Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 News

In dev diary #1, Alex Skidmore, Project Creative Director at The Chinese Room (TCR) wrote about the first game pillar “Feel like a Vampire”, which sets the player fantasy as a guiding light for creative decisions. We’ve shown a lot of combat so far to give you a taste of the power and flow. What you’ve seen is influenced by the second game pillar: "Visceral, Immersive Combat" which directs the action gameplay. Today, Alex is back to share his thoughts on this important part of the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

Concept art

When designing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 combat the goal was to create an action experience that can compete with modern titles. We think of it in three main gameplay styles we want to offer to you all - existing Bloodlines fans, and players who are new to the World of Darkness.

The 1st playstyle we at TCR call the Strategic Stalker: as the name reflects, fans of more strategic combat experiences where staying hidden and using the element of surprise is key will get their vampire predator fantasy. Did you enjoy the Dishonored series, or playing stealth-focused builds in Fallout or Elder Scrolls games? Me too! It gives you time to prepare what Discipline power you’d like to use and when. Once your plan is ready, summoning the powers of the blood, sneaking up on an enemy, distracting them, feeding on them before a fight breaks out or hit and run tactics are options for people who love to play this way.



The 2nd playstyle we call the Action Brawler: For players who prefer to jump straight into the action and rely on their fast reflexes and combat skills. Any Clan can brawl but this is where the Brujah shine. You’ll see them in our January gameplay reveal video. Their powers are aimed at dominating close combat. References for this style are action-brawling games like the God of War series, Shadow of Mordor and Elden Ring. It is about being in the centre of the brawl and using your abilities to control the crowd so you can deliver as much damage as possible.
We see the above playstyles as two extremes on the same action spectrum, with players being able to play any mixture of the two to find the balance of stalking and brawling that works for them.



The 3rd playstyle we call the Narrative Adventurer: For players who are less interested in combat and action gameplay and want to focus on the fantasy, narrative and exploration elements of the game. We envision that a core of the Bloodlines 1 fans identify with this playstyle and also fans of TCR's titles to date (and a lot of the developers working on the game), so we’re making sure the gameplay pillar doesn’t add action at the detriment of these important players. You can still enjoy exciting battles without having to delve too deeply into the combat mechanics if things like characters and story are more important to you.



So, how do we go about achieving this? We focus on immersion over complexity: A streamlined control scheme with actions that are easy for all three playstyles to pick up and play. We then build depth on top of these to give longer-term mastery for the players that want it. For example, the defensive mechanic is a dash, allowing players to dodge incoming attacks or reposition. If dodge is used towards an enemy performing a melee attack, it becomes a counter, staggering the enemy - it is fine for players to never do this move, but for those that want a higher skill-ceiling, it is there. How we use abilities is also streamlined, to maintain immersion. Abilities are mapped to the face buttons (on gamepad), limiting the player to 4 available at one time. This is a small enough amount that a player can use them without breaking their flow, but also deep enough, through the different ways you can combine and use them that it keeps combat engaging and fun.

All of this serves our principal of Immersive Combat. We would rather players were thinking about what cool thing they want to do next, rather than how they do it.

Visceral Combat is a stylistic choice we have made as we believe being a vampire should be a bloody business. Feeding plays a huge role in any vampire story and we wanted to give you a cool reason to tear out throats in the middle of a fight. As an Elder vampire, Phyre has become desensitised to violence, and we want the same to happen to the player over the course of the game - maybe being shocked the first time they chop someone's head off, but after a while accepting that violent carnage is par-for-the-course when you are a 400 hundred year old vampire in a city where everyone is out to get you.

The final game pillar in Bloodlines 2 is “Exploring the World of Darkness”. I look forward to talking to you about that in the next dev-diary.

Good night!
Alex Skidmore, Project Creative Director

[h2]What’s Next[/h2]
As Alex mentions above, the next dev diary will be on the third pillar ‘Exploring the World of Darkness’, coming in two weeks. Before that, you'll be able to see how everything comes together when we debut our gameplay trailer and deep dive on January 31.

This week we have Technical Director Nick Slaven joining us. He’s going to share his thoughts on the important tools we’ve developed to build all the things we need for our narratives, like cutscenes, missions and dialogue:

[h3]Quests and princesses and chat, oh my.[/h3]

Here at the Chinese Room we are all about storytelling. Our games are rich in narrative and the way we tell them, and for the story to make sense, we need to give the player something to do, other than just walking.

My name is Nick and I make sure that our team are able to tell stories and give the player things to do.
As a studio working on two large projects, we have to be smart about how we use our technology. We’re building systems that are used on both Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 and Still Wakes the Deep and fits the needs for both those teams and makes everyone’s work easier. As a narrative studio, that means tools for storytelling.

Storytelling involves more than just the spoken word. We may want to travel across the land to obtain the magical artefact that unlocks the door to the princess’ castle. I’ll stop here before I embarrass myself more with my lack of narrative ability. The point remains, in a few words I can describe something of a story and it materialises in your imagination.

Let’s back up a bit, it’s easy for us to interpret, but how do we get the game to recognise that you have got the magical artefact and how does picking it up then unlock a door to allow you to progress in your quest. How do we do that?

Our answer was to develop a way of describing the story as a sequence of events that the game engine can interpret, we call this mission scripting.

Mission scripting is a high level way of representing a sequence of events that the player may need to solve in order for the story to progress. For instance, you may need to find a key to open a door. We do this by representing the state of the game story and the event that will drive the story forward. In this case, opening the door; we look for a key, and only once we’ve found the key can we open the door, and face whatever is in the room.

Here's a screenshot of how this might look in our mission scripting system.

Example mission in the scripting system.

In a proper game story, there will be hundreds of states, on many story paths, here’s a small snippet of one of the missions in one of our current games.



There’s a lot happening, but having a simple way of defining the mission structure allows our design team to quickly iterate on the missions and get them as good as they can be.

[h3]That’s the doing bit, but what about the talking?[/h3]
Branching narrative is complex. From each decision point the story can go many ways. Rather than write our own tech for this we decided to use Ink, an open source narrative scripting language created by Inkle studios. We needed to port this from C# to C++ to get it working with Unreal, but this was way quicker than writing our own narrative scripting system from scratch.

Visual example of a text in Ink. Not part of Bloodlines 2.

Ink allows our narrative team to create the spoken word that accompanies the mission scripting to tell the story of the game. This is written as a narrative script, much in the same way that screenplays are written for film and tv.

Arone, our principal narrative designer, had this to say about using Ink for narrative creation.

Arone Le Bray: “It's interesting... There are definitely a bunch of things that I like about it and I think those are mostly from the point of view of how we have integrated it. We can use the basic scripting language inside it to make scenes that are non-linear and have reactivity without having to re-write the same scene multiple times.

Then, being able to put a single conversation file into a block that fires in-game, without needing to be fiddly with a lot of scripting there? Also lovely.
But yes, it doesn't have a huge barrier to entry for using it as newbies, or even sharing our work with other teams. At its base, it's a word document, but the fact that the Ink formatting is present lets us make that word document (which most people already understand) into a functional, nearly-live game development tool? That's a HUGE win.”

[h3]How do we then make that into animation and audio?[/h3]

Our solution was to introduce the ‘dope sheet’. We stole this name from the animation industry, but essentially for each line of dialogue the authors create, we can specify an audio event, along with animations for the face and body and a bunch of other things. The dope sheet is like a spreadsheet in excel, but with bells and whistles that allow us to preview audio and animation as we set up the scenes for dialogue in the game.



When the player makes a text choice in the game, the system presents that choice to the Ink runtime, in return we get a text response which we cross reference via the dope sheet to get the animations and audio to play to show back to the player.

Combining mission scripting and Ink have given us a very flexible and powerful system in which we can tell stories. We are using these systems on all the titles we are creating.

As we’ve had so much of a step up from using ink, we thought it only right to give something back, and so we have created Inkpot, which is a lightweight blueprint friendly wrapper of our C++ port of the Ink runtime. This is now freely available from our GitHub site. You can download this tool and use it in Unreal for yourselves. If you do, let us know! We’d love to see what people create.

GitHub - The-Chinese-Room/Inkpot: Inkpot - a container for Ink

[h3]What’s Next[/h3]
Coming later this month is the much awaited extended gameplay reveal video. In another two weeks we will also bring you a developer diary.

My name is Andrea Sancio, and I am the Associate Technical Director working on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 at The Chinese Room. Together with Nick Slaven, our Studio Technical Director, it has been my honour to lead our talented team on the technical side of the game.

I’m going to share with you now a behind-the-scenes look at what our team has been doing on the game, and when you play it, we hope that you will all love it as much as we do.

In the ever-evolving world of video game development, staying at the cutting edge is a continuous pursuit. With the release of Unreal Engine 5, the landscape has shifted dramatically, presenting game developers with an array of groundbreaking technologies and tools. I wanted to delve into our experiences and challenges with some of the experimental technologies that have come to define UE5: Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen. These technologies play a pivotal role in creating a realistic and dark world that aligns perfectly with the neo-noir art direction of our game.

An important milestone in our development was the upgrade from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. It was a big risk because normally you lock in the version of your development engine early. The changes touched every part of the game, and all our scenes, lighting and assets had to be converted. All the dev teams communicated with us brilliantly to make sure the new tools were exactly what we needed to make the game look amazing and run smoothly.

Lumen is a new real-time global illumination tech. It brings a level of realism to game lighting with raytracing to simulate the path of light and how it interacts with surfaces and materials. It can simulate indirect (bounce) lighting and reflections. However, integrating Lumen into our games was no small feat. Ensuring consistent and smooth performance was the key to achieving the atmospheric lighting required for our world. Working with dynamic lighting and shadow has always been a challenge. In performance terms it was expensive, placing lights is an art and overlapping lights exponentially increase complexity and the costs of rendering the scene because a lot of calculation must be done for each pixel hit by each light. Normally, the solution is to “pre-bake” lights. All the shadows were saved to the level before release, and you couldn’t change them. This provided great quality results for a cheap cost, but the lights and shadows were... well... faked. You would then have to include other tricks like light probes to show that on objects moving inside that space.

Lumen lets us change the colour, position, and intensity of lots of lights that can change dynamically. So to figure out the best way to include these new lights, we spent a lot of time working with our artists. It works by storing all the surfaces hit by light in a memory cache. This cache is at a lower resolution than the output. This means it’s way faster to calculate the effects of lighting. Then, Lumen uses Temporal Upsampling which makes the lower resolution larger without losing quality and detail. None of this can work without Nanite, Cached Virtual Shadows and Temporal Super Resolution so we adapted all those technologies too!



Virtual Shadow Maps introduced a fundamental change in how we handle shadows in Unreal Engine 5. By decoupling the shadow resolution from screen resolution, this technology delivers razor-sharp shadows with minimal performance overhead. Implementing Virtual Shadow Maps required a rethinking of our shadow casting and rendering techniques, but the result was a marked improvement in the visual quality. This was especially crucial in creating the dark and mysterious shadows that are synonymous with the neo-noir genre.

If you want fast frame rates, Programmers have always had to contend with draw calls. Draw calls are instructions sent from the Central Processing Unit (CPU) to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). To understand it in simple terms, think of a draw call as a request to draw or render a particular set of graphics. Each draw call carries information about how to paint a part of the scene - this includes textures, shading information, and geometry (like vertices). However, too many draw calls can slow down a game because each call requires the CPU and GPU to communicate and process information, which is valuable time spent when one frame is a fraction of a second. Nanite marks a seismic shift in how we handle geometry in games. Rather than relying on traditional Level of Detail (LOD) systems, Nanite virtualises geometry, allowing for detailed assets and performance. With Nanite all the meshes that use the same material get placed in what is called a "bucket” and are processed on the same draw call, greatly reducing their number. It reduces the complexity of asset creation but also opens the door to photorealistic environments that were previously unattainable. Now we can have some ornate architecture and densely detailed environments in our scenes.



