World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs

[Semiurge]

I am backreading some of this crap, which I (wisely) had been ignoring for a couple years. I still can't figure out why Mitsoda was fired, was ever an explanation given?

A culling of sorts, see. They announced Mitsy's firing in front of the employees, and the ones that looked visibly shocked were culled also. "You there, what's your name, Paul is it? You're out." "And you too, over there. Yes you, pizzaface." "You there, you can close that big mouth of yours, there will be no flies here to catch anymore now that mr. pizzaface is gone, you're out."

 

[True Ukrainian]

Mitsoda and Kai were sacked and the ubisoft hatchet man joined shortly after. Paradox most likely lost faith in Mitsoda's and Kai's ability to manage the project.

 

[Dycedarg]

Mitsoda and Kai were sacked and the ubisoft hatchet man joined shortly after. Paradox most likely lost faith in Mitsoda's and Kai's ability to manage the project.

Wasn't Mitsoda the lead narrative designer? If that's the case, hard to see how any mismanagement would be his fault.

As for the game in general, Paradox should cut their losses and simply cancel the project. It's a sequel to a niche game that never had much mainstream appeal. And all they did was squander all confidence the fanbase had in the project.

 

[PlacidDragon]

Mitsoda and Kai were sacked and the ubisoft hatchet man joined shortly after. Paradox most likely lost faith in Mitsoda's and Kai's ability to manage the project.

Mitsoda didn't manage anything but the story. Cluney was a "creative director", which i believe means that he helped out multiple departments as needed ("many hats" type of job). Neither of these were among the senior leadership of Hardsuit..

As for the game in general, Paradox should cut their losses and simply cancel the project. It's a sequel to a niche game that never had much mainstream appeal. And all they did was squander all confidence the fanbase had in the project.

After sinking millions of dollars into this, i dont think they can afford that. Paradox owns the "World of Darkness" IP, where Bloodlines 2 was to be a flagship title. In their mind i am sure that it still is, just that its starting to get a very expensive flagship title

 

[Dycedarg]

After sinking millions of dollars into this, i dont think they can afford that. Paradox owns the "World of Darkness" IP, where Bloodlines 2 was to be a flagship title. In their mind i am sure that it still is, just that its starting to get a very expensive flagship title

I can see why they would think on those terms. But given the circunstances, the only scenario where it would make sense for them to complete the game would be if it was close to being finished, which is very unlikely. This thing has sunk cost fallacy written all over it.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

 

[just]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

someone from paradox played it

 

[Lord_Potato]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

Maybe it was too terrible to unleash it upon the public

 

[Dycedarg]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

Do we know that? Because if the game is almost finished, Paradox's idea of hiring a former Ubisoft guy as project lead to wrap things up should have worked. There would be no need to drop Hardsuit Labs and bring in a whole new studio. Oh, and they already said the game is not coming up this year. None of it points to the game being almost done.

 

[Raghar]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

It wasn't finished. That's the problem.

(Alternative explanation would be Mitsoda wrote it correctly, it's not a black/brown showcase, and Paradox wanna to remake it for ideologic reasons.)

 

[compvet24]

Wasn't the game almost finished? Why stop suddenly at the finish line?

Do we know that? Because if the game is almost finished, Paradox's idea of hiring a former Ubisoft guy as project lead to wrap things up should have worked. There would be no need to drop Hardsuit Labs and bring in a whole new studio. Oh, and they already said the game is not coming up this year. None of it points to the game being almost done.

Honestly I think they were just lying and pretending to everyone that it was nearly finished. Cyberpunk basically did the same so yah.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm basing this off of the release dates before they cancelled it entirely. It was originally supposed to come out like a year ago

 

[Latelistener]

Mitsoda and Kai were sacked and the ubisoft hatchet man joined shortly after. Paradox most likely lost faith in Mitsoda's and Kai's ability to manage the project.

Wasn't Mitsoda the lead narrative designer? If that's the case, hard to see how any mismanagement would be his fault.

If it wasn't then Paradox would have no reason to fire him so abruptly. They would've just fired Cluney and found a way to deal with Mitsoda, i.e. by offering him a place in the new team or at least as a consultant for the narrative and characters. Seems like they cut all the ties with him.

It's clear to me that since they were buddies Mitsoda had more role in this than it may seem.

 

[Roguey]

I remain somewhat confident that Brian was fired because he was Ka'ai's partner/accomplice in crime in the grift they pulled off. "We have Brian Mitsoda" is the only reason they gave this particular project by this particular team the greenlight.

I'm basing this off of the release dates before they cancelled it entirely. It was originally supposed to come out like a year ago

Delusional optimism on behalf of all parties. e.g. https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...adox-interactive.126124/page-400#post-6868140

I went digging around various forums to see if any ~insiders~ were talking post-cancellation and didn't find anything. Did see this Sawyer post from last December though

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3882000&userid=17931

Again, I have no direct insight into anything on this game, but I'd guess even 2021 is optimistic given that they booted two leads and installed a new director. I've worked on one game that had a 6 month turnaround following the removal of two creative leads (Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows). It only shipped because the game's features and content were gutted and Midway death marched the team (then shut the studio down immediately after).

