Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2’s release window will be delayed in order to deliver a quality game that won’t repeat the mistakes of its predecessor, as announced by developer Hardsuit Labs.
Troika Games’ Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines suffered from a notoriously shaky development process. It used Valve Corporation’s Source game engine, and when Valve was hacked and the source code for Half-Life 2 was stolen, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was put on ice for two years. Within that period, the project lost its producer and was flying blind until Activision assigned David Mullich. The game slowly but surely exceeded its budget as feature creep settled into the team’s ambitions, and Activision gave the developer an ultimatum. It needed to finish the game in just a few months, and Troika Games delivered, but not without severely rushing the final product and leaving employees unpaid.
If you ask me, it would be good if that did not happen again, and Hardsuit Labs is of a similar mind. In an announcement on the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 development blog, the developer explained that its choice to delay the game wasn’t an easy one. ‘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,’ the statement read.
Hardsuit Labs said that it is dedicated to delivering a quality installment to the Vampire: The Masquerade series: ‘a deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness.’ It added that its community has been key to realising that a delay is the best course of action for developers and players alike.
‘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,’ Hardsuit Labs elaborated. Despite the delay, members of the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 team will be at PDXCON in Berlin, and welcome fans to come and ask questions about the game’s development. They will also start a Reddit thread for those who can’t make it to the livestream in person.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will launch for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC in late 2020.
Credit: Source link
