It's been nearly a decade since Paradox Interactive acquired White Wolf and the World of Darkness, and nearly as long since it started working with Hard Suit Labs based on its pitch for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. And boy has it been a rough time.
After four years working in secret, Hard Suit and Paradox announced Bloodlines 2 in 2019. We'd be playing it in 2020, the pair said. Then it was delayed. And delayed again. The 2020 target became 2021, and then it was delayed indefinitely, with Hard Suit given the boot.
For a while, it seemed like cancellation was inevitable. And it did almost end up in the bin. "If we hadn't found The Chinese Room," deputy CEO Mattias Lilja tells me, "and seen what they'd done with the early work, [cancellation] would have been the next logical step, because we could not continue as we did."
Lilja believes it's in a better place now—though it was recently struck with yet another delay, pushing it out of 2024 and into the first half of 2025. "It's been in development a very long time, but we are starting to see the game shape up to be something we can… we think it will be a World of Darkness experience."
It's strangely tepid praise, but also refreshing. The reason for this interview was not the usual marketing-driven fare. No big announcements. No hype. Just a rather frank explanation about what's going on at Paradox, the reasons why it's been struggling recently, and what it's doing to change its fortunes. But even with that in mind, there seems to be a bit of nervousness about how Bloodlines 2 will ultimately be received. And it's not something that Paradox wants to go through again.
"It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game," Lilja says. "So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the licence from us. I would say it's the sort of strategic way this would work. So it's still an outlier from what we're supposed to do, we don't know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it."
Paradox has its own small-scale experimental label, Paradox Arc, where it can try different things, but a big RPG doesn't remotely fit that. It would have to be something "very different", says Lilja, like a CRPG, but even that's a "big investment", and nowadays expectations are higher than ever thanks to Baldur's Gate 3. So "regardless of outcome," he says, Bloodlines is a "dead end".
As for the future of Bloodlines 2, specifically: "We don't drop games. We make sure they work. We make sure they fulfil the promise that they have. The rest is very much up to the players." So you can expect the usual slate of updates and fixes, but DLC? I wouldn't hold your breath.
"I think some studios do strategic investments, long term things, because they feel that the cost of not doing it is too high. But, I mean, I think it's fairly clear, at least to me, and I think to you, even in the best of cases, Bloodlines does not have a super long shelf life. That's not the way these games behave. You have an influx of players, there's a bit of word of mouth, and they have a high peak, and then they trail off. And it's not the type of gameplay that develops over time that much. So I think that's part of why these types of games are not really that attractive to us."
Yet it was the persistence of Bloodlines' fans that inspired this sequel, 20 years after the original. Better supported RPGs, meanwhile, can keep going year after year, as evidenced by the incredibly long life of Bethesda RPGs. And then there's Baldur's Gate—a 26-year-old series that's just spawned its third game, which in turn has been one of Steam's most played games for over a year, despite the lack of DLC. Some RPGs have an incredibly long tail. But it is clear they aren't in Paradox's wheelhouse, and passing the licence to other caretakers might be the smart call here.
