Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 News

Paradox Interactive and Bloodlines 2 bring you Vein Pursuit, a new tabletop role-playing game vampire chronicle preceding the events of the game.

Bloodlines 2 takes place in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, the iconic pen-and-paper game that lets you experience the rich universe of the Kindred, in all of its grit and majesty. The Vein Pursuit chronicle offers viewers a glimpse into events occurring before the plot of Bloodlines 2, narrated by World of Darkness Brand Editor and V5 developer Karim Muammar. Starring members of Paradox Interactive, the Bloodlines 2 development team and exciting guests, this group of Kindred will take on a perilous mission, relying on their unique skills and attributes as much as the roll of the dice to survive.

Synopsis:
A group of couriers; some of the most badass Kindred of Los Angeles, has been sent on the perilous journey from Los Angeles to Seattle, tasked with delivering precious and secret cargo to a vampire in the Emerald City. What the couriers don't realize is that betrayal lurks in their midst. However, this isn’t their story.

Vein Pursuit follows the perilous journey of the rag-tag band of Kindred who've been sent to save the couriers of the Anarch Free State and see the cargo safely north. On this journey through the backcountry of the West Coast, through deserts and mountains, all their wits and resolve will be tested. Time is running out - it’s going to be a hell of a ride!

Follow the journey of the coterie of Kindred starring players out of Paradox Interactive and Hardsuit Labs teams, as well as fan-favorite streamer Outstar.

All episodes of the campaign will stream weekly on Twitch.tv/WorldOfDarkness starting January 31st, 2020, and become available for replay on the World of Darkness Youtube channel.



Starring:

• Karim Muammar as the Storyteller
• Florian Schwarzer as Falk Meyer
• Outstar as Veronica Ivanova
• Malin Castegren as Camellia
• Debbie Lane as Margaret "Peggy" Randall
• Rachel Leiker as Della Pearson

2019 is nearing its end, and with it comes our last dev diary for the year. It’s been a wild time for us, from the announcement at GDC in March, to meeting you at PDXCON. All throughout, we’ve been blown away by your enthusiasm. It’s now more than three years since Andy, Brian and Ka’ai pitched the idea of making Bloodlines 2 to Paradox. You and your support have made this real in a way that’s difficult to describe.

As Andy mentioned in the November dev diary, we’ve turned our attention inward for a bit. Right now, our number one priority is development, with the goal to make Bloodlines 2 the best game it can be. That’s starting to bear fruit. For example, we recently passed our Alpha!

This is one of the big milestones in game development, although in different places, Alpha can mean slightly different things. For us, it means that we are “systems-complete”; we’re done adding gameplay mechanics and features to the game. By contrast: Beta, which’ll happen next year, is “content-complete”. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the core game is done and ready to put in a box (“systems-final”). There are still quite a few people busy tweaking, balancing, and art-ing up the gameplay. It’s actually quite possible that our final game will ship with a few less mechanics than we had in the game at Alpha. In the end, we want to offer you really compelling, smooth gameplay. If over the coming months we find that something sticks out, we’d much rather put one less bullet point on the back of the box than shoehorn things in.

As you may imagine, work changes after Alpha. For some of us, it becomes much more about keeping the details consistent. For example: Earlier this year, some of our engineers and the UX team had come up with a better, more natural-feeling way of using elevators and choosing floors in the game. What this means is that we’re now going through all of our virtual Seattle and make sure all elevators fit this new logic. Not a big thing - but still, it involved diligent work by our technical designers supported by lighting, environment and UI artists.



In other places, systems-complete means that we get to add that extra in art that we didn’t want to risk spending time on before. Finally, we had time to invite everyone to the 'dismemberment meeting' - just another day in game dev. At the same time, the audio team are having a blast recording weapon foley, to make everything from picking up, to loading, stashing away and y’know, firing each individual weapon feel another bit more real.

Audio is also involved in completing the lines in the NPC Bark system - they work closely with engineering and narrative on that one. Barks are all those words and short sentences you hear AI utter in a video game. Often, that’s connected to AI states, like for example “aggressive”, “searching”, or “hurt”. Sometimes, it’s also tied to the NPC’s role in the world - a policeman will have different barks than a drunk barfly. Good barks are useful without drawing too much attention from the player, and it is not a piece of cake to find 15 different ways to say “I think I’ve seen something odd in that back alley”.

Of course, not all of us are chasing gameplay details towards that elusive “Final”. A big chunk of our team, our level and narrative designers, animators, environment, VFX and lighting artists are hard at work on the quests you will experience that gameplay. We’re looking forward to talking more about that race to Beta in the coming months. For now, to conclude this blog post, we’d like to share the work of our VFX team on blood effects. These are research prototypes created by Wesley Eldridge and Tracey Landau.



Time to put down the quill and wish you all great Winter Holidays! See you in 2020!

