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Vampire

Paradox are “making adjustments” to Bloodlines 2’s day-one vampire clan DLC plans, following backlash

by admin August 27, 2025

Well, there you go. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox look like they might be sticking a stake in their rather unpopular plans to sell two of the game’s vampire clans as paid day-one DLC. I say “might be” because nothing specific’s been committed to yet, beyond some nebulous making of “adjustments ahead of launch” in response to fan feedback on the gating-off of Lasombra and Toreador bloodsuckers.

In case you missed the announcement of these two clans being packed away into the £18.69/€21.99/$21.99 coffin of Bloodlines’ Shadows and Silk DLC pack, it came right as the long-in-the-works RPG got a fresh trailer and what should hopefully be its final release date. The only ways to get the clans were to buy that pack on top of the base game, or splash out £74.99/€89.99/$89.99 for the premium edition.

On the Bloodlines 2 Discord last night, World of Darkness community developer DebbieElla emerged from the shadows with what looks like the first inkling of an impending change. “We are listening to your feedback about the Lasombra and Toreador clan access, and we’re making adjustments ahead of launch to reflect this,” she wrote. “We will share more information about what this means as soon as possible.”

That was it, aside from a line promoting a livestream on World of Darkness’ Twitch channel at 4PM BST / 5PM CEST / 11AM ET today, August 27th, which I only mention here in case it turns out to be the place Paradox share that promised info.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Up to this announcement, Paradox and Bloodlines developers The Chinese Room had been sticking by the call to paywall the two clans. Our James grilled them about it at Gamescom, and the response was along the lines of the Toreador and Lasombra being additional work on top of The Chinese Room’s original plans for the game, so therefore fine to charge extra for.

“We’ve made a huge amount of changes over that time, based on that cycle, if you like, 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,” Bloodlines 2 narrative director Ian Thomas told us.

Meanwhile, project design director Jey Hicks insisted that this ‘extra’ stuff is “not all, like, just fluff that we’re chucking in”. We’ll have to see what these promised “adjustments” look like, but a complete u-turn would rightly miff folks who’ve already pre-ordered the premium edition because it includes these extra clans. We’ll let you know when Paradox reveal exactly how they’re pulling their feet out of all this deathhound doo-doo.

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August 27, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The Chinese Room defend Bloodlines 2’s paywalled vampire clans: “we have been expanding it from where we originally planned to land it”

by admin August 22, 2025

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.

Check out our Gamescom 2025 event hub for all the PC game announcements and preview coverage from Cologne.

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August 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

More action than RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 struggles to convince after a few hours’ play

by admin August 20, 2025

I can’t hide it: I’m a little disappointed. The wait for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has been an excruciating one. This is the long-awaited follow-up to the flawed but respected Bloodlines 1 from 2004, and it was originally announced in 2019 with a release date of 2020. But it was systematically delayed, then full-on suspended, before being resurrected at The Chinese Room (Still Wakes the Deep) where it’s been reshaped for release. Bloodlines 2 has had problems. The question is: does it still have problems and has it been worth the wait?

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Having played Bloodlines 2 for a few hours in a preview build my answer – frustratingly for you – is I’m not sure. I have mixed feelings. There are things I really like about it – I love how powerful it makes you feel as a vampire from the very beginning of the game; the action feels great – but I’m concerned by how narrow the game is as a role-playing experience. Too often I feel led through metaphorical corridors from point A to B, as though I’m playing a predetermined experience rather than shaping one of my own. I think it’s telling that Paradox is leaning into the “action” part of the “action RPG” descriptor; from what I’ve played, this is more like an action or stealth game, with some RPG elements, rather than the other way around. And given the extensive and exhaustive resource material involved – a tabletop RPG that’s been running for decades – that disappoints me. But there are upsides to this approach.

The things I like, then: Bloodlines 2 wastes no time making you feel cool. You do not wake as a fledgling vampire but an elder one who’s been asleep for a hundred years. From the moment you take control of this character – a character cringingly called “Phyre” (“fire”), and who likes to announce their name at every given opportunity – you can already do incredible things. You can scramble up walls like a spider, even entire buildings if you plan your route right, and leap off the other side, to the ground, and take no damage. You can move with blur-like vampire speed, float through the air, and punch people so hard they float – well, fly – through the air. You can telekinetically grab at objects and then hurl them wherever you want. You can even telekinetically grab people. There’s no gradual build-up of power here: you are, from the beginning, a beast.

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It feels great. There’s a snap and a pace and a wallop to everything you do. Even a small thing like climbing up a ladder is sped-up so that it’s like doing it on fast-forward. And as you start to unlock more powers as you level up, which differ slightly depending on which of the game’s six clans you join – I joined the Brujah clan, which are brawlers – the action gets more ridiculous still. (Note: two of the clans you have to pay to unlock, which is grubby.) I have a Lightning Punch ability that rapidly strikes, countless times, anyone who I ‘mark’ nearby to be punched. I pulverize them in a blur of action. I have a charge that makes me thunder towards anyone in my path and pick them up and slam them into whatever I’m running towards. Tactility: there’s a lot of it here.

This is the upside to the game’s somewhat obvious action focus. The more linear approach to levels and situations also means areas have been shaped specially to encourage entertaining, platformer-like traversal, and that they’ve been decorated to a high degree because designers know where the level you’ll be. Take the derelict building you wake up in, for example: there’s only one route through it as you work your way onto the roof, away from inquisitive police, so visually, the crumbling ruin of the place is writ large all around you. Developer Chinese Room showed what flair it has for environmental storytelling in Still Wakes the Deep, on that wonderfully touchable and dilapidated 1970s oil rig, and you can see that expertise here too. The dimly lit griminess of it. The posters on the wall. The graffiti. The walls smeared in blood. It’s exactly the atmosphere a Bloodlines game begs for. The detail in your home-base apartment, a kind of disgusting, makeshift laboratory, is incredible.

This is the male version of the main character Phyre, who I don’t think you can structurally customise. You can change his hair and piercings and clothing but not completely customise who you are. I guess it’s for cinematic reasons. He’s a bit annoying. | Image credit: Paradox / The Chinese Room

Nice though they are to look at, in these areas there’s little you can actually interact with – a problem that carries right across the game. Take the city of Seattle, for instance, where the game’s set. It looks nice, caught as it has been in heavy snowfall, and moody in the dark, lit by pools of streetlight or car headlights. But the only doors you can interact with are the ones that lead to specific quest objectives, of which there are only one or two in the preview build, and the only people you can interact with… Well, you can utter a few words to some people, in an effort to lead them into an alley to drink their blood, which regenerates health or regains special ability charges, or earns you a kind of upgrade currency, but that’s about it. For the most part, it feels like a place filled with non-interactive extras.

This feeling extends to the building environments you enter. There’s a hotel lobby that’s full of people at a Christmas do, but I can’t interact with any of them. Then, when I get to the more gamey areas of the hotel, which are where I’ll fight some packs of low-level vampires – thugs, really – there’s no one else around. These halls and corridors are mostly empty with only occasional clusters of enemies there. It’s a bit dull. Even the more central characters don’t inspire much excitement when you meet them. They’re nice enough to look at but predictable to the point of stereotype – with exception of Tolly, a disfigured nosferatu who injects much needed humour and charisma – and the interactions with them feel stiff. There’s not much intrigue in the dialogue. You can provoke reactions, such as arousal or embarrassment or annoyance, which suggests these things mean something in a gameplay sense, but how that plays out is unclear for now from what I’ve played.

I wasn’t allowed to take my own screenshots so I’ve had to use these supplied ones, which don’t really show the game in action very well. All the same, they highlight some of the nice lighting and atmosphere and character design, which can be very striking. | Image credit: Paradox / The Chinese Room

Thankfully the story does have some intrigue of its own – it’s literally embedded in you. You wake with not so much a voice in your head as a whole other personality, who happens to be – bizarrely but brilliantly – a noir-style private investigator, which prompts an amusing clash of styles between him and his overly dramatic inner monologues, and your surliness. It also allows you an on-board narrator who can explain the world as you adventure through it. Actually, the best part of the preview came when inhabiting the PI-style character through a memory of his, because he had access to a different range of vampire abilities – mind-affecting ones. The gameplay challenge here became extracting information through dialogue from characters who didn’t necessarily want to give it, which was much more interesting than rote battles with uninspiring packs of vampire thugs. It was a glimpse at the sort of thoughtful dialogue interaction I had hoped the game would have.

Look, there’s still hope. This, it’s worth remembering, is a preview build of a game still a couple of months from release, and it’s only the start of the experience – the part that typically lays some ground rules before opening up and letting you do what you want to do. I fully expect this empty-feeling Seattle playground to populate with places to go and people to meet. At least, I hope that’s the case. But I also expect a preview build to be designed to showcase the best parts of the game I’m previewing, and for the beginning of a game to grab and dazzle a player, and convince them to stick around. I did enjoy some of what I played, and I’m willing to give it another go. But I wasn’t grabbed or dazzled.

I’m always wary of critiquing a game for what it’s not, rather than meeting it where it is – and just to emphasise, the focus on action here makes plenty of sense. But this 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.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

This sucks: you’ll have to pay for two clans in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

by admin August 20, 2025

As Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 finally gets a release date it looks like it will hit – 21st October 2025 – so comes news you’ll have to pay to access two of the six clans in the game. Clans here act like your character class, determining what kind of gameplay role your character will adopt, as well as giving you a sense of storied belonging in the world, so they’re no trivial thing. And they’re not cheap.

In order to access the Lasombra and Toreador clans, you’ll need to buy the Shadows and Silk add-on pack, which costs £18.69/€21.99/$21.99. And as far as I can tell, you won’t be able to access these locked clans otherwise. If you don’t pay, you’ll only be able to access the default four: Brujah, Tremere, Banu Haqim and Ventrue.

There’s a further gameplay consideration here. Clans modify the difficulty of the game by making you better or worse at certain things. In the preview build of Bloodlines 2 I’ve just been playing, I picked to be Brujah, which are a brawler-focused group. They are a normal difficulty clan to play as, whereas Ventrue – a clan that dominates minds – are easier, and the Banu Haqim, which revolve around stealthy ambush gameplay, are hard. There’s more detail on the various clans on the Bloodlines 2 website, but there’s not, frustratingly, any more information on Toreador or Lasombra.

However, Vampire: The Masquerade being a long-standing tabletop role-playing game means there’s plenty of available information out there about these locked clans. The Lasombra clan is a shadowy organisation that manipulates through religion, apparently, whereas the Toreador are known for being seductive and enthralling, which is exactly the kind of vampire I’d like to be. It’s a shame to have to pay for the privilege.

The Shadows and Silk add-on pack comes as part of the Premium Edition of the game, if you’re willing to fork out £74.99/€89.99/$89.99 for it. It also contains the cosmetic Santa Monica Memories pack. But at the moment I suggest you wait. And I say that because I remain unconvinced after a few hours of play.

This game has had a troubled development and it seems to me that in an effort to get it out, the developer has narrowed the scope and focused more on action gameplay rather than an intricate role-playing experience. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – there’s a terrific sense of speed and punch in what I played – but it does lack substance. I would wait for 21st October and see.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments