The Chinese Room's cofounder told Paradox 'we can't make Bloodlines 2' but then they did make Bloodlines 2 and it was like 'untangling an anaconda f***ball of competing priorities'

Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 released last month after a lengthy, difficult development, one that saw the project taken off original developer Hardsuit Labs by publisher Paradox Interactive and handed over to The Chinese Room. When it finally burst from its coffin, the critical reaction ranged from mildly positive to firmly negative, with our own Fraser Brown giving it a respectable score of 78 in our Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 review.

Yet whether players liked it or not, pretty much everyone agreed that The Chinese Room's sequel wasn't really a successor to Bloodlines at all, lacking the ridiculous roleplaying depth that makes Troika's original the brilliantly broken bloodsucking adventure it is. In fact, PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens pointed out that the biggest problem with Bloodlines 2 is that it is called Bloodlines 2.

As is so often the case, it appears Bloodlines 2's adoptive developers were highly aware of this potential problem. Speaking to Cat Burton of the Goth Boss Podcast (via PCGamesN) TCR cofounder Dan Pinchbeck explained how he urged Paradox Interactive not to call Bloodlines 2, well, that.

Pinchbeck says that, from the start, The Chinese Room intended to build its own version of the game, rather than try to finish the work done by Hardsuit Labs up to that point. "When we first started talking to Paradox, I said—we'd even seen the Hardsuit build—I was like 'We're a studio that [has] built our reputation on storytelling.'

"And I guess you want to do it justice. You want to take care of it. But taking over a project that had already been in development as well, that's such a tricky thing to take on. We are an original IP studio. The only way we're going to want to do this is if we are able to, basically, we'll take everything that's there and use as much as we can. But we don't just want to finish someone else's game."

Paradox, apparently, agreed to this. But Pinchbeck says the "tricky question" was whether The Chinese Room's should herald its status as a sequel to Bloodlines 1, something he repeatedly discussed with one of Paradox's former producers. "We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of 'how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2?' You can't make Bloodlines 2. There's not enough time. There's not enough money."

Pinchbeck points out that the original Bloodlines came out at a "really interesting period" when games like Stalker and Shenmue were shooting for the moon in terms of roleplaying simulation. "You could ship a really ambitious game that was full of bugs and holes, was totally flawed, but the ambition was really exciting."

Pinchbeck says that "you couldn't get away with" that style of design now. "Trying to recreate that magic in a different environment felt wrongheaded. 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."

To briefly interject, I'd point out that making an ambitious but broken RPG wasn't acceptable in 2004 either—Bloodlines was a commercial failure that resulted in the death of Troika. Its reputation has been salvaged mainly through time and the absurd dedication of one German chemist.

Nonetheless, Pinchbeck is correct that it's even less acceptable now than it was then. Hence, in a pitch that he says would make Bloodlines 1 fans elicit a "psychic scream", Pinchbeck said to Paradox: "We can't make Bloodlines 2, we can't make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored. And if we look at something which 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 started talking about saying, then 'what would the next big Bloodlines game look like after that, if that happened'?" In other words, The Chinese Room tried to rework Bloodlines 2 as vampire Dishonored as a stepping stone to another Bloodlines game, perhaps Bloodlines 3 or, if The Chinese Room had its way, the true Bloodlines 2.

Personally, I don't think The Chinese Room pulled off this plan of making vampire Dishonored either—though you can see that DNA more clearly than you can Bloodlines 1. And I think Pinchbeck recognises this too, as he says that "like every other game" Bloodlines 2's development became a process of "untangling an anaconda fuckball of competing priorities and what everybody wants and things like that".

Ultimately, Pinchbeck left The Chinese Room sometime in the summer of 2023, more than two years before Bloodlines 2 launched. In the interview with Burton he cites being "very burnt out" and lingering stresses from a "very difficult pandemic" as reasons, though he also states that the studio had "evolved into something that wasn't the same thing Jess[ica Curry] and I had started."