Trivia / Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

• Author's Saving Throw: Many of the returning Disciplines that had been made Low Tier Letdowns in the first game have been confirmed to improve in order to better match their power and usefulness from the Tabletop game:
  • The Auspex Discipline was infamously reduced to underwhelming near-useless abilities aside from a small Wits and Perception bonus that was a pain to use properly due to the game's interface. This game apparently made a point of retooling it, adding back the beloved Astral Projection from the tabletop game, along with Vein-o-Vision and captions allowing you to see what's important gameplay-wise in your surrounding.
  • Presence, which had similarly been decried for being reduced to a not very dramatic buff in combat plus bonus dialogue options if you installed the patch, will now be much more powerful, allowing you to freeze and move entire crowds around you, along with dialogues options without the need for a patch.
• Content Leak:
  • About an hour before the big reveal, a Paradox associate accidentally posted the game's logo and an invitation to the official community Discord server on Twitter; the tweet was quickly deleted and the server was emptied of members. That said, the sheer unlikelihood of a direct Bloodlines sequel still sent certain corners of the internet into a frenzy.
  • The Malkavian clan trailer was discovered a few days before its intended launch as an unlisted YouTube video.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The game will have the Unsanctioned Blood Pack Edition and the Blood Moon Edition. The former comes with 24 hour early access, bonus outfits, in-game art books, and a stop sign. The latter comes with all of the former's content, as well as all DLC including the Season of the Wolf expansion.
• Role Reprise: Courtenay Taylor returns as Damsel.
• Schedule Slip: The game was delayed in October 2019 from March 2020 to late 2020, then pushed back to 2021, then delayed into 2022, then to Fall of 2024.
• Sequel Gap: The game is currently set to release in Fall 2024, two full decades after the original game.
  • In-unverse while not clear how long in the pre-release footage so far, it has been shown that some time has passed and modern smartphones of the 2010s and 20s are present instead of the 2004 accurate cell phones of Bloodlines 1.
• Troubled Production: To the point that it was more troubled than the first game's. The game started development in 2015 and was originally slated for a 2019 release, being developed by Hardsuit Labs. This release date slipped into a 2020 window, before it was announced the studio had been taken off the project in 2021. The project then went mostly silent for more than two years, with the only announcements being that the new team was working on finishing the previous version and that they'd have something to say when the project was nearly done. It was announced in 2023 that the new developer of the game was The Chinese Room, a studio associated with the Environmental Narrative Game genre. In the interim, the game had been completely retooled, with most or all of Hardsuit Labs' work being thrown out.
• Un-Canceled:
  • Given the original game infamously bombed due to being released unfinished, and the creator's Troika Games went under shortly after, a sequel was highly unlikely, especially after more than a decade had passed. However, the game's popularity as a Cult Classic Vindicated by History was so impressive that Paradox Interactive, after buying the right for the franchise, decided to bring the franchise back to life.
  • Happened again after it was taken away from Hardsuit Labs. Initially, the plan was to scrap the game but a new studio has since been given it to finish after they made a last minute pitch that convinced Paradox to change their minds.
• What Could Have Been: A case with multiple versions by different studios.
  • Tim Cain discussed some dev notes from Troika for proposed sequels to the first game, including an idea for a trilogy. The second game, which would have been called Exodus would have featured the Fledgling fleeing after the events of the first game, along with other vampires running from the impending Gehenna, and reaching the city of Barstow.
  • The original plan from Hardsuit Labs for the game was that you would play as a thin-blood who had been turned as part of a mass embrace by an unknown party. At some point after the game was given to The Chinese Room it was changed to playing as an elder who woke from torpor to find the city in the middle of a power struggle.
  • For hardware, the Hardsuit Labs game was planned to be released on the PS4 along with other consoles. This has been dropped from the Chinese Room's version.
• Working Title: Project Frasier.
• Write What You Know: The people in charge of the game declared they chose Seattle as a setting because that's where their studio was based, thus allowing them to represent it faithfully.

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