As work continues on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, developer The Chinese Room has shared more details on how players will be a bloody pain in the neck for San Francisco’s populace and why they’ll want to quench their thirst.
Blood will sustain you in the game, allowing you to make use of your vampiric talents, and you’ll need to regularly hunt for a fresh supply. Refueling on some human-sourced sustenance will require you to use your supernatural powers or raw persuasion on civilians so that you can lure them in for a quick sip, and you’ll want to do this as discreetly as possible so that you don’t break the rules of the Masquerade. That’s a vampire societal faux pas that can result in deadly consequences.
“One aspect that was really challenging was presentation, from a first-person perspective,” senior game designer Max Bottomley explained on the Bloodlines 2 blog. “Feeding in first-person doesn’t really show you much at best, and looks silly at worst, but a simple cut in and out of third-person can also be disorienting and feels a bit disconnected. What we settled on uses a bit of both, with some basic cinematic action cutting techniques to maintain continuity of motion, and enough first-person action at the end to get you settled into your next move.”
Senior concept artist Michele Nucera added that feeding was designed to feel “like an intimate experience” between players and their victims, a raw of rush of power that shows “the visceral nature of stealing life from a beating heart” and transferring it to a vampire.
An interesting twist on this idea is that players will be able to track down and hunt NPCs that have the potential to achieve a maximum Resonance effect. Resonance is a new feature being introduced in the game, and this can add additional effects depending on the emotional state of the victim at the time they are fed on. This acts as a secondary-XP system that then activates Resonance-specific buffs known as Merits, and some of the Resonances that have been revealed so far include desire, rage, fear, pain, and delirium.
After a rocky development cycle that almost led to the game being canceled before The Chinese Room stepped in, Bloodlines 2 is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2025. Originally scheduled to launch in Q4 2024, the studio says it’s using the extra time to polish up the game and expand on its story.