Editorial Chris Avellone: What the Fuck Happened to Bloodlines 2?

[Rean]

he sounds a bit bitter

He sounds sober, and that's the problem, he just shouldn't write anything in that state. He shouldn't write games in that state. He goes down tumbling into some self-guilt trip (please cancel me now!).

What happened is he just wanted the game to be made, he helped with the pitch, but in his soberness, he didn't have the clarity to see the that the Hardsuit whatever cucks didn't have what it takes to make a game worthy to be called Bloodlines 2.

It's true. Being sober makes you dumb!!!

 

[Rahdulan]

That's a lot of words to say "I have no idea". Goes with being a writer, I guess.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

I wonder if he will say anything about Owlcats Games. I heard that he was the one who suggested ending the partnership.

 

[Rean]

I heard that he was the one who suggested ending the partnership.

Where did you hear that?

 

[mindx2]

@Chris Avellone said:

I’d like to think I helped during the pitch, but that’s for others to judge. Paradox certainly signed the damn thing, and I didn’t even have to blow anyone. This time.

Oh, you...!

Spoiler

 

[Digital Monocle]

This Jaded MCA would be perfect for a Jagged Alliance 3.
Maybe he can write a character like Norma from personal experiences

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

I heard that he was the one who suggested ending the partnership.

Where did you hear that?

'A friend of a friend' told me.

 

[Absinthe]

The bigger problem was that Chris Avellone wanted a Bloodlines sequel more than he wanted a sequel that was in good hands. He apparently assumed that given a project, the rest would fall into place. Still, without Brian Mitsoda doing the writing, it's basically got no future. Developers being used as marketing gimmicks to give a project legitimacy is fucking annoying though. Evidently Brian Mitsoda was used more as a prop to make the project look legitimate than as a proper writer, which means they decided they didn't really need or want him to take charge of the actual writing, and when you have those kinds of "my way is just better" types with their heads up their asses, you typically know you're looking at a dumpster fire. If you're making Bloodlines 2, people will expect it to be a sequel to Bloodlines 1, which means they will expect it to have a similar way of doing things to Bloodlines 1. Seeing as RPGs with good gameplay are rare (Bloodlines also isn't doing too hot here), that basically leaves you with trying to develop a similar writing style and atmosphere.

Hardsuit Labs's inexperience with making RPGs and focus on making shooters wasn't the most damning thing (Bloodlines was a first-person game anyway), but the fact that their entire list of videogame projects consists of ports, remasters, "co-development", and "engineering support" aside from one self-developed title (Blacklight Retribution - a 2012 release, F2P shooter, said to be "above average" by F2P standards) is pretty fucking concerning. Other than that you can look at Glassdoor and find out that yep, Hardsuit Labs is into SJW things and suffers from massive turnover (1-2 notices happen every week, and this is a tiny studio), poor pay, constant mandatory crunch time, micromanagement, busybodies, and otherwise poor management (clueless, dishonest, low transparency, poor communication skills, more interest in social media than practical work, and general incompetence). That's a death sentence right there. You have a studio that has minimal experience developing games, bad management, and a development staff that is actively being hindered and burned out with massive turnover.

Fun fact: If you check out Hardsuit Labs's website, you find out that they are now hiring! Hiring for what? Well, if the above Glassdoor reviews are any indication, Hardsuit Labs will always encourage you that there is more work coming up and opportunities are just around the corner, right until they hand you your pink slip informing you you're being laid off in just a few days.

It's an interesting question why Chris Avellone and Brian Mitsoda backed this horse, and I'm really just coming back to "They really wanted a Bloodlines sequel that they were part of" and "Hardsuit Labs is pretty good at sounding like they're decent people." The managers sound like those personable types that have good presentation skills and are good at looking professional but bad at actually doing work.