The Team at Hardsuit Labs

Greetings Vamily! We welcome you to join us on the 14th of December with Outstar at 17:00 - 22:00 CET / 8AM - 1PM PST on Twitch (twitch.tv/outstar) to raise money for The International Myeloma Foundation.

Josephine McAdams will be joining us later in the stream to talk about the foundation, why it's one she has chosen to support and some fun chatter about her current work in L.A by Night.

We'll also be joined by folks from the Bloodlines 2 team. Florian Schwarzer, Senior Product Manager and Rachel Leiker Lead UI/UX Designer, to chat a little about their part in this most anticipated game and perhaps a little vampire lore on the side.

During these five hours Outstar will be our Host for an entertaining look at the new mod for Bloodlines 1, Prelude, with famed modder Wesp5 joining us in chat to answer her questions. Following that up with a play of Coteries of New York, a new Vampire: The Masquerade game by developers Draw Distance, with friend of the Vamily Aavak joining us to lend his lovely vocals for dialogue on stream.

That's not all! A host of giveaways and raffles will be held on stream. For the top 3 donators they'll be sent the following goodies that no one can resist (we're looking at you Toreador):

Top Donator

• Set of Signed Faction posters by HSL
  
• VTMB Soundtrack Vinyl
  
• Bloodlines 2 Game Key
  
• V5 Core Book
  
• Corsair Swag
  
• Bloodlines 2 T-Shirt
  
• Coteries of New York Game Key
  

2nd

• Set of Signed Faction posters by HSL
  
• VTMB Soundtrack Vinyl
  
• Bloodlines 2 Game Key
  
• Bloodlines 2 T-Shirt
  
• Coteries of New York Game Key
  

3rd

• Set of Signed Faction posters by HSL
  
• Bloodlines 2 Game Key
  
• Bloodlines 2 T-Shirt
  
• Coteries of New York Game Key
  

With raffles on going through the stream for signed posters, T-shirts and more!

Last but not least we will have Twitch Drops* enabled. If you’re still looking for more Blood Points to unlock those goodies on your Bloodlines 2 account then be ready to drink them all up in chat!



If you haven’t started the quest yet, have a look at My Paradox Account section on the website and start collecting Blood Points to unlock in-games rewards at launch.

We can’t wait to see you all on Saturday, let’s spread the holiday cheer and help out a good cause while we’re at it!

-Bloodlines 2 Team

*How to activate Twitch Drops?
When tuning in to the stream you’ll have the ability to activate your Twitch drop. You can find more information on how to activate Twitch drops HERE.
If you do not have a Paradox account you’ll need to create one in order to activate the Twitch drops for this stream and collect Blood Points. Those with a Paradox account will use their existing credentials.

p.s We hear there's something going down at via bloodfortrade.com hmm... Suspicious.

Hi there! My name is Andy Kipling, and I’m the CEO of Hardsuit Labs. Being a CEO means a lot of responsibility: From deciding how to grow the team, to looking after the company's profit & loss plan. All of it important, but not all of it fit for a dev diary.

Seeing that we recently visited PDXCon, I thought I’d share what the event was all about, giving you a glimpse behind the scenes from the perspective of the HSL team.

On October 16, 2019, I boarded a flight whose final stop would not only take me to Germany for the first time but would also take me to my first ever PDXCon. I have attended a lot of industry-related conventions over the years, but I have never been to one which featured so many passionate fans focused on a single publisher’s set of games. And it was quite the experience.

The weeks leading up to PDXCon were intense as we had a lot of irons in the fire: Among other things, we were pushing forward on development, we were coordinating the pending delay announcement, and we were preparing talks for PDXCon.

Side note: developing a public talk about the nature of development is no easy task. On the one hand, I could probably talk for hours about Living World or Combat or general development, but without proper context, a lot of that talk can easily be misunderstood or misconstrued. So, boiling down all that information into something concise and comprehensible was a challenging yet interesting exercise.

That said, when we stepped off the plane in Berlin, the delay had already been announced, it was mostly well-received, and our talks were… nearing completion. With our feet firmly in Germany and our focus solely on PDXCon, we got to work, meeting up with our friend and Product Manager, Florian, at our hotel to being practicing and dry runs on our talks for the event.

The next day we woke up early and headed over to the Funkhaus where PDXCon was being hosted. We had the chance to show the very same demo we announced the game with, back in March at GDC. To this day, there have been no recordings of this build, which meant that we could offer our guests something exclusive. As I got into the groove, it was 7 months since I last did this demo, I recognized that we hit our familiar stride with when doing the press demos, a demo that was well received. It would turn out to be a stark contrast to the next day, however.

