Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has been in development trouble for a while, after multiple delays. The first-person roleplaying game developed by Hardsuit Labs was originally meant to be released in early 2020. Not only that didn’t happen, today publisher Paradox Interactive revealed that it won’t launch in 2021 either, and there is no new release date as its very developer (Hardsuit Labs) is being replaced.
Here’s the message shared by Paradox Lead Community Developer Dale Emasiri on the official Discord channel.
Good morning, As you have noticed, we’ve been keeping pretty quiet for a while. With this in mind, the first piece of news we have for you is to confirm that Bloodlines 2 is still in development.
Secondly, we have made the hard decision that Hardsuit Labs will no longer be leading the development of Bloodlines 2 – which also means that we will not be releasing in 2021 as previously planned. Since we cannot at this time communicate a new release date, we’ve also decided to stop accepting pre-orders for the time being.
This game is very important to us and it has been an ambitious project from the very start. In order to meet our goals for it, we’ve come to the conclusion that a change is needed and, as a result, more development time is required.
We’d like to take this opportunity to honor Hardsuit Labs for their efforts and thank them for their hard work on the project. The studio has done a tremendous job in laying the foundations for the game and we hope that you, the community, will also appreciate their contribution to Bloodlines 2.
We’re thankful for your continuous support throughout the game’s development. We understand how important this is to you, and we’d love to share more with you. As soon as we can, we’ll let you know what the future development team of Bloodlines 2 will look like.
Paradox CEO Ebba Ljungerud also briefly commented on the news during the publisher’s year-end report, published today on Paradox’s official website.
For us, it is crucial that our games are well received by the players, so we always choose, if possible, to give our development studios the time required to achieve our quality goals.
This also affects the development of Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, where we communicated a delay during the third quarter of 2020. We have now chosen to postpone the release of the game further, and we will not be launching the game in 2021. We have also decided that Hardsuit Labs will no longer be leading the development of Bloodlines 2, and we have started a collaboration with a new studio partner to finish work on the game. This has been a difficult decision, but we are convinced that it is the right way forward to do the game justice.
