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At this year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, the team behind Vampire: The Masquerade showed up in force to debut several projects, including the announcement of the future of Bloodlines II. The game is now coming in 2024, courtesy of new developer The Chinese Room.
This may seem like a massive departure if you’re familiar with The Chinese Room’s previous work, which includes Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and the forthcoming Still Wakes the Deep. Bloodlines II is supposedly a choice-based action RPG, while TCR’s creative output is mostly narrative adventure games.
They do have a plan here, however. At PAX, I was ushered into an inordinately creepy meeting room in the official Vampire: The Masquerade booth to hear all about it.
“We had a different product vision around this one,” Shaun Grady told me, “and at that point it was time to find a studio that shared that vision.”
At Paradox Interactive, Grady holds the ominous title of Vice President of World of Darkness, which encompasses Vampire and all the horror RPGs like Werewolf: The Apocalypse that share its setting.
“We went out and we spoke to a lot of studios,” Grady said. “There were a few factors in there because of the franchise we’re in. One of those factors is obviously the ability to handle a narrative in a mature, adult way, and also an ability to handle narratives that are very grounded in what’s still very much our world with an angle on them. That’s very much the World of Darkness, but also the Chinese Room.”
Bloodlines II – a long-awaited sequel to the cult 2004 hit Bloodlines – had been announced in 2019 as being under development at Hardsuit Labs, the Seattle-based developer behind now-shuttered FPS Blacklight: Retribution. Several of the original game’s writers were also said to be returning for the sequel.
Not quite two years later, Paradox revealed it had removed Hardsuit Labs as the developer on Bloodlines II, due to what Grady calls “a diversion of visions” with Paradox. That was it for new news on Bloodlines II until Sept. 2.
The creative director on this new Bloodlines II is Alex Skidmore. “When The Chinese Room became part of Sumo Group, which is one of the UK’s largest developers, the goal of that was to create games that had more action, larger-scale games,” Skidmore told me at PAX. “We were developing concepts around that when Paradox approached us with the opportunity for Bloodlines II. For us, that was perfect timing. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
The Chinese Room had already expanded to a crew of over 100 developers as part of its work on the forthcoming Still Wakes the Deep, which put it into a better position to make a game the size of something like Bloodlines II. It’s also being supported by several other internal teams at Sumo Digital. Skidmore himself is a relatively recent hire at TCR, and has previously worked on games in the Fable and Gears of War series.
“We see Bloodlines II as taking a big step forward in trying to map out our future,” Skidmore said. “That really drew me. I really liked the idea that there was ambition there to make these games, and these are the kinds of games I love to make.”
The Chinese Room effectively started Bloodlines II when it took over the project in 2021. Its new game is still set in Seattle, and takes place in 2024, during a massive, once-a-century snowstorm that’s paralyzed the city. While this is still distinctly set in the same world as Bloodlines – as well as other recent Vampire video games, such as last year’s Swansong – Bloodlines II picks up 20 years later.
In TCR’s Bloodlines II, for the first time in a Vampire adaptation, you’ll play as an elder vampire rather than a freshly-turned novice. While Skidmore was cagey about further details, your character begins Bloodlines II as having just awakened from a long slumber, which means you’ll have no idea what to make of 21st-century human or vampire society at the start of the game.
“In this one, Seattle is a completely dominated Camarilla city,” Skidmore says, “as opposed to Los Angeles in Bloodlines which was technically an anarch state. So here you have this whole political system. Everything’s under [the Camarilla’s] control, and then at the start of our game, all that’s in jeopardy. That’s what our story explores.”
