The Chinese Room's founder says Paradox refused to drop The Bloodlines 2 name: "no one would be happy"
The former co-founder of The Chinese Room, Dan Pinchbeck, revealed that he had asked publisher Paradox Interactive to drop the “Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2” title entirely, as the game did not live up to the name of the series.
Dan Pinchbeck sat down in an interview with host Cat Burton in The Goth Boss Podcast. Pinchbeck had left The Chinese Room in 2023, midway through Bloodlines 2’s development, and debated that leveraging the 2004 cult classic's name pretty much doomed the project. He warned that “No one would be happy.”
The Chinese Room was already taking the helm of a project that had a turbulent development run at Hardsuit Labs. Pinchbeck felt like the project radiated “the frustration of a team who were desperately trying to finish something and really, really make their mark on it, but it had just gone south.” However, he clarified that he wasn’t taking a jab at Hardsuit Labs or Paradox Interactive.
He said that The Chinese Room tried to “really pull it apart and put it back together again,” incorporating many elements from prior builds and the 2004 title while retaining the game’s beloved storytelling.
Pinchbeck mentioned this in the interview:
Right from the word go, there was one of the producers that was then at Paradox, now with another publisher; we would sit there and go and have these planning sessions on ‘how do we get Paradox not to call it Bloodlines 2?’
He vented the frustration felt during the time, stating, “That feels like the most important thing that we do here, is come at this and say this isn’t Bloodlines 2, you can’t make Bloodlines 2. There’s not enough time, and there’s not enough money.”
Trying to recreate an ambitious project seemed out of the question considering all factors, so the studio settled on “We can’t make Bloodlines 2, we can’t make Skyrim, but we can make Dishonored.”
However, Paradox Interactive did not budge on the title’s name because of fan hype and commercial pressure. Pinchbeck compared it to “untangling an anaconda f***ball of competing priorities.”
Despite all the technical hurdles and time crunches, Pinchbeck looked back fondly at the scriptwriting for the game, stating, “It was really, really important to do justice to the world and the mythos. I had a lot of fun writing the story on that one, because the mythos on the RPG is so brilliant.
Pinchbeck departed The Chinese Room in 2023 amid the studio’s restructuring, leaving the project in other hands. Pinchbeck concluded the interview, stating, “It was always going to be tricky.”
