Resurrection

After 15 years in the grave, Bloodlines 2 brings the vampire-RPG back from the dead, and it’s bigger, darker, and more ambitious than ever.

- Rick Lane

Here are three words I never thought I’d write: Bloodlines is back. It’s been almost 15 years since Troika Games’ vampire RPG first launched, winning and breaking hearts in equal measure. Bloodlines remains one of the most stylish and intricate first-person RPGs ever made, with a truly remarkable amount of depth and dynamism baked into its dark and seedy Los Angeles. But Bloodlines’ premature launch also meant it was riddled with bugs. After years of community support, it is still a challenging game to grapple with.

Bloodlines is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of PC gaming. What if Troika had been given another six months to sharpen Bloodlines’ fangs? What if the game hadn’t launched on the same day as Half-Life 2? What if the likes of Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain and Brian Mitsoda had been given a shot at a sequel, to capitalize on all the lessons they’d learned?

We’ll never know the answers to those first two questions. But we will, finally, get an answer to the third. “If they’d asked me to do another one back then I would have done it,” says Brian Mitsoda, lead narrative designer on Bloodlines and Bloodlines 2. “I think one of the best things about the World of Darkness IP is that there are—just in one city alone—hundreds of stories. There’s always more stories to be told.”

Mitsoda is working with Hardsuit Labs, the developer and creative lead behind Bloodlines 2. The game is being published by Paradox Interactive, which acquired White Wolf in 2015, and thus owns the World of Darkness IP. Indeed, the acquisition of White Wolf by Paradox was the trigger for Bloodlines 2’s development. In an unusual turn of events, HSL began working on