World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 - VTMB sequel from The Chinese Room - coming early 2025

[Raghar]

On launch you'll be able to play Brujah, Tremere, Ventrue and Banu Haqim. There will be two more clans planned as DLC sometime after launch.

Their plans have not changed. Main game gets released, an additional clan gets put up for sale, then they'll follow it up with an expansion pack featuring a new clan/character, then they're done.

Why was Troika able to create so many clan origins, and both males and females? This is retarded.

 

[Roguey]

On launch you'll be able to play Brujah, Tremere, Ventrue and Banu Haqim. There will be two more clans planned as DLC sometime after launch.

Their plans have not changed. Main game gets released, an additional clan gets put up for sale, then they'll follow it up with an expansion pack featuring a new clan/character, then they're done.

Why was Troika able to create so many clan origins, and both males and females? This is retarded.

RPS: Did the scope of the game just seem too big to you?

Mitsoda: Yes. It made me coin the phrase “kitchen sink design” – which isn’t that an impressive phrase I know, but I was too busy turning out stuff for the game. Kitchen sink design just means your game has everything AND the kitchen sink, and we literally did have kitchen sinks in that game. When a game tries to do everything, it will most likely fail at most of them.

A lot of this is due to designers (including myself) shooting too high within the scope. Sometimes overpromising features to the publisher causes it. Adapting one type of gameplay for a different interface – like sneaking and melee, for instance, which pose a lot different animation, design, and AI challenges in an FPS – and not realizing how long it takes to prototype and refine those systems, can cause problems. A simple refusal to cut or lock content generation is also a culprit in bloated scope. I think Bloodlines suffered from all of these, but despite its flaws, I think we managed to do some things exceedingly well.

Nowadays, if I have any say over it, I eliminate anything that I think can’t be finished in the estimated time to completion. Designers should cut not only to spend time on polish, but because it ends up creating a lot of work for everyone else on the team too. Unfortunately, it is my experience that too many people in the game industry cannot learn this lesson. It’s especially bad on RPGs since publishers and fans have this expectation that the game should be fifty to a million hours long, which is almost impossible to polish.