Paradox says The Chinese Room saved Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from being canceled

Paradox considered cancelling Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 after Hardsuit Labs said the hotly anticipated RPG was too much to handle

Paradox Interactive

Paradox considered canceling Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 after Hardsuit Labs said the sequel to one of the best RPGs was too much to handle, but they wanted to give it one last chance by handing the project to The Chinese Room. Paradox CEO Mattias Lilja made the comments to GIBiz in a recent interview, where he described changing developers as a “pretty drastic measure.”

“It is the step before you stop," Lilja said. "And you need to find a good developer to continue, otherwise you probably don't continue. The game had already struggled a bit when this happened, [and] we [didn't] do it lightly. It is a high risk manoeuvre. But…we knew the Chinese Room, we'd seen some of what they'd done... So we thought this could be a good fit. We're really happy that we changed, I think.”

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Lilja said Paradox’s partners at Hardsuit were open and honest about the challenge of building Bloodlines 2 and realizing everyone’s ambitions for it. The studio’s previous work consisted primarily of design support for other projects, and this was of a scale larger than they expected.

“Chinese Room is a more stable developer, so they could attack this with more confidence,” Lilja said. “And we had more confidence that they could deliver what we saw, the early work that they did. So it's the experience with this type of game. If you look at the Chinese Room… Crafting a game with this very tight story and a tight setting is very much what they do.”

Lilja said Paradox let The Chinese Room decide what to keep and what to scrap from Hardsuit’s build, and he’s happy with the result so far.

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"I'm a huge World of Darkness fan myself, so when I play it, I'm starting to see that actually you're in that world, which is the experience we're going for.”

Paradox recently delayed Vampire Bloodlines 2 into the first part of 2025, though there’s no exact release date yet.