Category: Video Games

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.

Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok will indeed get a PS5 Pro Enhanced update after the first-party PlayStation Studios game skipped the announcement of the $700 mid-gen upgrade.

Push Square spotted the PlayStation Store listing for God of War Ragnarok now includes the ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ label. Neither Sony nor Sony Santa Monica have announced the game’s PS5 Pro support yet, and there’s no detail on what it will involve, but of course the hope is Ragnarok’s resolution will be boosted while maintaining 60 frames per second.

God of War Ragnarok joins the likes of Blizzard’s Diablo 4 in a list of over 60 games with confirmed PS5 Pro Enhanced updates, according to eagle-eyed fans who’ve been keeping an eye on the PlayStation Store (IGN has a list of all the PS5 Pro Enhanced games so far).

PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features.

At a recent PS5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us Part 2, to discuss the improvements we can expect to see now there’s a more powerful PS5 on the market.

In an interview with IGN, Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits said he’s hopeful the PS5 Pro will improve Space Marine 2 by default via PSSR, but did not confirm a PS5 Pro Enhanced patch. PS5 Pro itself launches November 7.

Just days after God of War Ragnarok launched on PC to a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating over its forced PlayStation Network account linking, a mod was released that bypassed the requirement entirely. The creator of the mod eventually pulled it offline out of fear of reprisal from Sony.

The PC port includes the long sought after ability to tone down puzzle hints from companions. Sony has said this will soon to be added to the console version, but we don’t have a release date yet. Perhaps it will arrive alongside the PS5 Pro Enhanced update.

Though God of War Ragnarok met with critical and commercial acclaim, selling a whopping 11 million copies in less than three months on sale and earning a 10/10 in IGN’s review, one gripe players had was with the companions throwing out puzzle solutions before players had a chance to solve them.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.