While we were originally supposed to be playing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 by now, the game was delayed to get a little extra polish, and also to come to next generation consoles. Whether we’ll end up getting the game this year or not is up in the air at this point, but that’s the aim, and now we get an insight into the game’s overall arching theme and what else is going bump in the night.
In a lengthy interview with USGamer, multiple developers from Hardsuit Labs spoke about various aspects of the upcoming fantasy title. When it came to the story, Lead Creative Designer Rachel Leiker talked about how it was about social change at its core, struggle between the structural changes of old and new, and one of the reasons they chose to go with a Seattle setting since it represents of the biggest sites of inequality in America today, something they have referenced before.
“There are few cities in the U.S. where the financial inequality of the modern world is more visibly apparent than it is in Seattle. This meant artists, poets, authors, and more of the type of people that tend to have a profound impact on the culture of a place. Many of the people who built the culture of the place were pushed and priced out, and that meant social change,” Leiker says. “Bloodlines 2 plays on this struggle between old and new—old money and new money, established culture and changing culture, and more.”
That certainly seems like some fertile game for storytelling and not something you see a lot from video games. Leiker also dropped some hints that there may be more than vampires lurking in the shadows as well, pointing to the Season Pass naming as a hint of what could come, saying “I will say the Season Pass is called the ‘Season of the Wolf. You can speculate from there.” You can see more details about that via the Collector’s Edition through here.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is set to release later this year for all major consoles and PC.