From next week, anyone who pre-ordered their Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 Premium Edition via the PlayStation Store will be refunded.
Community developer DebbieElla told players the refunds were coming as part of recent “adjustments”, and confirmed we’ll get “all the details” on the changes on 17th September.
We weren’t allowed to direct capture the preview build but we were supplied some b-roll to fit a video together with instead.Watch on YouTube
As we reported last week, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox is rethinking its plan to charge for two of the six playable clans in the game following community feedback. The news came after publisher Paradox announced the release date for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, 21st October, along with pricing details for the game. It was then we learned the company intended to charge £20 extra to access two clans in the game, via a Shadows and Silk content pack.
According to developer, The Chinese Room, these two clans represented content developed beyond what was originally planned for the game after it inherited development of Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs. Consequently, The Chinese Room’s reasoning was this was additional content developed for the game, so it would sell it as such at release. But not anymore.
Now, in a Discord post, DebbieElla writes: “We are working hard on the adjustments that we promised, and we will be able to tell you all the details on 17th September. Making significant changes like this involves many moving parts, and we want to make sure that we get it right with this change.
“Anyone who pre-ordered the Premium Edition through the PlayStation Store will be contacted and refunded starting Monday 8th September. You’ll be able to pre-order your Premium Edition copy later again, before the release on 21st October. Please note that this is an intentional first step in our planned course of action leading up to 17th September to deliver the best possible experience for you at launch.”
The post closed on thanking players for their patience, and later messages from DebbieElla confirm this only applies to this particular edition sold for PlayStation – purchases on other platforms are unaffected.
Some are now hoping this signifies all clans may be available in the base game, but as one player points out, however, “taking the clans out of the deluxe editions is the easy part. The hard part is trying to figure out what else they can put in there”.
In his Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 preview a few weeks back, Bertie wrote: “[T]his is a sequel to a cult RPG after all, and one based on a major tabletop RPG to boot. In this case it feels valid to crave a little more role-playing, a little more texture and depth to the game’s people and conversations. And so for now, a question mark remains”.
