Paradox Interactive seems ready to be done with Vampire: The Masquerade — and with RPGs in general — with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja telling PC Gamer that any potential Bloodlines 3 will be “done by someone else.”
Lilja opened up about Bloodlines 2’s development in the course of an unusually frank interview, itself part of a media tour seemingly designed to show how Paradox was being reset after a string of problematic releases and reports of a toxic work culture. Paradox’s overarching message? It’s sticking to what it’s good at, and what it’s good at is strategy games.
“It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game,” Lilja told PC Gamer. “So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us. I would say it’s the sort of strategic way this would work. So it’s still an outlier from what we’re supposed to do, we don’t know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it.”
In short, Lilja considers Bloodlines a “dead end” for the company regardless of how well it does, which is made more awkward by the fact that Paradox Interactive owns Vampire: The Masquerade creator White Wolf Publishing. Lilja didn’t talk about Paradox’s plans for White Wolf, but it seems as if any future Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines RPGs will be licensed out to other developers.
“I think some studios do strategic investments, long term things, because they feel that the cost of not doing it is too high. But, I mean, I think it’s fairly clear, at least to me, and I think to you, even in the best of cases, Bloodlines does not have a super long shelf life. That’s not the way these games behave. You have an influx of players, there’s a bit of word of mouth, and they have a high peak, and then they trail off. And it’s not the type of gameplay that develops over time that much. So I think that’s part of why these types of games are not really that attractive to us.”
Lilja’s comments come amid the still-ongoing development of Bloodlines 2, which was announced back in 2019 as a faithful successor to the original game by Troika Games — considered one of the greatest RPGs ever made. The original development was handled by Hardsuit Labs, but numerous delays and other problems led to its near cancellation before Paradox handed development to The Chinese Room .
“If we hadn’t found The Chinese Room,” deputy CEO Mattias Lilja said, “and seen what they’d done with the early work, [cancellation] would have been the next logical step, because we could not continue as we did.”
The Chinese Room is taking what looks like a very different direction from Hardsuit Labs, boiling it down into more of a straightforward action RPG. Fans have posted various comparisons between the two online, noting the differences between the melee combat among other things.
“Generally, it’s a continuation of the same vision but they had to make it theirs,” Lilja told GI.biz in a separate interview. “When a game has been going this long with a sizable team in Seattle for a number of years before we moved it… It might have commercial challenges, but we liked the direction.”
Lilja says that Paradox is targeting a first half of 2025 release for Bloodlines 2, and that development is currently on track after its suffered yet another delay in August.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.