Much has already been written about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 and its desperately troubled development, but it's still interesting to hear about the project from someone who was actually there, on the inside.
In a rather revealing interview with Cat Burton on YouTube, Dan Pinchbeck, the game's creative director, basically admits that significant doubts surrounded the title from the start — especially when it came to taking up the 'Bloodlines' name.
"We used to sit there and go and have these planning sessions of, ‘how do we get [the producers] to not call it Bloodlines 2?," Pinchbeck explains.
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He continues, in particularly damning fashion: "That feels like the most important thing we do here is to come at this and say this isn’t Bloodlines 2. You can’t make Bloodlines 2. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money’."
Indeed, it's a brutal recollection of what must have been a stressful situation for The Chinese Room — the studio that was handed the project after it had repeatedly failed to get off the ground elsewhere.
The bottom line here is that Pinchbeck — and presumably many others at The Chinese Room — knew that they couldn't replicate the magic of Bloodlines, which is now fondly remembered as a cult classic RPG.
And with that in mind, Pinchbeck recalls that his original pitch was to create a more linear experience.
"We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored," he says.
Of course, looking back on Bloodlines 2 now, that line of thought makes a lot of sense. To be fair, the developer clearly understood its own limitations — but once the project adopted that all-important 'Bloodlines' name, the game's fate was sealed.
Pinchbeck, who co-founded The Chinese Room, left the company before Bloodlines 2 released.
"It felt like [The Chinese Room] had evolved into something that wasn’t the same thing that [co-founder Jessica Curry] and I started," he states.
Bloodlines 2 launched just over a month ago, and it was met with disappointing reviews from both critics and Vampire: The Masquerade fans. We called it "disastrously paced" and "a shambles" in our 4/10 review.
Did you ever have faith in Bloodlines 2? What do you make of Pinchbeck's comments? Don't forget to drain some blood in the comments section below.