I don't ask for very much in life. I like good coffee, competitive esports, and, sometimes, getting caught in the rain (given I'm from Scotland, that part happens a lot). But all I want from 2025 is for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 to be my game of the year. A slot currently occupied by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I'd love to see the World of Darkness shine yet again. Bloodhunt was great, but it didn't last. Swansong, which in theory sounded great, quickly became monotonous. Aside from visual novels like Shadows of New York and its recent sister title, Reckoning of New York, VTM's virtual universe hasn't wowed anyone lately – in short, Bloodlines 2 has to deliver.
In an interview with ex-Dragon Age writer David Gaider covering his Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which Gaider claims could be like Baldur's Gate 3 or Expedition 33 if the developer leans into what makes the TTRPG so great.
But one of the hills (or mountains) that Bloodlines 2 has to overcome is its predecessor's reputation. I reminisce with Gaider about Troika's chaotic RPG, and he tells me that it inspired Bioware's approach to slow, non-combat-focused storytelling.
"[Bloodlines 1] was a sad tale of its own," he recalls. "It was really good, but they never quite managed to bring it home, like maintain the quality. But that first half of the game? Amazing stuff." As someone who spent many, many hours suffering through the Nosferatu Warrens, I concur.
"One thing that Bloodlines did that I was like 'I really want someone to do this,' was that there's a whole plot that takes place in a haunted hotel [Ocean House] where, unlike the rest of the game, there's no actual combat, but it's tense from beginning to end. I at the time that it's all anybody on the Bioware team could talk about."
"For a while, it actually enabled me to have some ammunition," he laughs. "Whenever the level designers would be like 'we have to sprinkle some popcorn fights everywhere because players get bored,' I was like 'no, they don't! That doesn't need to be a thing!
"I when we were working on Dragon Age: Inquisition and I wanted to have the part where you go to Val Royeaux and you're at the masquerade ball [not have] any combat, and I just couldn't convince everybody. So you kept having to duck out of the masquerade, go have a fight, then come back into it. Players need to be kept interested, absolutely. Players need to feel like the things they're doing are having an effect. But I think it's always underestimated that part of that can be story – politics can keep people interested. What the player doesn't need to do is just fight, even if it's an RPG."
While Bloodlines is a cult classic, it is, ittedly, a little rough by today's standards and even requires modded patches to work correctly on most PCs. I ask Gaider what he wants from Bloodlines 2 and what The Chinese Room needs to do to land it.
"The hope is that we would get a new Vampire game in the same line as Expedition 33 or Baldur's Gate 3 – let's take [VTM] and see what we can do with it. Wouldn't it be great to have a full-on RPG that wasn't beholden to the fantasy or sci-fi genre, one that really leaned into the roleplaying systems of Vampire: The Masquerade?
"If you've played the tabletop version, it didn't do a lot of combat, but what it did with characters and inter-character relationships, as well as the various powers you had and how those changed the way you played the game completely, [had] some meat there. I wish somebody would just take that to its logical conclusion and give us the game that's meant to exist."
Ahead of the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 clans if you're wondering where to stamp your allegiance ahead of time.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We've also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with of the team and fellow readers.