Ex-Dragon Age lead hopes Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 pulls an ‘Expedition 33 or Baldur’s Gate 3’ by leaning into the combat-light, roleplaying-heavy gameplay of the tabletop version

PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown played a vile trick on me when he rekindled my formerly long-dead hope that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 might actually be good. Before he went and did that preview, I’d reached a state of acceptance and inner peace—there simply wasn’t any way it could live up to my halcyon memories of the first game.

But it turns out it might be good, and I’m feeling the familiar twinge of optimism like the absolute rube I am all over again. Still, I’m not the only one—Dragon Age setting creator David Gaider shares my love of the original Bloodlines, and has been chatting to PCGamesN about just what he hopes the sequel ends up being.

“The hope is that we would get a new Vampire game in the same line as Expedition 33 or Baldur’s Gate 3,” said Gaider, which I’ve decided to interpret as ‘it should be French and horny.’ Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s actually what he means. Instead, it sounds like Gaider wants a future Bloodlines to lean a lot harder into the meaty, political roleplaying of the original tabletop games.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have a full-on RPG that wasn’t beholden to the fantasy or sci-fi genre,” says Gaider, “one that really leaned into the roleplaying systems of Vampire: The Masquerade?” Hell yeah it would, I answer in response to my empty office.

“If you’ve played the tabletop version, it didn’t do a lot of combat,” he continues. “What it did with characters and inter-character relationships, as well as the various powers you had and how those changed the way you played the game completely… I wish somebody would just take that to its logical conclusion and give us the game that’s meant to exist.”

I suspect Gaider won’t get quite what he’s after, but what we get might still be a banger. In his preview, Fraser wrote that the game’s “messiness becomes gleeful controlled chaos as you juggle bodies, rip out throats and use your vampiric powers to make mortals and vamps alike explode in a shower of blood.” Which, you know, doesn’t quite sound like a videogame adaptation of 12 Angry Men, but does sound pretty good in a whole different way.

Anyway, I reckon we’ll still get a lot of roleplaying opportunities, Fraser also wrote that “The action is violent, visceral (one of the few times when this is actually an appropriate adjective) and frequent, but it’s not all Bloodlines 2 is. It’s also a labyrinthine mystery and a Machiavellian tug of war.” The tense chats you have with LA’s vampire prince LaCroix, its coterie of rebel anarchs, and the argument you have with a stop sign are the game operating at the height of its powers. If Bloodlines 2 can capitalise and expand on those moments? I’ll be a very happy vamp.