2025 finally brought us Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, but whether you liked or loathed The Chinese Room's follow-up to Troika's wildly ambitious and deeply flawed RPG, it's safe to say that it wasn't the follow-up most fans expected.
On a personal level, what I wanted from Bloodlines 2 was basically 'Bloodlines 1, but fixed', an RPG that took all the wild, unconstrained ambition of the original and brought it up to modern standards with a new story and exploratory space on top. Yet while Bloodlines 2 had its merits—like its brilliant Malkavian detective companion Fabien—it was mechanically much simpler than Troika's game, while also lacking meaningful side-quests and any real sense of character progression.