Saturday the 19th started early. We arrived at the venue around 7:30 am and the fans were already there en masse. Kudos to you all who were standing around outside the early cold fall morning.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Demos with the fans started at 8:30 that morning and immediately I was surprised, excited and impressed. In all my years in this industry and with all the demos I have been a part of, I can not say I have ever had the privilege to present to a group of fans like the people at PDXCon. Within 30 seconds of starting the demo, our audience was clapping, cheering, shouting out answers for dialogue and generally showing a level of excitement I haven’t experienced before. And as a developer, that was super inspiring and emotionally fulfilling. For as early as it was, and as jet-lagged and tired I was, that initial experience was a real inspiration and something I took home to Seattle to share with the team. If only they also had been there. And to top it off, I had a Malkavian cosplayer in our audience!

From there it was a few more demos, followed by the big announcement show. After some quick rehearsals outside on the banks of the river Spree, it was back inside the concrete Funkhaus for a deep dive into combat mechanics, where I stood in for our designers, who had opted to stay home and press on with development. Despite my trepidation, it went off without a hitch.

By then, we had also settled into the rhythm that was our time at PDXCon. If one of us was not manning the demo booth, then someone was off giving a talk, be it on Combat, Living World, Dialogue Systems or the game’s narrative. Oh, and speaking of Narrative, I should note that while my experience reflected most of the other HSL dev’s experience, Brian and Cara, being responsible for our narrative, had quite a different experience; doing back to back interviews for two days straight. I’m truly impressed and glad that they could take on that responsibility.

Saturday was by far our busiest day, but it was also the most fun day. In addition to being able to show the game to our fans, we also got to interact with them one on one. We had a community meet and greet for an hour where we got to just speak freely about all things Bloodlines, HSL and Paradox. It was great to meet a lot of the fans, pose for pictures and just enjoy the conversation and support. I can not say how great it is to have positive feedback and support from the community. We have been at work on this game for a long time, and it is because of people like those who came to PDXCon (and many others) that we have the opportunity to put as much time and effort into this game as we have.

Also, to the person whose poster I accidentally signed twice, please accept my apology.

This takes me to the Dev Update on the main stage at PDXCon. While we did not end PDXCon with the keynote it did mark the culmination of a lot of behind-the-scenes work. We spoke to some of the history of the project, the studio, the relationship with Paradox, where we are presently and most importantly; where we are going from here.

I mentioned this earlier and I will mention it again, but the support that you all have shown us following the delay announcement has been tremendous and wonderful. It is that kind of response that inspires and motivates us developers and so I wanted to personally say thanks. It is something that we not only heard leading up to PDXCon but was reinforced over and over while at the event – do what is necessary and best for the game and we will support you.

So, with that in mind, and as we alluded to in the keynote, we are going to be a bit quieter for a while as we do just that – do what is necessary and best for the game; making it all it can be. This means that you may not hear or see from us as much but that does not mean we have forgotten about you. Rather, we are heads down working to make Bloodlines 2 everything we want it to be. We look forward to seeing you on the flip side. Until then...



— Andy Kipling

To all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

For the last three and a half years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a worthy successor to Bloodlines 1. To us, that meant not only making good on the ambitions of this remarkable game, but also a duty to ensure we would not repeat its mistakes. Today, we have to tell you that we need some more time to get you the game you’ve been waiting for. Although Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will still launch in 2020, we have decided to value quality over making the Q1 launch window.

There are some things we wanted to hit under all circumstances when we set out to follow in Bloodlines’ footsteps: A deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness. We firmly believe that we’re on the right track to get you all of this.

On the flip side, there’s the responsibility to avoid some of the issues that plagued the first game, which was famously launched too early. Over the last few months, it became clear that to stick to our original date would risk repeating that mistake. We won’t do that. In the end, everyone working on this game wants to offer you the best Bloodlines 2 we can.

This hasn’t been an easy- nor our first choice. Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised.

Your feedback was invaluable in this. It helped us give the proper weight to what we saw, as well. We’d like to thank you, and hope you’ll support us in the decision that came from it.

Many of us from Hardsuit Labs will be in Berlin for PDXCON. For those of you going, we look forward to seeing you there! We will be sharing insights into the development of Bloodlines 2 along with other steps we’ve taken to strengthen our development team to realize our ambitions for Bloodlines 2.

For those of you who won’t be there, we will be sharing more about this during the PDXCON Announcement stream on Saturday the 21st. We are also opening up a Reddit thread to answer any of your questions in the Bloodlines stream on the following Sunday.

Thanks,

Andy Kipling and Brian Mitsoda, on behalf of the team at Hardsuit Labs



We want to hear from you! Join the discussion on the comments below to ask your questions. We will compile them to be answered on October 20th during our special Dev Q&A stream live from PDXCON.

Tune in to Paradox Interactive Twitch or Mixer channels this Sunday Oct. 20th at 4pm CET to watch our dev team answer your most burning questions.