You really have to hand it to the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. They are the absolute masters of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the doyens of stepping on rakes, even as they near the checkered flag. The long-awaited RPG got a new trailer and what may actually prove to be the final release date at Gamescom Opening Night Live this week. The trailer was a feisty show of Dishonored-esque mayhem, and the hands-on verdicts I’ve read (save for stinky uncle Eurogamer) have been positive. Ours is forthcoming.
But then came the revelation that this much-delayed sequel to a quintessentially faction-led RPG from a company famous for downloadable add-ons would sell two of its vampire clans as day-one DLC. How we laughed! How we clutched our faces and chittered like gerbils! How we ran outside, begging for the moon to fall on our heads! Despair springs anew.
Our reporter on the ground at Gamescom is hardware editor James ‘Hardwearing’ Archer. He caught up with current and hopefully, final Bloodlines 2 developers The Chinese Room in person yesterday and, much like a parent coaxing a child away from a poisonous snake, casually asked them ‘What’s the thinking behind splitting off two of the clans as DLC?’
The answer, broadly, is that the new clans represent additional work on top of The Chinese Room’s original plans for the game – sometimes at Paradox’s request – so it’s fair to flog those bits separately. As for releasing the DLC alongside the main game, which naturally suggests that it could be sold as part of the main game, a PR told James, not in so many words, that they don’t want players to have to wait.
Narrative director Ian Thomas attempted to spell it all out. “It’s worthwhile saying that the game – well, I’ve only been on the game, I think, for two and a half years – but during that period, we’ve had huge cycles of ‘What are the player base thinking? What are they asking for? How does that fit in? What does the early alpha testing say, and what are they actually asking for?'” he said. (Side note to any more prosperous game developers reading: I feel like you are all taught by media training people to stall for time with rhetorical questions. Please stop doing this, it’s very exasperating and only makes me suspicious.)
“So we’ve made a huge amount of changes over that time, based on that cycle, if you like,” Thomas continued. “Including a massive amount of story content and features and all the rest of it. So we have been expanding it from where we originally planned to land it, I think, constantly, and Paradox have been really good when we go, or when the clients go, or when Paradox go: ‘We should add a bit more here. Let’s push the date back.’ As you know, the date has pushed back, but that has been to fatten it out into something that we feel does land where the players want it.”
According to Thomas, The Chinese Room are still “adding additional content even over the last few weeks”. The extra clan material and associated story bits fall into this rubric of post-concept ‘fattening’. So do certain character customisation features like hairstyles, piercings and tattoos, according to project design director Jey Hicks. “It’s not all, like, just fluff that we’re chucking in,” he said. “It’s all got that same quality there.”
The original Bloodlines shipped with seven vampire clans, including one of the clans Bloodlines 2 wants to paywall. They appear to be very different games, however – Paradox have taken to describing the sequel as a “spiritual successor” – as one might expect from the fact that The Chinese Room have sod-all experience making CRPGs. I think it would be fair to argue that Bloodlines 2 only having four clans by default simply reflects a necessary change of direction, however much fans of the original might dislike that change of direction. It’s also worth noting that the conditions of game development have changed enormously since 2004, and that given the turmoil of Bloodlines 2’s overall development under Paradox, it’s miraculous they have anything to show at all.
But that’s not the case the developers made to us at Gamescom. And in particular, none of the above really explains the decision to ship features returning players would reasonably expect to form part of the base package as day-one ‘extras’. The “additional work” argument would ring truer if the DLC clans landed after release; as it is, the designation as to what constitutes the original concept and what constitutes an ‘extra’ seems totally arbitrary. The language about not wanting fans to wait just feels like predictable camouflage for the boring truth that they’d like to make more money.
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