Odds are Paradox just wised up to the fact that they were throwing money down the drain and pulled the plug on them. Bloodlines 2 should be in limbo (basically dead) until Paradox shops for another developer to take over (and probably overhaul/redo the whole thing). Without Brian Mitsoda doing actual work there though, any Bloodlines 2 project is most likely going to be a failure, so you can basically keep an eye on how Brian is doing professionally for an indicator on Bloodlines 2, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Reading that I thought it was written by Cleve Himself.

 

[Tacgnol]

Reading that I thought it was written by Cleve Himself.

Cleve would have had more interjections about giant sewer rats and titanium bones woven throughout.

 

[HanoverF]

some of whom I've worked with

Spoiler

 

[Chippy]

After the signing, it was like a chorus of angels. Or a distant howling of a werewolf pack during their monthly moonlit night of fuckening

Still butthurt about those wolves. Sad!

I know this is totally wrong and disrespectful, but I hope all MCA fans like myself and MCA himself if he is reading this just see the humor I'm going for when I post this video:



I just couldn't help it.

Edit: Good luck MCA. Pretty sure everyone is behind you. We would probably just hesitate if we were all in a plane crash, and you advised charging a pack of wolves to get to safety over the mountain.

 

[Raghar]

he sounds a bit bitter

Obviously, 2 years of writing was thrown away.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'd be furious personally. I get it, but still for none of it to be used? That's shitty.

 

[supervoid]

So boring. I hope for more Techland drama leaks.
Bad google translate:

Apparently, it looks similar in terms of the plot. Little remains of Chris Avellone's vision, who would be her chief architect. Although the person himself denies and still expresses his satisfaction with the cooperation with Techland. One of the interviewees described the plot as a pretext, consisting only of completing repetitive tasks in the style of "bring it, talk to it, kill the zombies here and here". Vision about factions, decisions, and other details has changed, but did Avellone himself do enough? The unofficial words of one of the employees are: “Avellone gave us the quest list for one region… except that nothing was fit for the game. Chris wrote it like he was doing quests for New Vegas. " (it's about Fallout: New Vegas, on which Avellone made a huge contribution). This is not an optimistic scenario.

 

[Tyranicon]

This Jaded MCA would be perfect for a Jagged Alliance 3.
Maybe he can write a character like Norma from personal experiences

I'm honestly surprised that at this point nobody has done a JA spiritual successor right.

 

[RunningWolf]

They didn’t use anything I wrote during that time

Does anybody know whats up with studios hiring him and not using anything he writes? If i remember that also was the case in Obsidian during their POE1 era. I get that they exploit his fame, but you already paying the man and even if he isn't as good as he was in Torment, KOTOR 2(which i find hard to believe because even this post saying he doesn't know is more interesting than 90% of POE script), its implausible that the best writer in the industry suddenly produces only unusable material. The only NPC i remember from POE is Durance and i didn't even finished that boring flop. Instead they used literally who Carrie Patel and Olivia Veras, that churn out purple prose by the cartload all of which incapacitates you better than any Sleep spell. Then Hardsuit Labs use another literally who Cara Ellison whos peak writing credentials include being a QA tester of GTA4 and some text-game about "raw exploration of female sexuality that also includes some astute observations about male desire" that nobody heard about. It looks so comical and retarded that it borders on malice and self-sabotage. What the fuck are they all thinking? Does it really all falls into woke=broke self-sabotage trend?

 

[Absinthe]

Sometimes it's shit like "he's making the rest of the writers look bad" (iirc Chris Avellone has actually had his writing sabotaged for this reason). Sometimes it's about control/vanity/ego/the compulsive need to be on top and have things done your way, so while you bring other people along to validate your own work, it's important to you that it's your work that is being validated, not theirs. Sometimes it's plain stupidity and incompetence where you hire a writer for marketing purposes but fail to realize that you could just use him to... actually write, which happens whenever people start feeling clever about outwitting consumers and are too dumb to realize their "clever trick" consists of hiring a person to do a job but not using his work.

