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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox appears to be rethinking its plan to charge for two of the six playable clans in the game.

Community developer DebbieElla told the Bloodlines 2 Discord community last night (spotted by ResetEra): “We are listening to your feedback about the Lasombra and Toreador clan access, and we’re making adjustments ahead of launch to reflect this. We will share more information about what this means as soon as possible.”

The comment comes a week after Paradox announced the release date for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which is 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.

The Shadows and Silk pack can be bought alone for £18.69/€22/$22, or as part of a Premium Edition for £75/€90/$90, which also includes a cosmetic-focused Santa Monica Memories pack. For reference, the Standard Edition of the game costs £50/€60/$60.

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At a glance, this might not seem untoward. Plenty of games sell additional content at launch and bundle it with premium editions of a game. The base price of Bloodlines 2 even appears to have been adjusted because of it, so it’s cheaper than other full-priced games. But the problem comes from the content being charged for itself: the clans.

The clans in Bloodlines 2 are a core part of the game. Choosing one is equivalent to choosing your character class and therefore the playstyle you’re opting for. Clans also determine the storied group you belong to in the world and give you access to different clothing options and clan-specific non-player characters. Clans are not superfluous, cosmetic content.

What’s more, the locked Toreador and Lasombra clans are highly desirable. Toreador are a clan built around the iconic archetype of vampires as seductive, sexy beings, and come fitted with the power to enthrall their prey by, yes, kissing them. Lasombra, on the other hand, do their work in the shadows, and can manipulate shadows to tangle and hold enemies and teleport themselves. I tried both clans briefly in the Bloodlines 2 preview build I played and enjoyed them, especially Lasombra.

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Important caveat: you can access powers from another clan in Bloodlines 2, so you’re not locked to only doing things your clan offers. Every time you gain a higher tier of power, you’ll see other powers listed to the left and right of them that belong to other clans. You can unlock them but doing so is costly and complicated. You need to pay a higher skill-point cost for them as well as a price related to other ‘currencies’ in the game, which are usually earned by drinking special types of blood, and you need to find certain NPCs to teach these powers to you.

It’s a faff, in other words, so it’s more likely your experience of Bloodlines 2 will be unlocking your clan-specific powers first before branching into other clan’s abilities. Your clan choice, therefore, is an important one, and so the decision to paywall access to a third of them is notable.

The justification for doing it, as relayed by developer The Chinese Room to Rock Paper Shotgun at Gamescom, was these two clans represented content developed beyond what was originally planned for the game. The Chinese Room inherited development of Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs, remember – it didn’t originate it. So The Chinese Room’s reasoning was this was additional content developed for the game, so it would sell it as such at release. But if the content is developed during a game’s main development period, is it really additional? And if it appears alongside other content in the game, only with a padlock over it, is it really additive or withheld?

Portioning off parts of a game to be sold around release is nothing new. Paradox itself has a track record of leveraging paid-for downloadable content as a significant source of income for games it makes. It was expected, to a degree, here. But Paradox has chosen the wrong approach. Carving off core gameplay will never be an acceptable proposition, and its decision has tainted the upcoming arrival of an excruciatingly long-awaited game. Here’s hoping the “adjustments” being considered will turn this situation around.

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