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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 News

Dev Diary Recap #1 - Atmosphere and Art

[h2]Good evening Kindred,[/h2]

This week, as mentioned in our last dev diary, we’re bringing you our first video recap. Straight from The Chinese Room and their Community Manager Josh Matthews, you’ll hear from earlier dev diary authors Michele Nucera (Senior Concept Artist), Alex Skidmore (Project Creative Director) and Ben Matthews (Associate Art Director). In this recap, they’ll summarize their individual diaries, share additional thoughts and answer fan questions.

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[h3]What’s Next[/h3]
We’ll be back with the next dev diary in two weeks and we’re looking forward to our third clan reveal at PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted.

Clan Reveal: Tremere

[h2]Our Second Playable Clan[/h2]

Good evening Kindred,

Last week we revealed the first of the playable clans for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah. Today we’re excited to be sharing the second playable of the four available at release, in Fall of 2024. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.

From the ashes of the attack on their main chantry, the Tremere know the clan is injured, but far from fallen.

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[h3]Nicknames[/h3]
The Broken Clan, Usurpers, Warlocks, Haemetics, Thaumaturges, Transgressors, Blood Mages

[h3]Who are the Tremere?[/h3]
Clan Tremere embraces scholars, academics, researchers, and other relentless pursuers of knowledge. These Kindred have an obsession with blood and vitae — vampire Blood — beyond even that of other Kindred, an obsession which extends to its control. Whether the blood coursing through their enemies veins, or a Tremere’s own vitae, a drop of red can turn into a deadly weapon in the hands of an experienced Warlock.

Tremeres are experts in Blood Sorcery, giving them Discipline powers that can shape vitae.

[h3]What to expect when playing a Tremere[/h3]
As a Tremere in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, you use your arcane powers to control your own Blood and that of your foes. The playstyle is rewarding when keeping your distance in combat, making enemies scream in agony as you boil their blood, shaping your own vitae into projectiles, or even ripping the blood from their veins.

Render of Phyre as a female with one of the Tremere-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits..

[h3]What’s next?[/h3]
Next week, we’re on hiatus for Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back with a third playable clan at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted on the 30th of November.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2's first confirmed playable race is the Brujah, again

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has named its first playable race: the Brujah, who love to settle brouhahas with brutal melee combat. A brief, fifteen second trailer showed a little of that combat in action in The Chinese Room's rebooted take on the RPG sequel. Find it below.


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Clan Reveal: Brujah

[h2]First Playable Clan[/h2]

Good evening Kindred,

Today the countdown begins! We’re revealing the first of four playable clans available at release in Fall 2024 in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 today. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.

No huge surprise in which clan’s boot is kicking open the door first… Don’t get too comfortable though, there’s always something unexpected in World of Darkness.

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[h3]Nicknames[/h3]
The Learned Clan, Rabble, Punks, Hipsters, Prometheans, Rebels, Philosopher-Kings, Hellenes

[h3]Who are the Brujah?[/h3]
The learned clan, the clan of radicals, the clan commonly misjudged as punks looking for trouble, the Brujah are guided by passion and dedication to an ideal. And if they have the supernatural strength to back that passion up, who are you to argue? Rebellion unites their blood, whether that rebellion is of the subtle lend me your ears kind or the fists out, fire in the streets sack of Rome kind is down to the individual.

Brujah powers enhance your speed and power.

[h3]Playing a Brujah in Bloodlines 2[/h3]
If you’re a player who leaves the shadows to the cowards, knows the frontline is where the fun is and idealistically rebels against power, Brujah is your clan.

In Bloodlines 2, Clan Brujah will offer a brutal melee playstyle with its abilities (in Vampire: The Masquerade, known as Disciplines) getting you into the fray and rewarding you for staying there. Exemplified in the video, our Brujah uses charge to gain a burst of momentum, grab an enemy, drag them with you and body slam them into a wall. Don’t assume you’re limited to charging just one enemy either. In early 2024, we’ll be back with a complete list of Brujah discipline powers you will be able to use in game.

Render of Phyre with one of the Brujah-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.

[h3]What’s next?[/h3]
Brujah is the first of four clans available at release in Fall 2024 and next week, we’ll be back with the second playable clan. The following week, we’ll be on Thanksgiving hiatus, before coming back to reveal the third playable clan.

Creating Vampiric Concepts in Unreal

Hi, I’m Michele Nucera, Senior Concept Artist. I’ve been looking forward to showing you the hard work that our art team has done to bring life into our game. We’re using a relatively new technique in concept art to help us. Normally all the screenshots you see are fully finished levels with lighting and details in-game. But today I’ll be showing some of the earlier versions that we use to visualise what that final product will look like.

The first thing we keep in mind is the Bloodline 2 art direction. We want to create a foggy, dark, and neo-noir environment where the player can hide and attack from the shadows. The perfect setting for a vampire!

Paintover, View of Seattle – Art: Jordan Grimmer

Our goal is to provide the 3D team with a few images to show them our idea for a location or a character. We try to keep our concepts grounded to the real world, but we try to push reality up to 11 (as our Art Director John McCormack always suggests) so the player can experience something unexpected and never seen before.

[h2]Why make concepts in Unreal? [/h2]
Building worlds directly in the game engine is incredibly easy and fun. Thanks to our experience on other TCR titles, we had the chance to learn Unreal and experiment with a Concept Art pipeline to add this piece of software to our workflow.

Bloodlines 2 was the perfect game to push our skills in Unreal to the next step. We had a huge asset library available in this game, including props, characters, and materials. The most logical step forward was to use Unreal to create our concepts rather than creating everything from scratch.

The fog system and the lighting in Unreal are much closer to reality than other real time engines, especially with the recent update to UE5. So this was the perfect tool to visualise our version of Seattle. We have built these underground scenes in Unreal 5, using a fog volume and lights with volumetric options active. Once the composition is approved we then rendered them and quickly painted over in Photoshop.

Paintover, Underground area – Art: Jordan Grimmer

[h2]The Creative Process[/h2]

Before working on an environment, we usually receive a brief from Ben Matthews, Associate Art Director, who provides us with a rough idea of the environment he needs, together with some references. After spending some time searching for references we jump on Unreal and start working from a block-out scene done by the Level Design Team where we import our 3D assets and give “life” to their level.

As always when designing, we start from the big shapes first and then place some provisional lighting and fog. Traditional concept art generally captures the world from one perspective and you have to start from scratch if you’re painting something from another angle. Choosing a good camera angle early on is important and we usually set up a few cameras so our art director can choose what shot works better for him and then we are good to go with the final touches.

Once the first pass gets approved, we then move onto detailing our scene and this is the most fun part. This stage feels like playing a real-life simulator game where you can create little dioramas and add storytelling to the scene. If needed, we create additional assets with Blender and then import them in Unreal Engine. For example, in this bathroom piece we have modelled the toilet and bath using Blender and then imported the assets in Unreal where you can easily assign materials to them.

Paintover, Abandoned Building Bathroom – Art: Isobel Hine

Finally, we render our scene using the high-resolution screenshot tool in Unreal, import the render passes in Photoshop, compose the scene and paint over it adding more details and pushing the mood even further.

We are also lucky that we can easily import 3D characters and plug specific animation loops onto them so our environment will instantly come to life! Here we have used our 3D model of a Hunter done by Kjartan Tysdal, Senior 3D Character Artist, to populate the scenes and add storytelling elements.

Paintover, Radio Tower Callout – Art: Jordan Grimmer

Paintover, Hunters Entering an Underground Area – Art: Michele Nucera

[h2]A Fresh way to make Concepts[/h2]
If you are in a rush, you can skip the thumbnailing process and do it directly in 3D, also you can show a real-time 3D scene rather than one single image so it’s easier for Directors to have the right feeling of the space. Lastly, you can provide the 3D art team with your scenes so they have a base to work with when building the scenes for the actual game… if they can figure out how to deal with our very messy layers!

The below concept shows the police looking for you in an abandoned building. To showcase this, we have built a few rooms and a corridor using our assets in Unreal Engine and then rendered a few shots to follow the story of this policeman looking for you. Since the scene was done in Unreal, the Art Director could easily navigate the space and experience the flow and mood of it.

Paintover, Abandoned Building – Art: Michele Nucera

[h2]Bloody Murder[/h2]
Obviously this game contains a LOT of blood. We were lucky enough that the 3D Art Team provided us with a few blood decals to use directly in Unreal. We placed them in our scenes and lit them in an interesting way to enhance their shiny property, adding a slight hue of red light so the blood colour is not affected by the mood of the scene!

These pieces show a vampire haven under attack. We placed a lot of corpses and blood directly in Unreal and then did a paintover to add all the extra details we needed to sell the story and mood.

Paintover, Vampire Haven – Art: Jordan Grimmer

I think that creating concepts in Unreal is the future of Concept Art. A lot of Concept Artists are expanding their skill set to learn this fantastic tool. Being able to create a real-time scene that your directors can navigate and give you live feedback is priceless and it makes the game better.

We’ll be back in another two weeks, but this time with a Video Diary where we will summarise the content from our latest Dev Diaries. If you have any questions relating to the first four dev diaries, feel free to send them to us on Discord and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.