Developer, Hardsuit Labs has recently announced that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will see delay from Q1 2020 to “sometime in 2020”. While a new date has not been announced per this statement, it’s possible we may hear more details via PDXCON on Saturday, October 21st. The developer has also stated they will hold a Reddit AMA the following Sunday to aid in answering several fan questions.
Hardsuit Labs’ CEO, Andy Kipling and writer, Brian Mitsoda, detailed the delay in a blog post on the Vampire website:
To all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
For the last three and a half years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a worthy successor to Bloodlines 1. To us, that meant not only making good on the ambitions of this remarkable game, but also a duty to ensure we would not repeat its mistakes. Today, we have to tell you that we need some more time to get you the game you’ve been waiting for. Although Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will still launch in 2020, we have decided to value quality over making the Q1 launch window.
There are some things we wanted to hit under all circumstances when we set out to follow in Bloodlines’ footsteps: A deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness. We firmly believe that we’re on the right track to get you all of this.
On the flip side, there’s the responsibility to avoid some of the issues that plagued the first game, which was famously launched too early. Over the last few months, it became clear that to stick to our original date would risk repeating that mistake. We won’t do that. In the end, everyone working on this game wants to offer you the best Bloodlines 2 we can.
This hasn’t been an easy- nor our first choice. Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised.
Your feedback was invaluable in this. It helped us give the proper weight to what we saw, as well. We’d like to thank you, and hope you’ll support us in the decision that came from it.
Many of us from Hardsuit Labs will be in Berlin for PDXCON. For those of you going, we look forward to seeing you there! We will be sharing insights into the development of Bloodlines 2 along with other steps we’ve taken to strengthen our development team to realize our ambitions for Bloodlines 2.
For those of you who won’t be there, we will be sharing more about this during the PDXCON Announcement stream on Saturday the 19th. We are also opening up a Reddit thread to answer any of your questions in the Bloodlines stream on the following Sunday.
Thanks,
Andy Kipling and Brian Mitsoda, on behalf of the team at Hardsuit Labs
Unlike so many releases that seem to release first and fix later, it’s great to see Hardsuit Labs taking the initiative to make the game as good as it can be on day one. Vampire: The Masquerade has a huge cult following and made a huge name for those involved. When it was announced at GDC 2019, the title jumped to the near top of my highly anticipated releases, and I’m excited to see what the team has in store for us to sink our teeth into. :)