In the final blog post before the end of the year, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 developer The Chinese Room talked about the challenges and the benefits of migrating from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.
Associate Technical Director Andrea Sancio explained that integrating Lumen wasn’t that easy. At the same time, it was just too important to leave out.
Lumen lets us change the color, position, and intensity of lots of lights that can change dynamically. So, to figure out the best way to include these new lights, we spent a lot of time working with our artists.
The best way to implement Lumen in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was to add the rest of the Unreal Engine 5 feature set (which is, after all, designed with that in mind), starting with Nanite, which received great praise from Sancio.
Nanite marks a seismic shift in how we handle geometry in games. Rather than relying on traditional Level of Detail (LOD) systems, Nanite virtualizes geometry, allowing for detailed assets and performance. With Nanite all the meshes that use the same material get placed in what is called a “bucket” and are processed on the same draw call, greatly reducing their number. It reduces the complexity of asset creation but also opens the door to photorealistic environments that were previously unattainable. Now we can have some ornate architecture and densely detailed environments in our scenes.
Last but not least, the implementation of Virtual Shadow Maps delivered a significant improvement in visual quality, which Sancio described as critical to portraying the dark, shadowy rendition of wintertime Seattle featured in the game.
The Chinese Room recently finished revealing the four playable clans available at launch in Bloodlines 2: Brujah, Tremere, Banu Haqim, and Ventrue. Two additional clans will be added post-release.
The developer promised to deliver the gameplay reveal in early 2024, while the launch window remains scheduled for Fall 2024.
