Bad news for Vampire: The Masquerade fans: Paradox Interactive, the publishers of the upcoming game Bloodlines 2, just revealed it’s delaying the game indefinitely. As if that wasn’t enough of a downer, it’s also going to replace the entire development team, so it could be a while before it even resumes development on the game.
In its announcement, Paradox doesn’t exactly say what the problem is, just that “a change is needed and, as a result, more development time is required.” The change, in this case, is that developer Hardsuit Labs is no longer leading development on the game. Paradox adds that, because this shakeup is such a big one, it’s no longer accepting pre-orders. It didn’t add what it would do for existing pre-orders, but I presume it’s bracing for a wave of refund requests.
The development of Bloodlines 2 has been dogged by bad news for a while now. It’s been delayed twice, as it was originally supposed to launch in the first quarter of 2020. The first delay was announced in October 2019, and the second was announced in August 2020. In the same month as the second delay, two major figures on the development staff — lead narrative designer Brian Mitsoda and creative director Ka’ai Cluney — were fired from Hardsuit. In October, senior narrative designer Cara Ellison left Hardsuit and the project. We haven’t heard good news about Bloodlines 2 in quite some time.
So needless to say, we haven’t been holding our breath for this game for a while. That said, it’s still a big surprise that Paradox has outright fired Hardsuit, and haven’t yet said which studio it plans to replace it with. Paradox ends the announcement by saying, “As soon as we can, we’ll let you know what the future development team of Bloodlines 2 will look like.”
Source: Paradox Interactive