Debugging and optimising our code and the world environment became increasingly complex, and we were acutely aware of the constant need to stay up to date with frequent engine upgrades. These upgrades were essential for acquiring crucial fixes and performance improvements. This is a process that many studios might prefer to avoid, as such transitions rarely occur without their own costs. With limited documentation and a scarcity of experienced individuals to consult, our journey involved extensive research, talking with Epic, trials and errors.

It feels cheesy to say but making all this work for our team made everyone’s bond stronger because we all had to communicate constantly. The results were worth it because our art team used it to realise the neo-noir direction they were looking for. And because games are made with tools and technology developed during previous games, The Chinese Room’s future titles will benefit from this hard work too. Everyone did a great job to best use the new workflows. Personally, after many years on projects that used similar approaches, this was a fresh and exciting evolution!

Your experience of playing the game should be seamless. In a way, the less you think about the tech as you’re playing, the better we did our jobs. It’s been a pride of our careers to take on a project that is already so complex on many different levels, and to give it a chance to be ground-breaking in the realm of visual fidelity.

[h3]What’s Next[/h3]
Following the holiday break, we’ll be back in January with more dev diaries and an extended gameplay reveal of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

Good evening Kindred,

Last month, we announced three of four playable clans in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2: Brujah, Tremere and Banu Haqim. Today, we’d like to share the fourth clan with you: Ventrue. The clan assets for Ventrue are in the process of being finalized, and we will share assets and gameplay showing off the playstyle of Ventrue during next year. Ahead of that deep dive we’re showing off an in-game render of Phyre in one of the Ventrue-themed outfits (all clans can earn all outfits).

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.

[h3]Nicknames[/h3]
The Clan of Kings, Blue Bloods, Tyrants, Warlords, Patricians, Borgias

[h3]Who are the Ventrue?[/h3]
Ventrue vampires usually choose their progeny from mortals familiar with power, wealth and influence. Seeing themselves as the rightful leaders of vampire society, Kindred of clan Ventrue take up the mantle of leadership wherever possible, often in the form of high positions in Camarilla Courts.

[h3]What can you expect from playing a Ventrue?[/h3]
Ventrue are blue blooded tyrants who incite obedience in both their allies and their foes. Using the Disciplines of Presence and Dominate, they can mesmerize as well as awe their prey. Feeding builds up Fortitude, allowing the Ventrue to soak up more damage in case any enemy is powerful enough to resist their force of will.

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

[h3]Concept Art[/h3]
Ventrue powers focus on domination, forcing foes to obey your commands.

[h3]What’s next?[/h3]
Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.

[h2]Our Third Playable Clan[/h2]

Good evening Kindred,

Earlier this month, we announced the first two clans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah and Tremere. Today at PC Gamer Most Wanted, we introduce the third playable clan of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Nicknames[/h3]
The Clan of the Hunt, Assassins, Children of Haqim, Saracens, Mediators, Lawmen

[h3]Who are the Banu Haqim?[/h3]
Cursed with a thirst for the Blood of other vampires, the Banu Haqim stalk the night as judges and lawbringers. To this end, most Banu Haqim adhere to a strict code of conduct - derived from law, faith, or personal ethics - sating their Hunger on those that breach these convictions.

[h3]What can you expect from playing a Banu Haqim?[/h3]
Banu Haqim takes the role of a strategic stalker, using shadows to their advantage. You are a predator on a hunt, and your discipline powers focus on stalking, assassination, and silently moving faster than your foes can track.

Render of female Phyre with one of the Banu Haqim-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.

Banu Haqim powers focus on strategic stalking, avoiding attacks and assassination.

[h3]What’s next?[/h3]
Banu Haqim is the third clan we’ve revealed for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, we'll be back in December for the next clan reveal. Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.