I think all three of Cain/Boyarsky/Anderson have openly admitted that they were not good managers and never wanted to do the job in the first place, and that the failure of Troika is squarely on their shoulders. Maybe things might have gone differently if they had made a four-way partnership with someone that did have a business background and handed off the day-to-day running of the place to them, but ultimately I think they were probably doomed to be a casualty of the widespread death of the mid-tier developer that occurred around that time regardless.
Something that really annoyed me in those demos is people jumping off/jumping up on two story buildings and nobody bats an eyelid. In one a guy walks right in front of the player while they are picking a lock and there was a cop only 30 feet away and again nothing. I sure hope they do something about stuff like that in the release version.
Anyone else getting motion sickness from that video?
No, but I understand why would that happen. (I don't get motion sickness but I get an annoyingly feeling of... frustrating limitation that I can't get used with.)
As a PC -> M&Kb player watching the limited camera movement due to controller can affect the brain that expects a more free, natural, snappy movement of the camera (possible only with mouse look).
Limiting this expected / habitual movement makes the brain go a bit... weeee...
That's the console for you. Unfortunately plebs are used to being limited. In many ways. That's why no one complains about FOV or limited control and mechanics.
That video seems to be basically the same as the E3 demo video as both are the same game build so if you saw that previous video there is nothing new in this current one. Hard to say if it is IGN just being their normal incompetent self or if the devs are really trying to pawn that off as new footage.
My name is Cara Ellison, and I’m the senior narrative designer on Bloodlines 2. I’m responsible for co-designing how the minute-to-minute story and characters in the game feel, what the player’s relationship is to characters, and specifically what you can say and do to characters. The awful jokes that radiate from the narrative department sometimes make Ka’ai suddenly choke and splutter at his desk, and I’m sure that at some point Luke Dodge, our Art Director, is going to have to call the police. Or maybe the CDC.
Today I want to write a little bit about what I've learned about building and writing a World Of Darkness Seattle to be a sequel to the first Bloodlines.
1. You are locked in the game with them
What is compelling about the original Bloodlines is that it is very interested in power relations encroaching on your ‘territory’ in a way that most RPGs are not. Most RPGs try to present you with systems that soup you up like a tanked-up space marine and expel you out into space to explode things and mess with civilizations and make your spaceship very shiny. Like a kind of settler model.
Bloodlines 1 and 2 are games that are much more interested in how its NPCs might fuck with you than how you might fuck with them. It is claustrophobic. As Watchmen’s Rorschach might say, you are locked in the game with them. You start the game already a political pawn in other people’s chess. Vampire relations in Santa Monica in Bloodlines 1, for example, were already a tense and volatile political mess before you started the game.
In Bloodlines 1 as well as in Bloodlines 2, every vampire you encounter in the game has been a vampire for longer than you. You are in their realm. You are not the hero of the tale, and neither are they. You are merely trying to make a mark on a world that got fucked up without you. And for characters that are weaker than you – mortals, for example – you have the ability to rope them into your nightmare, but what is certain is that there will be very little good outcome for anyone involved with a monster. Try to be ‘nice’, and it will backfire. Try to be ‘kind’, and you might have to be cruel. Try to help out, and you might help out the worst of the World Of Darkness. But what is certain is that this neo-noir set of characters is not going to give you a bunch of vampire powers and then let you do whatever you like. Someone created you for a reason; The Masquerade is all-encompassing. The characters in this neo-noir world are there to be a big, entertaining pain in your ass at every step. The original game - Bloodlines 1 – was the same way.
2. Choose Who You Hurt
In Bloodlines 1, and therefore Bloodlines 2, you cannot achieve anything without hurting people or making them angry. You can only choose who you hurt. You can choose between one vampire political reality, or another. Everything is seen through vampire eyes – when you’re immortal, you do not work on mortal time. The politics is long-term. You have to stay undead and stay powerful. And in order to do that, you have to start manipulating.
For example, if humans are dying out en masse, how will you feed? If the humans stop free movement from happening, where will you live, will your reality become more difficult? How do vampires use technology to manipulate their food supply? What’s the lowest effort way you can stay alive as a vampire? How can you stop humans from knowing that you exist… and yet keep them sweet on you so that you can feed on them easily? How do mortal politics interfere with your unlife? When the city bans sex work… is that good or bad for you and those you know? Does perpetuating mortal trauma make an undead existence easier… or harder to deal with? If you suck blood at a particular bloodshop, what happens when another vampire takes it over? Does what you were doing before the Embrace impact how people react to you now? Is there anything that…scares you as a vampire? And …can you make mortals more likely to turn up when you want by getting really good in bed?
3. Navigating the World of Darkness
We ask ourselves a lot of questions while writing and we try to give you a reactive world where you can figure out some of the answers to these questions. This means that whatever difficult choices we force you to make, the world will give you consequences that are always as equally interesting as each other. We try to open up every conversation so that you have a number of ways you can get through it – by negotiating, coercing, or seducing, for example. We also make bribery an option – even starting a fight or finding a way to avoid people is a viable way to get by. If you are a Malkavian, perhaps your options are more terrifying than usual. Or, you can merely ask a bunch of questions until you are forced to choose what to do.