If I had to bet, I'd go with the first half of '22 (or it gets canceled).

The Hatchet Man likely told Paradox that even the first half of 22 was an impossibility with this studio.

 

[Maculo]

SS2 also had the excuse that the game constantly talks about how everything on the ship is falling apart due to being built by the lowest bidder. Still way too fast, but at least there's a believable story reason.

This was just a bad excuse, because you know what? The stupid wrench held the whole game. No, together with all the backtracking the reason behind this was to make a short game appear much longer!

Interesting, I never thought of it as intentional padding in SS2, although that does make sense. I thought it was more so to stress new players out with resource management (hypos, ammo, etc.) by throwing respawning enemies at them.

How many legacy/throwback games have imploded as of late? VTMB2, SS3?

 

[Grunker]

It's funny how in the 00s and 10s the paradigm was evil-publisher-poor-developer and the 20s are starting off with double trouble incompetent-developer-poor-publisher: Chaos Chronicles Forever (Realms Beyond) and Bloodlines 2

Roguey must be having a field day watching all these Codex heroes fall

 

[jungl]

how hard is it to make a early 2000 hub based wrpg. They really basic design wise obsidian cooked up outer worlds in what a year? Maybe paradox has too high expectations.

 

[Dycedarg]

It's funny how in the 00s and 10s the paradigm was evil-publisher-poor-developer and the 20s are starting off with double trouble incompetent-developer-poor-publisher: Chaos Chronicles Forever (Realms Beyond) and Bloodlines 2

People actually believed this was how things worked:


After the Kickstarter era, many developers had the chance to actually prove themselves. Some made amazing games, while others didn't do so well.

 

[Grunker]

It's funny how in the 00s and 10s the paradigm was evil-publisher-poor-developer and the 20s are starting off with double trouble incompetent-developer-poor-publisher: Chaos Chronicles Forever (Realms Beyond) and Bloodlines 2

People actually believed this was how things worked:


After the Kickstarter era, many developers had the chance to actually prove themselves. Some made amazing games, while others didn't do so well.

Pretty much my point, yep.

 

[DeepOcean]

To be fair, before, we only had the account of the developers as they were the only ones willing to talk and, as expected, they were the angels of ths story, now with everyone and his mother with social media accounts, we can watch dysfunctionality and incompetence from all parties involved in real time including nasty breakups and social media drama like real time reality TV.

 

[Fenix]

All these stories about greedy pablishers were true - the lie was that devs are pigeons, cause every dev want to become big publisher.
Simple knowledge of rules of capitalism enough to understand that.
Yesterday they were pigeons, but they got the chance and used it to become big publisher.
Read Marks.

 

[Ninjerk]

Wasn't Wasteland 3 pretty warmly received here?

 

[Roguey]

Wasn't Wasteland 3 pretty warmly received here?

It's an improvement over everything else inXile has done but not a modern classic which is what everyone was hoping for back in 2012.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Publishers did nothing wrong.

 

[copebot]

In the past, so few games were released that it seemed that when publishers cancelled games, they were preventing artists from releasing amazing work into the world. Nowadays, more games are released in a month than were once released in a year, and most of them are garbage. There are few filters because up-front distribution costs have been replaced with the 30% app store / Steam cut, and even that is not a limiter because games can be distributed without app stores as well. Instead of developers scheming for advantage in corporate politics, many of them just run hustles on the public directly and run away with the money. We know that when publishers cancel games, it's probably because the game was shit, because otherwise they would have been able to make money selling it.

Considering how much work had to have been done already on this game, it's surprising that it's more or less getting canned. It had to have been really terrible for them to forgo selling several hundred thousand copies and getting Mixed reviews on Steam. Paradox purchased White Wolf in 2015, and since then, they have released nothing from that IP. They could have put out multiple simple games from the IP in that time with any number of developers. Paradox isn't allergic to publishing mediocre midlist games. The IP's last owner just procrastinated with it for ages also, releasing nothing while pretending to work (AKA boss' friends getting paid salaries to jerk off) on an "MMO" for something like 30 years. I think part of the issue is probably just that the White Wolf license and the World of Darkness in general is just not that unique. It has some good ideas, but ultimately it is nearly the same as just inventing your own story about bloodsuckers. The lore of WoD is more of a constraint than something that resonates with millions and millions of people. There are some nerds who know what a Malkavian is and what a Tzimisce does, but there aren't that many of them and most of those people will be picky and have high standards based on the previous game in the series.

The other issue for a woke story-based game is that vampire fiction is fundamentally about suave mind-controlling rapists. Feminist authors are going to want to fuck up a winning commercial formula by subverting it.