't get away with them now.

"Trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded," he continues. "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.

"We sort of approached it from that point of view of what can we do with the time and the money that's available, and at that point what actually pitched weirdly - which will probably [elicit] a psychic scream from Bloodlines 1 players across the net - was 'we can't make Bloodlines 2, we can't make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.' If we look at something that 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 start talking about 'what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that, if that happened?'"

"Then you go 'yay!'," he says with a laugh. "And then everything goes [wild], and everyone feeds in and it's 'yes, but this. Yes, but this. Yes, but the players, the community, this and that,' and then like every other game it just becomes untangling an anaconda fuckball of competing priorities and what everyone wants and things like that.

"It was always going to be tricky," he concludes, but notes that "I had a lot of fun writing the story on that one, because the mythos around the RPG is so brilliant."

Pinchbeck left midway through Bloodlines 2's development, and doesn't give his own thoughts on the game that eventually released, but I agree with his comments more generally. Bloodlines 1 is pretty buggy and busted, but its legacy and ambition overshadows every Vampire: The Masquerade videogame to date. Perhaps, with Bloodlines 2 now out in the wild, the series has met its final death - and maybe, while it hurts to say it, that's for the best.