Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is back and now under development by Dear Esther studio

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has had a troubled development to say the least, but it has now risen from the dead once more. The first-person RPG sequel is now being made by Dear Esther developers The Chinese Room, it looks different from the last time we saw it, and it’s aiming for release in autumn 2024. Watch the trailer below.

The Chinese Room are best known for first-person narrative walk ’em ups like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, but in 2017 they laid off all their staff and were acquired the following year by Sumo Digital. Since then they’ve scaled up considerably, releasing lush platformer Little Orpheus in 2020. If Bloodlines 2 is the sort of expansive, open world FPS-RPG that folks expect, it’ll be the biggest thing they’ll have made by some margin.

Bloodlines 2’s own development is similarly stories. Announced in 2019, it was initially under development by Hardsuit Labs before it was delayed several times, its creative leads were fired in 2020, and its development was moved by Paradox to a previously unknown studio in 2021.

From the trailer above, some elements from Hardsuit’s version remain. Alice B saw the lumpy-faced fella in a demo at Gamescom in 2019, for example. The combat looks a lot slicker than anything we had seen previously, however.

The latest announcement was made at PAX West, where Paradox also announced that there would be a “gameplay reveal” in January 2024. I guess we wait until then to find out how its RPG systems have changed.

The Chinese Room posted their own ‘studio reveal’ video to YouTube: