Paradox Interactive Deputy CEO Mattias Lilja talked about the publisher’s future plans, and he also touched upon Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.
Speaking to PCGamesN, Lija said he’s confident the game will be released in the first half of 2025, as mentioned after the latest delay. However, he also pointed out that a potential Bloodlines 3 would likely be licensed to a third party since it’s so much out of Paradox’s usual ‘comfort zone.’
I’m very confident that we’re going to release Bloodlines 2. I’m actually quite confident that we’re going to release it in the first half of next year. Of course when you change developer midway through you’ve accumulated cost, but this time we gave The Chinese Room the game and went ‘this is the vision, this is what’s been done so far, but you own it.’ They have full ownership and many degrees of freedom, and they’re actually delivering a game that’s starting to look like what we really want. I’m starting to feel confident about Bloodlines 2, and that’s why it still exists, of course; we think it’s doable and it’s worth doing. We will reach the game’s release, we think we know when, and we hope people will like it.
We will probably not make Bloodlines 3 – we would probably find somebody to license that to. It goes back to the idea of ‘what do we really know?’ If you look at Paradox after Bloodlines 2 – maybe late 2025 or 2026 – I think you’ll see that the games we’re talking about then are going to look more like grand strategy games, management games, or things that are at least adjacent to that.
Paradox Interactive seeks to return to do what it knows best following the cancellation of Life Is You and the near-cancellation of Bloodlines 2 itself, which passed from original developer Hardsuit Labs to The Chinese Room. Following that change, while the setting remained the same (Seattle during a Christmas-time snowstorm), the new developer decided on a different protagonist. Rather than a newly awakened Thinblood vampire, players will step into the shoes of Phyre, an Elder vampire who has been forced to sleep for a century and is just now readjusting to the political environment in Seattle.
