If there's a recent game-dev story I'm ravenous to hear more about, it's this: what the hell happened with Hardsuit Labs' version of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2? If you can cast your mind back to the heady days of 2019, you might remember the game's initial announcement, when Paradox got Brian Mitsoda—writer on the original Bloodlines and narrative lead on HSL's Bloodlines 2—on stage to announce the series' revival with all manner of hullabaloo. The game was due out the following year.
A year later and the game was not out, but Mitsoda and creative director Ka'ai Cluney were suddenly and shockingly fired. In 2021, Hardsuit lost the project entirely. In 2023, Paradox revealed it had given it over to The Chinese Room, which had dramatically overhauled the game in its own image. Today, we are six days away from that game's release, and hoi polloi like us still don't know any more about what went down with HSL's Bloodlines than we did several years ago.
And it's likely to stay that way for some time. Maybe forever. The wounds still seem too fresh for anyone to go blabbing too much about it, but in a recent post on his blog Mitsoda shined at least a little light on where he's at with his feelings on the game, the varieties of work he did on it, and the contact he's had with the game's new dev and Paradox. That last one is easy: there's been none.
In answer to the frequently asked question "What happened to your work on Bloodlines 2?" Mitsoda answers plainly—his narrative team's work was replaced "but I don’t actually know anything further and haven’t been contacted by anyone from the project or publisher since I was released from any involvement in it."
Mitsoda does point to a different blog, from The Chinese Room's Dan Pinchbeck, in which Pinchbeck writes that "I knew I wanted to write the [Bloodlines 2] story too, we’d never been a studio that were going to finish someone else’s work." Mitsoda says that this seems, from his point of view, "like the reason given for replacing what my narrative team did." But that's all he knows. Or says he knows.
Above: A trailer for Hardsuit Labs' Bloodlines 2.
"This makes me sad, but it’s really out of my hands," continues Mitsoda. "I’m proud of the work the team did and loved the things they wrote."
Mitsoda goes into a bit of detail about what he did back when he was working on Bloodlines 2, as well. "I was a narrative lead on the initially pitched game," he writes. "I was responsible for designing quests and dialogue tools, co-direction and casting for voice acting, conceiving/writing/scripting the characters, and running the narrative department."
Which might tickle your brain a little bit. After all, Mitsoda did a lot of PR for Hardsuit's Bloodlines 2, right up to that aforementioned stage appearance, which might seem odd for a dev who's not the project's overall lead. But it seems like that was more about Paradox and Hardsuit drawing on Mitsoda's ties to Bloodlines 1 to hype up fans:
"I was asked to do that PR even though it’s unusual for narrative leads alone and I felt if fans wanted me to I would do it for the good of the game," says Mitsoda. "But I was not in control of much apart from what my game characters say. As you may know, I do not enjoy the PR part of the job at all. I like to make things instead."
I rather like Mitsoda's work, so I have to say I find it a touch exhausting that the guy got carted around all these PR events he had no interest doing only to have all his work thrown to the wind. But that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Lord knows I don't hold it against The Chinese Room's take on the game—it's not like the studio chose to make its entrance into the world of Vamp like this.
The good news is that, with Hardsuit's calamities in the rearview, Mitsoda's still beavering away in games. "I am currently working on a AAA project and an independent project," he says. "One day I might return to game direction when the offer is good enough. But right now I’m happy just making and releasing games."
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