Chinese Room's Cofounder Told Paradox 'we Can't Make Bloodlines 2'...

"We can't make Bloodlines 2, we can't make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored."

Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 released last month after a lengthy, difficult development, one that saw the project taken off original developer Hardsuit Labs by publisher Paradox Interactive and handed over to The Chinese Room. When it finally burst from its coffin, the critical reaction ranged from mildly positive to firmly negative, with our own Fraser Brown giving it a respectable score of 78 in our Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 review.

Yet whether players liked it or not, pretty much everyone agreed that The Chinese Room's sequel wasn't really a successor to Bloodlines at all, lacking the ridiculous roleplaying depth that makes Troika's original the brilliantly broken bloodsucking adventure it is. In fact, PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens pointed out that the biggest problem with Bloodlines 2 is that it is called Bloodlines 2.

As is so often the case, it appears Bloodlines 2's adoptive developers were highly aware of this potential problem. Speaking to Cat Burton of the Goth Boss Podcast (via PCGamesN) TCR cofounder Dan Pinchbeck explained how he urged Paradox Interactive not to call Bloodlines 2, well, that.

Pinchbeck says that, from the start, The Chinese Room intended to build its own version of the game, rather than try to finish the work done by Hardsuit Labs up to that point. "When we first started talking to Paradox, I said—we'd even seen the Hardsuit build—I was like 'We're a studio that [has] built our reputation on storytelling.'

"And I guess you want to do it justice. You want to take care of it. But taking over a project that had already been in development as well, that's such a tricky thing to take on. We are an original IP studio. The only way we're going to want to do this is if we are able to, basically, we'll take everything that's there and use as much as we can. But we don't just want to finish someone else's game."

Paradox, apparently, agreed to this. But Pinchbeck says the "tricky question" was whether The Chinese Room's should herald its status as a sequel to Bloodlines 1, something he repeatedly discussed with one of Paradox's former producers. "We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of 'how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2?' You can't make Bloodlines 2. There's not enough time. There's not enough money."

Pinchbeck points out that the original Bloodlines came out at a "really interesting period" when games like S

Source: PC Gamer