And then there's good old creative differences where you hire a writer but you just plain don't like their way of writing or think it's not suited to the story you're trying to make. Definitely if you want to do a good vs evil heroic journey and a writer decides to add a ton of nuance to the good and bad guys and room for moral grayness and ambiguity to it you might decide "Hm, you're a good writer, but let's not use your work." I think that was the sort of problem Obsidian ran into with Dungeon Siege 3 (Chris Avellone was not a part of this project) where they opted to try to make a more nuanced story than the usual Dungeon Siege and it wasn't well received.

And of course there's just the usual "design marches on" where all the work that has been done ends up getting thrown out because that content's no longer got a place, like that level got axed or that character no longer makes sense in that scene because of other stuff that's changed since or the storyline wound up taking a different direction or there was a redundancy somewhere so you axed something or whatever. In an ideal world the story isn't being overhauled 10+ times while you're making the game, but it does happen.

But really, you'd have to ask Chris Avellone. I'm just listing guesses and ideas for the most part.

 

[0wca]

The bigger problem was that Chris Avellone wanted a Bloodlines sequel more than he wanted a sequel that was in good hands. He apparently assumed that given a project, the rest would fall into place. Still, without Brian Mitsoda doing the writing, it's basically got no future. Developers being used as marketing gimmicks to give a project legitimacy is fucking annoying though. Evidently Brian Mitsoda was used more as a prop to make the project look legitimate than as a proper writer, which means they decided they didn't really need or want him to take charge of the actual writing, and when you have those kinds of "my way is just better" types with their heads up their asses, you typically know you're looking at a dumpster fire. If you're making Bloodlines 2, people will expect it to be a sequel to Bloodlines 1, which means they will expect it to have a similar way of doing things to Bloodlines 1. Seeing as RPGs with good gameplay are rare (Bloodlines also isn't doing too hot here), that basically leaves you with trying to develop a similar writing style and atmosphere.

Hardsuit Labs's inexperience with making RPGs and focus on making shooters wasn't the most damning thing (Bloodlines was a first-person game anyway), but the fact that their entire list of videogame projects consists of ports, remasters, "co-development", and "engineering support" aside from one self-developed title (Blacklight Retribution - a 2012 release, F2P shooter, said to be "above average" by F2P standards) is pretty fucking concerning. Other than that you can look at Glassdoor and find out that yep, Hardsuit Labs is into SJW things and suffers from massive turnover (1-2 notices happen every week, and this is a tiny studio), poor pay, constant mandatory crunch time, micromanagement, busybodies, and otherwise poor management (clueless, dishonest, low transparency, poor communication skills, more interest in social media than practical work, and general incompetence). That's a death sentence right there. You have a studio that has minimal experience developing games, bad management, and a development staff that is actively being hindered and burned out with massive turnover.

Fun fact: If you check out Hardsuit Labs's website, you find out that they are now hiring! Hiring for what? Well, if the above Glassdoor reviews are any indication, Hardsuit Labs will always encourage you that there is more work coming up and opportunities are just around the corner, right until they hand you your pink slip informing you you're being laid off in just a few days.

It's an interesting question why Chris Avellone and Brian Mitsoda backed this horse, and I'm really just coming back to "They really wanted a Bloodlines sequel that they were part of" and "Hardsuit Labs is pretty good at sounding like they're decent people." The managers sound like those personable types that have good presentation skills and are good at looking professional but bad at actually doing work.

Odds are Paradox just wised up to the fact that they were throwing money down the drain and pulled the plug on them. Bloodlines 2 should be in limbo (basically dead) until Paradox shops for another developer to take over (and probably overhaul/redo the whole thing). Without Brian Mitsoda doing actual work there though, any Bloodlines 2 project is most likely going to be a failure, so you can basically keep an eye on how Brian is doing professionally for an indicator on Bloodlines 2, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

It's also because Mitsoda was fired from the project even though it was pretty much his to begin with, and almost at the SAME TIME, Mark Rein-Hagen, the creator of the whole VtM franchise, was fired from White Wolf. I'm not saying that necessarily had any impact on the game's development but I'm saying it's weird when the key figures in both the video game and the tabletop version of the game are fired for no apparent reason.