A lot of our characters are assholes. A lot of people who exist in the real world are assholes. But just like in the real world, the way that characters in Bloodlines 2 talk about others provides a social fabric that gives you a better context and understanding of what that does to the world, what the consequences are, and how characters are affected by those attitudes and actions. No one character will be ‘just’ a category of person. If you laugh at a joke an asshole makes, it doesn’t make them any less a bad person who will screw you over at a moment’s notice. For example, in HBO’s Veep, we know that the characters are all some of the worst people we’ve ever seen. But what makes you understand that they are doing or saying something bad is that other people react to them in the way that they do. In our game, if you keep one asshole alive, maybe some other bad people will be really mad about it. I mean in the first Bloodlines, did you really, completely like Damsel? Or was there something naive about her? Was she just necessary for the fireworks to happen? Depending on who you hung out with, maybe you’d have a different perspective on her. Or maybe you’d be more impressed with what she does than what she says.
4. Unsanctioned Vampires
At the forefront of my mind in Bloodlines 2 is the crossover from being mortal to being a vampire. Around the time your character was created in an event called the Mass Embrace, a small number of other vampires were also created. Unlike you, they were abandoned and they did not get to choose who they were when they were Embraced. There was no character creator for them. Their lives were interrupted and they were made immortal, and all their relationships with the world were frozen in time. They are your brothers and sisters, in a way. And perhaps they are not having as privileged a time as you are. They had no guidance on the crossover. They had no support as to what was happening to them. They have to deal with their unlives as is. If you suddenly got thirsty for human blood and couldn’t stand sunlight, what exactly would you tell the people you know? How would you get through vampire puberty? And uh… what are the rules?
We let you figure out what to do with the messiest vampires. But I am not going to make it easy on you.
To all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
For the last three and a half years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a worthy successor to Bloodlines 1. To us, that meant not only making good on the ambitions of this remarkable game, but also a duty to ensure we would not repeat its mistakes. Today, we have to tell you that we need some more time to get you the game you’ve been waiting for. Although Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will still launch in 2020, we have decided to value quality over making the Q1 launch window.
There are some things we wanted to hit under all circumstances when we set out to follow in Bloodlines’ footsteps: A deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness. We firmly believe that we’re on the right track to get you all of this.
On the flip side, there’s the responsibility to avoid some of the issues that plagued the first game, which was famously launched too early. Over the last few months, it became clear that to stick to our original date would risk repeating that mistake. We won’t do that. In the end, everyone working on this game wants to offer you the best Bloodlines 2 we can.
This hasn’t been an easy- nor our first choice. Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised.
Your feedback was invaluable in this. It helped us give the proper weight to what we saw, as well. We’d like to thank you, and hope you’ll support us in the decision that came from it.
Many of us from Hardsuit Labs will be in Berlin for PDXCON. For those of you going, we look forward to seeing you there! We will be sharing insights into the development of Bloodlines 2 along with other steps we’ve taken to strengthen our development team to realize our ambitions for Bloodlines 2.
For those of you who won’t be there, we will be sharing more about this during the PDXCON Announcement stream on Saturday the 21st. We are also opening up a Reddit thread to answer any of your questions in the Bloodlines stream on the following Sunday.
Thanks,
Andy Kipling and Brian Mitsoda, on behalf of the team at Hardsuit Labs
Good decision, the gameplay footage shown so far was quite promising but also very rough (Q1 looked objectively unrealistic). Hopefully they'll take their time in order to avoid a severe case of earlyaccessitis.
Good, I hope they delay it even more later. Gameplay looks like clunky shit. And story and characters seem way more hipster and less cool than the old game. Seems less goth and more edgy for the "current year" players.
Seems less goth and more edgy for the "current year" players.
That part is hardly gonna change. I mean who are the Goth's in this day and age? It's 100% SJW's.. and sure, many of the Goths in the 90's where leftists too, but it was not on this SJW/activism-level
/puts on my cut-off black leather gloves and imagine i'm not looking ridiculous, as a soon 50-year old
The delay will also help with the setting as it is supposed to take place during Christmas time in Seattle but after seeing the clunky combat from these early trailers hopefully this extra time will allow them to fix those issues.
Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised.
You'd think publishers would have learned by now that simply throwing more people at development does not make things happen faster or more efficiently. It typically has the opposite effect. They should have just stuck with a vague "coming 2020" from the get-go.
There is something weird going on with Bloodlines 2 on Steam. The game vanished from my wishlist and I can't find it anymore on the store (launcher or web). However, I can get the steam link to it via google search.
There is something weird going on with Bloodlines 2 on Steam. The game vanished from my wishlist and I can't find it anymore on the store (launcher or web). However, I can get the steam link to it via google search.
I was thinking about VTM2 when I was considering yet another playthough of the original.. What's going on with this game now ? Complete lack of news compared to other upcoming titles of 2020, in such a crisis time.. Doesn't bode well.
It is probably just a random glitch but maybe they are pushing it to 2021 or later now just due to the lock downs and thought it was easier to just make it harder to search for to not look so incompetent since it was originally going to be out by now before the first delay.
It is kind of funny though that doing the search I discovered 3 more games in that Visual Novel series are coming out.
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