Now that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has a firm release window of October 2025, new developer The Chinese Room (which replaced Hardsuit Labs a few years ago) has discussed the long-awaited role-playing game sequel in an exclusive interview that appeared in the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine.
Speaking of the game’s dialogues, Game Director Alex Skidmore emphasized that they will feel like a maze, partly to avoid people just heading straight toward the standard good choice options.
We ultimately want narrative exploration, so each of those dialogue trees is a kind of maze. So we didn’t want people to sort of switch off and go, ‘I’m looking for the good choice, or the Paragon choice’. Because the moment you do that, you’re always going to press top right or whatever.
Even though this new iteration of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will put players in the role of an Elder vampire called Phyre (rather than the newly created Thinblood originally imagined by Hardsuit Labs), The Chinese Room made sure to leave plenty of room for players to interpret the character however they want. Narrative Director Ian Thomas explained:
We’re deliberately leaving space for the player. If we went, ‘Here is your character, they’re like this, they have done this, all of these things,’ actually, in a way, it’s not important that they know all that backstory – at least to start with, because we are dumping them into a new and unfamiliar situation.
How we show the status of the character is in other people’s reactions to that character. And so, rather than saying at the beginning, you’re a legend, we build that by people’s reactions to you. Then there’s the power level, which I think would show pretty heavily very early on. The first time you accidentally punch a guy across a room, which I think is very different from the start of Bloodlines 1.
At the start of the game, Phyre, who is waking up after a long slumber, is bound and stripped of most of their Elder powers. However, even in this state, they’re still a force to be reckoned with. Lead Sound Designer Tessa Verplancke adds:
They’re much more quiet. Their foley doesn’t make as much noise because even without their powers, even when they’re nerfed, they’re way more silent than all the rest of them. You can feel how strong and powerful they are. Even if you can’t use all of their powers, when they’re climbing up things, they don’t even need to have a little exertion when they do it. So even in their movements, they’ve been made to be more powerful audibly, and you can subtly tell that nothing is really difficult for you.
We expect to learn much more about Bloodlines 2 over the next five months or so. Stay tuned for more info.
