A funny thing happens when you stir up enough trouble in the tiny, open-world portions of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. If you indulge in showing off your uber vampiric parkour abilities and wield your other powers too openly, the music intensifies and sirens, followed by the sound of a helicopter, surround you as you, hopefully, are trying to hide. At first, it instills a sense of urgency, a panic. You have to find somewhere in the not-so-sprawling map of Seattle to hide away. The need to run, to disappear into the shadows, it’s kind of fun.
The thing is, there are no police cars with sirens blazing. Stop and look: There are no helicopters. You’ll reach a game over screen if you continue to violate the vampiric code of silence known as the Masquerade, but aside from cops on the streets opening fire on you (who are hardly a threat given that you’re literally a 400-year-old vampire), so much of the sense of danger around you is nothing more than a shallow facade. It makes an otherwise beautiful slice of Seattle in snowy winter feel completely hollow.
Equally deflating, there are no lasting consequences for feeding on humans, killing them quietly, or indulging in your violent vampiric side.
In the tabletop roleplaying game on which Bloodlines 2 is based, players whose characters are vampires have to balance the bestial nature of vampirism with their efforts to hang onto what’s left of their humanity. It’s a core game mechanic, with a “humanity” meter that can grow or shrink depending on your actions. But it’s also fodder for the central themes of VtM, which many come to the game for: at what point are you no longer human? How and when have you fully given into the monster inside you that hungers, eternally so?
There’s no hunger meter in Bloodlines 2, at least not one that reflects the concerns you have in the tabletop roleplaying game where your actions have an impact on the world around you as well as yourself. In Bloodlines 2, you’ll need to feed on humans if you’ve used too many powers in combat, but never does the game require you to concern yourself with the ethics of how you satiate that hunger.
And sure, those vampiric powers can be a lot of fun. You can zip around enemies, snap their necks, telepathically pick up their guns to fire back at your enemies, toy with their minds by instilling fear or a sense of self-destruction, or even summon blades of blood to shoot at your foes. That part can be very cool.
But the fun of that loop is fleeting at best and you’re left with nothing but a hollow diorama set in the world of VtM’s rich lore.
That’s why it’s even more disappointing that, despite that fake feeling of the world around you, despite a game loop that tires quickly, there’s so much that Bloodlines 2 does well that it feels like an undead variant of a better game that somehow withered away in its developmental slumber.
The soul of something vibrant trapped in a lifeless husk
It’s sort of poetic that Bloodlines 2’s protagonist, Phyre, is a 400-year-old vampire only recently awoken from a deep sleep, unsure of the reality they now live in. Bloodlines 2 itself had a rough previous life, and it seems equally unsure of itself. The original Bloodlines, released in a shoddy state in 2004, required the work of countless modders and VtM enthusiasts to mold it into something acceptable. It remains a wonky game to this day.
The sequel, as you may know, saw its first developer, Hardsuit Labs, dismissed from the project. The remains were picked up by Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture developer The Chinese Room, as they used assets created by HSL and crafted an entirely new story set in a very small slice of Seattle.
As we speak, those old assets and build materials from HSL’s work on the game have leaked out, and are leading many to speculate that something better was lost.
The speculation is fun, no doubt, but I think it also distracts from talking about the actual product that exists, what it fails to achieve and what it manages to do well. And going by the writing in Bloodlines 2, it’s clear that this could’ve been an excellent video game.
There’s a lot to say about the story and writing of Bloodlines 2, how well it handles VtM’s themes and lore, how the Johnny-Silverhand-of-a-situation that Phyre and the co-protagonist who lives in their head find themselves in sparks great dialogue (and excellent voice performances) and narrative direction. But I often find myself thinking about a particular NPC named Patience, a Toreador clan vampire who I consider a brilliant take on the obsessed artist archetype.
Patience is almost always found in the backroom of a pawn shop which is owned by another fascinating character, Niko Anelov. In most VtM media, Toreadors are portrayed as upper-class divas, obsessed with themselves and their objects of desire. There’s literally a mechanic for this in the TTRPG: a Toreador can become fixated on what they find beautiful to the point where their monstrous nature enables them to do horrible things in pursuit of having that beauty.
It’s common enough that those beautiful objects are “high art,” or things that many would regard as conventionally beautiful or sexually attractive. Patience, as a Toreador, is very obsessed in a similar way, but it’s trash that calls to them, the trash left behind at a pawn shop specifically. They wish to collect it and work with it as a kind of found media, seeing beauty in the act of something left behind, forgotten, misplaced, discarded. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see a character like this. On the other, Patience could be viewed as an egotistical hipster scrounging up garbage to masquerade as art, not quite unlike the stuffy elite Toreadors holed up in art galleries and opera houses. Who are they really? I love that riddle about them.
I tend to prefer Malkavian clan types myself, but this Toreador? One conversation with them sees Phyre ruminating over whether Patience’s art is about “mortality” or “individualism.” It’s the kind of moment I love in a good tabletop game of VtM. Yes, there’s the gory lore and the sex and the thrill of being powerful, but stopping to ask a vampire artist if their work, which they will continue to toil away with for eternity, is a statement of their own individuality or a commentary on the nature of death? That’s what I’m here for. Those are the deep, endless riddles that I love cracking open with the sharp object that is the vampire as metaphor.
But alas, Patience, my beautiful trash Toreador, will just stand around in the world, lifeless, unless I talk to them. And the quest they give me? It’s just to collect some items which, while they’re connected to the story, feel like a Ubisoft-ified collect-a-thon. I’ve gathered all the items they requested, but these knickknacks don’t appear in their studio, or on their work. It was all just a checkmark on the game’s map.
Lifeless, hollow, I leave Patience to do their work of…standing there, as I return to the equally lifeless sirens and helicopters of Seattle. The world will blare sirens at you that don’t exist, and Patience will speak of a vibrant, countercultural artistic practice you rarely see outside of what exists in a permanent, rigid state in their studio.
I’ve yet to cross the finish line on Bloodlines 2’s story. I feel compelled to do so because the characters are excellent, and the way it’s using the lore of Vampire: The Masquerade and the thematic nature of the vampire has potential. But the execution, that’s the stake through the heart.
