![]() The World of Darkness MMO devours CCPĬCP Games revealed the creatively named World of Darkness MMO during White Wolf’s 2010 Grand Masquerade fan event in New Orleans. Little did they know that the development curse of the franchise was just lurking in the shadows. So when Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was announced on March 22, 2019, people were pretty excited. The love for the game was apparent then, and seems to have continued to grow as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines currently has a Very Positive rating on Steam with over 9,500 reviews. Often the community would reach out to former Troika Games employees who were able to fill in the blanks, and the community developers often called on fans to provide some extra voice work for the new quests. In the years after release, the community banded together to deliver unofficial patches that fixed technical issues, and restored missing and unfinished content. The development team were all laid off by the end of that year, and Troika Games closed its doors in February 2005. Despite a warm critical reception, Bloodlines only managed to sell 72,000 copies, a meager $3.4 million in sales. Bloodlines was unfinished, shipping with a multitude of bugs, and there was a missing in action mutliplayer mode that Activision had been marketing right up until May of that year. The same day that Half-Life 2, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Halo 2, all considered to be the best of their respective franchises, also hit store shelves. The problem however, Bloodlines was not allowed to be released before Valve shipped their first Source engine game, Half-Life 2.Īctivision, notorious for shoveling games out as quickly as possible on an annual basis, slated Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines to release on November 16, 2004. After a slew of delays, and issues, Activision stepped in with their own producer, and a hard deadline for the game to be released. Often they found themselves having to write their own workarounds for missing features in the engine just to complete the vision. Not only were they making an ambitious RPG on a scale that we had never seen before, they were doing so with the unreleased and unfinished Source engine from Valve. All the systems that make Bloodlines such a great game were its ultimate downfall. The game was a victim of its own ambition. It’s web of intricate narrative dalliances that still hold up today, despite the many, MANY, flaws that the game had when it released in 2004. There was first-person combat, third-person combat, each clan had their own biases towards the others, and your actions dictated the response you would receive from your rivals in the game world. Choosing between one of seven vampire clans each with their own set of powers, dialogue options, and pathways for violent and non-violent conflict resolution, the game offered a staggering freedom of choice even by today’s standard. It was in 2001 that the team partnered with Activision to create V ampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, a game that is widely considered one of the most ambitious and adventurous RPGs ever created, but also one of the biggest commercial failures of its decade.įor those who missed that original game, Bloodlines puts you in the shoes of a newly embraced Kindred in a Los Angeles riddled with ancient vampires in the upper echelons of society. Tim Cain, Jason Anderson, and Leonard Boyarsky were designers on that project, and decided to start their own studio in Irvine, California.įounded on April Fool’s Day in 1998, Troika Games was created with the idea to continue producing RPGs for the PC, initially striking up a publishing deal with Sierra Entertainment for their first game, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. In this case that employer was Interplay, and the disagreement was about the future team structure of the then in-development CRPG Fallout 2. ![]() Troika Games started out how most new studios do – an answer to disagreements with their former employer. To truly understand this story we have to go back to 2004 a landmark year in gaming that saw the release of classics such as Far Cry, Katamari Damacy, Half-Life 2, and a quirky game based on a tabletop RPG from the 90s, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. What was shaping up to be the first major action RPG from a publisher long known for their thoughtful 4X and Strategy offerings, had quickly spiraled into a tall tale of game development hell that included surprise layoffs, considerable delays, and eventually pondering the option of cancellation.īut all of this is par for the course for Vampire fans. When Paradox Interactive announced that Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 was delayed indefinitely, it was not a surprise for longtime fans of the cult-classic RPG.
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