Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines II

Skyrim’s quests and writing are vastly inferior to Witcher 3, I don’t think anyone could debate it sensibly. I’m not even arguing that they are the same quality level game-wise. But Skyrim does belong in the same sentence with Witcher 3 in regards to games that successfully execute an open world game design, which is really the point I was making.

I find most open world games dreadful. Just dreadful. So I’ve always been a bit skeptical about this project. Hoping for the best, but you generally don’t fire the entire creative team when things are going “the best”. Guess we’ll see!

It really does - While Witcher 3’s quest writing was a lot better, I find Skyrims world a lot more realized and well done than W3’s, which to me was just okay.

I’m pretty concerned this is going to be a huge disappointment. So like you I say, delay away.

Fair enough, it’s just that you were specifically talking about quest design and the “collect 8 pelts” kind of stuff that plagues open world games, and then listed Skyrim as an example of doing it right, which does not parse. But it seems we actually agree.
Bloodlines 2 will not be an open world game of that typical mold though. I expect its structure to be very similar to the first game as well as its focus on meaningful sidequests. How well written those will be however, after both Mitsoda and Avellone are gone, is anyone’s guess.

Yea these two games have different design goals. Skyrim is much more of a “make your own hero” sandbox, Witcher is all about the story and characters. Cyberpunk will have more emphasis on sandboxish elements but still will be story-first kind of game at heart.

I’ll probably cancel my preorder on GoG. Such a disappointing development.

I am very, very concerned that you are going to be exactly right, and that pains me.

There have been very few games I WANTED a sequel to more than the original Bloodlines game. And the idea of it being a complete disaster…it breaks my heart.

In a message from the Discord server, Paradox announced that Hardsuit Labs is out and the game’s not releasing in 2021 anymore. It must be in quite a state.

Good morning, everyone

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.

Guys, I’m starting to think this one isn’t going to pan out.

So presumably, despite what appear to be significant time and effort in development, the game is in such a mess that a new dev is needed? Or perhaps the game is just dead, Jim?

How does something like this happen? In theory Paradox is a sizable operation which should be monitoring development. How does something like this go so awry? And why has it taken so long to realize all this?

This Paradox dude has a good sense of humor:

At least they canceled pre-orders and they’re not trying to milk the public via kickstarter like SC.

Paradox has its fair share of disastrous third-party releases. They are (reasonably) good at managing their own (PDS) releases. Third-parties… not so much. Not sure why, though.

Yeah, this game has definitely moved into the “Wait and see” category. I am expecting a broken mess at release with an overall narrative full of contradictions and otherwise a complete mess.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a game being taken away from a developer completely, to be handed over to a different one by the publisher.

Didn’t the FF7 Remake swap devs midstream?

While there have been warning signs for quite a while now, I would not be surprised if the whole pandemic thing and remote collaboration issues contributed to this fiasco.

Maybe Duke Nukem Forever counts on this one.

I’m sure I’ve heard of other cases, but I can’t recall any of them right now. :(

Rollercoaster Tycoon World changed developers not once but twice after being announced by Atari, and we all know how that turned out so not the greatest of precedents. That’s the only I have any recollection of so far, I feel like there have been other such instances though.

Happened multiple times with Starcraft Ghost before the project was just scrapped.