Even old undead monsters need some warmth.
Your standard RPG romantic interludes probably wouldn’t make much sense in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. You’re not some adventurer, hero, or even an anti-hero. You are Phyre, an old monster who spends their unlife drinking blood, killing without mercy and plotting until the sun comes up.
But that doesn’t mean romance is completely out of the question.
I recently visited The Chinese Room to play a few hours of Bloodlines 2 and chat to the team, and naturally we got onto the subject of how horny vampires tend to be (especially in your average Anne Rice novel). And there is a degree of this in Bloodlines 2.
“So there are some romantic options,” creative director Alex Skidmore told me. “But vampire romance isn’t the same as human romance. So we have—this is probably awful and I don’t want to give this soundbite—a kind of romantic feeding.”
Naturally I warned him that I was absolutely going to have to put this in a headline.
“So there are points with named vampires,” he continued, “where if you have played your card rights, you can do a romantic feed.”
Playing your cards right might be tricky, though. As I found when I was playing, chatting to other vampires is a dangerous dance, and every dialogue option, even if it’s just an innocent question, might tarnish your relationship. And these relationships are the products of how you’ve built your character’s history, what clan you’ve chosen, your reputation and deeds, and a few misconceptions.
How other vampires relate to each other will also be important, narrative director Ian Thomas told me. “As Alex said, romance is very different amongst vampires, and non-traditional, but there are definitely relationships in there—as would happen if you’ve been with the same group of people for 100 years. And that’s an interesting part of the puzzle—figuring out who is allied with who, whether that be a romantic alliance or political. So they probably could have lots of things going on behind closed doors.”
There’s even a hint of romance, or at least sensuousness, when you feed on humans. This is not like the animalistic combat feeds, where you’re ripping out throats and guzzling on blood.
“A vampire’s bite in VTM is called ‘the kiss’,” said Skidmore, “so the humans don’t scream, and they’re left afterwards sort of dazed, and probably when they snap out of it they’ll go, ‘That was awesome. Where did that person go?’ So that’s the romanticism, whereas we didn’t have that for the combat feeds. We want the combat feeds to be lethal, horrible.”
There’s also plenty of flirty dialogue, but that might get you into a spot of trouble. I made pals with a Phyre fangirl in my prologue playthrough, and by flirting with her I was able to take charge of the conversation. But when I did it again, in front of the fangirl’s boss, her boss was less amused—and she was probably the one I should have been trying to get on my side.
Navigating all of these alliances, relationships and dicey chats is gonna take a lot of work, and I’m pretty keen to get started. After spending a long time expecting very little out of Bloodlines 2’s turbulent development, my hands-on has left me cautiously optimistic.
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