But yeah picking Hardsuit Labs was a major mistake to begin with.

I got a feeling this whole project was either sabotaged, destroyed by the uncompromising hand of SJW retardation, or just sheer incompetence. Probably a combination of all three.

But look at this way: VtMB 2 was always gonna suck. There's no way they would catch that lightning in a bottle they had with the first one. Not in today's world.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

They didn’t use anything I wrote during that time

Does anybody know whats up with studios hiring him and not using anything he writes? If i remember that also was the case in Obsidian during their POE1 era. I get that they exploit his fame, but you already paying the man and even if he isn't as good as he was in Torment, KOTOR 2(which i find hard to believe because even this post saying he doesn't know is more interesting than 90% of POE script), its implausible that the best writer in the industry suddenly produces only unusable material. The only NPC i remember from POE is Durance and i didn't even finished that boring flop. Instead they used literally who Carrie Patel and Olivia Veras, that churn out purple prose by the cartload all of which incapacitates you better than any Sleep spell. Then Hardsuit Labs use another literally who Cara Ellison whos peak writing credentials include being a QA tester of GTA4 and some text-game about "raw exploration of female sexuality that also includes some astute observations about male desire" that nobody heard about. It looks so comical and retarded that it borders on malice and self-sabotage. What the fuck are they all thinking? Does it really all falls into woke=broke self-sabotage trend?

May guess would be that using only mediocre writers makes the whole writing seems more consistent. MCA contribution would stand out too much from the rest of the game.

 

[Archibald]

It's an interesting question why Chris Avellone and Brian Mitsoda backed this horse, and I'm really just coming back to "They really wanted a Bloodlines sequel that they were part of" and "Hardsuit Labs is pretty good at sounding like they're decent people." The managers sound like those personable types that have good presentation skills and are good at looking professional but bad at actually doing work.

My guess would be that they simply saw no other options. Bloodlines was not a mega hit, gameplay is complicated to pull off and writing/atmosphere is basically impossible to replicate today without getting cancelled. I don't think that there are many studios interested in doing such game.

 

[Raghar]

May guess would be that using only mediocre writers makes the whole writing seems more consistent. MCA contribution would stand out too much from the rest of the game.

MCA is mediocre writer. But, he has likely different style than rest of the team, and stuff would stand out like a sore thumb.

(In pathfinder it was actually better writing than the most, but it didn't merge well with the rest. Cultural differences? Wasn't most of that team Russians? Or was it because some younger people nowadays are blabbering with stuff like LGBT and he still is from era when people had more common sense?)

 

[gerey]

until Paradox shops for another developer to take over (and probably overhaul/redo the whole thing)

The Swede is not a learning animal - so I can guarantee you that they'll make the same mistake, maybe not to this magnitude, but whoever gets the project will once again be some bottom-of-the-barrel collective of incompetent dangerhairs, and if by some miracle they manage to shit out a functioning product you can bet the writing will be the kind of cringe that will make BioWare's more recent efforts look like literary masterpieces.

For VtM:B2 to be good you'd first need to find a developer both passionate enough and talented enough to make a good immersive sim, and also one with enough good writers to somehow rise above the vile source material of NuWoD and write something that is actually tolerable to non-ResetEra regulars.

It looks so comical and retarded that it borders on malice and self-sabotage.

And thus we learn how communists managed to kill more of their own people via starvation than both world wars combined (and that's counting casualties, both civilian and military, on all sides).

 

[Vladimuar]

And thus we learn how communists managed to kill more of their own people via starvation than both world wars combined (and that's counting casualties, both civilian and military, on all sides).

cool story

 

[Roguey]

If i remember that also was the case in Obsidian during their POE1 era.

His writing was reduced (not cut) from Pillars because he significantly went over his allotted word budgets for those characters. He could have taken on more companions or even been narrative lead, but he didn't want to.