Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 Cover Story

When Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was released in November 2004, it was, by most accounts, an immediate failure. The game was famously ugly and buggy, and it faced intense competition, sharing a launch with Half-Life 2 and releasing within days of both Halo 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. In its launch window, Bloodlines sold only 72,000 copies, and its developer Troika Games shut down just over three months after its launch.

Despite that, Bloodlines was eventually resurrected as a cult classic. In the following years, fans modded it to patch out bugs and add new content. Once people pushed past that rough exterior, its world-building, storytelling, and narrative design were praised as top-notch. Current estimates put the game’s lifetime sales between nine and ten times as much as its launch window. The game, like the vampires it depicts, simply refused to die. In the years that followed, a natural question arose: could we ever get a sequel?

In 2015, Paradox Interactive acquired White Wolf and, by extension, the IP to Bloodlines. In a 2017 interview with PCGamesN, Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester expressed interest in developing a Bloodlines 2, saying it would happen “when the time is right.” That task would ultimately go to the Seattle-based Hardsuit Labs, which even recruited Brian Mitsoda, lead writer on the original Bloodlines. The long-awaited sequel was announced at GDC 2019, and by E3 a few months later, Hardsuit showed off a gameplay trailer and ran demos for press outlets. Trailers and press releases advertised a Q1 2020 release date, but Bloodlines 2 missed that window by a wide margin, to say the least. The Hardsuit Labs version of the game would never be released.