Bloodlines 2 is the most unbuyable game I've ever seen
It's just unthinkable, right? You'd have to be a fool to buy this game.
I should lay my cards out - I adore Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Well, the first 2/3 or so. Chinatown onwards is... kind of a mess, a victim of circumstance, or just a kind of bad idea executed as well as it could be? I'm not sure.
But I have a lot of affection for that game - it came out at a formative age for me, right when I was starting to get into more "adult" themed games. I'll admit I bounce off it a couple of times before leaving Santa Monica, but that was technical stuff - when I discovered the patch that the devs had made (knowing the company was toast) and installed that, I was in love with it.
I've reinstalled this game on every computer I've owned at some point. I have Gangrel, Ventrue, and Malkavian completions as well as playthroughs well into Hollywood on all other clans.
I'm a fan.
Bloodlines 2 (1)
When Bloodlines 2 was announced, with the OG Mitsoda at the helm? I was extremely on board.
My expectations weren't sky-high that this would be the best game ever made - but neither was VtM:B, it was just a perfect example of its genre for a specific genre of nerd - a holotype for a holotype.
So sure I was hype but less for quality and more for continuity. White Wolf have gone on a weird journey over the last couple of decades, with the kind of decisions and partnerships that sort of naturally happen when you make edgy roleplay products for edgy people. They had a run of really bad publicity and had already kind of alienated a lot of their older, potentially more loyal fans by doing a big reboot right after Bloodlines launched (probably not causal, just coincidental) to move over to a more streamlined version of the same basic rules and ideas.
I'll hold my hands up and admit that I'm not a big White Wolf TTRPG guy - I played a couple of sessions of an extremely dysfunctional VtM game in 2011 (still on the old system near a decade later), and own a bunch of the source books (MtA my love...), but I've never really become fluent in the systems. I use them for inspiration in planning FATE games I never run.
So any commentary I have on the change of system is purely surface level "here's what I was told" - I was told pretty uniformly that the new system was for babies (hyperbole) and took a lot of the crunchy decision-making out of the game (probably more accurate).
The main effect was a split in the playerbase, and a general distaste for "management".
In the 15 years following there hasn't been much (any?) mass-market success for White Wolf videogames. The list of WoD developments is actually really long, but there's a gulf between Bloodlines and ~2019, a few years after they were bought by Paradox (yeah, the strategy game company) and right around when they announced Bloodlines 2. You'll also notice that the vast majority of those recent titles are Interactive Fiction by Choice of Games - these do pretty well on a small scale, they probably recoup the cost of paying a writer and artist to make them, but they aren't what Paradox shelled out for.
From what I've heard that initial development period was extremely messy, dogged by bad practice and personal politics, mismanagement stuff. Paradox sacked the leads after ~5 years of work in 2020, binned the development team the following year, and handed the project over to The Chinese Room - the Walking Simulator (non-pejorative) experts.
Bloodlines 2 (2)
Another admission - I'm not a big fan of TCR games, they just never clicked for me. They also aren't in any way affiliated with Paradox beyond this contract I think? So that's weird. That said they're a proven studio that knows how to write a compelling narrative, so it's not a terrible pick - I can just lower my expectations for the interactivity a bit, no big deal.
None of this was announced until 2023, which I think was probably wise - Bloodlines is kind of a cursed franchise at this point, best not to set expectations too high in case you have to nuke the project again. They said it'd be released a year later, "Fall 2024" - so clearly it was nearly done.
Next we hear is in August 2024, potentially weeks from the scheduled release, that they were delaying it 6 months or so. In March they delayed it again to October, for realsies this time!
This does not foster confidence.
Then last week they finally confirmed a release date of October 21 - Great!
Incapable of shooting a shot without catching their own foot, they also announced that 2 of the 6 playable clans were exclusive to the $90 Premium edition.
This is the most obvious "we hear you, we take it back" instigating move I've ever seen - if they don't reverse this decision before launch they're going to have a very bad time if the product is anything less than Game-of-the-Year. If they do reverse it, they have the awkward problem of refunds - it's simple to refund something you're no longer selling, but the Premium edition is technically not just the clans, there are some cosmetics too.
Outside looking in, it's just a massive fuck-up of corporate greed.
Researching further, I think a bit of naivete can also be blamed - I don't think they intended to release these two clans day 1 (as implied here) and had them planned for 6-12 months later to get people playing again, but with a year of delays they had the time to get them finished and polished up alongside the game itself and thought "why delay them any longer than necessary?" What probably started as a Season Pass became day 1 DLC because nobody considered the perception of such a thing.
Why would anyone buy this?
Let's summarise.
- Decade long development cycle
- Two Development teams including a reset 4 years ago
- Two 6-month delays in a row
- Disorganised Day-1 DLC announcement
When has a game ever released with this many red flags and been worth the price of admission?
As a comparison - Veilguard had an extremely messy development but no delays or DLC to worry about and it was a simple $60 purchase, they discounted it 35% two weeks after launch, 50% a few months later, and was just announced as joining GamePass less than a year in. Messy projects like this get gutted and squeezed for value.
You'd be (I was) a fool to buy this game at full price.