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

[J1M]

Anne Rice, Anita Blake, Women of the Otherworld, True Blood, Blood Ties, Vampire Diaries, Twilight, A Discovery of Witches, Night Watch, Lost Girl, and countless others.

You've just proved my point. None of those have brand recognition and Anne Rice is just gay romance and BDMS that happens to involve vampires.

The point is you need vampires, not brand recognition, to have an urban fantasy success.

 

[J1M]

Anne Rice, Anita Blake, Women of the Otherworld, True Blood, Blood Ties, Vampire Diaries, Twilight, A Discovery of Witches, Night Watch, Lost Girl, and countless others.

You've just proved my point. None of those have brand recognition and Anne Rice is just gay romance and BDMS that happens to involve vampires.

Brand recognition is overrated anyway. Unless it's a huge brand like a movie franchise or something (although those are getting less and less valuable as studios ruin them), it's not going to be big enough to make much of a difference in profit unless you're making a cheap shovelware game in an uber niche genre where a couple thousand purchases by the tiny dedicated fandom of an obscure IP are considered amazing success beyond your wildest dreams. If you're making a free to play in an oversaturated genre, then brand recognition is completely irrelevant because you're guaranteed to turn huge profits unless your game is so sucky that it drives players away. Elden Ring and Apex Legends are completely original and they're huge. I'd think advertising would be a more important thing to focus on.

Also, the IP may restrict your game more than it helps. When Troika made BL they weren't fans of the IP and wanted to do their own stuff (Activision forced them to use the license), but due to contract stipulations they had to contact WW whenever they wanted to make changes and that proved to be extremely laborious and may have negatively affected development.

In any case, that doesn't explain the dearth of indie games.

Why would you pretend that Elden Ring is an original venture when from years of marketing it is clearly how they chose to spell Dark Souls 4?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Why would you pretend that Elden Ring is an original venture when from years of marketing it is clearly how they chose to spell Dark Souls 4?

Original title for Dark Souls was Dark Ring until someone told them about what that could be interpreted as

 

[Berengar]

Does this game exist again yet?

 

[Delterius]

Why would you pretend that Elden Ring is an original venture when from years of marketing it is clearly how they chose to spell Dark Souls 4?

Original title for Dark Souls was Dark Ring until someone told them about what that could be interpreted as

does that mean elden ring is just goatse

 

[deuxhero]

the problem isn't urban fantasy or lack of brand recognition. the problem is making an rpg that isn't faux medieval fantasy. anything outside the world of wizards and castles is considered a risk. and, frankly, it is. the audience was raised in a very specific cocktail of early modern and fake medieval aesthetics and it is rather unwilling to let go.

I don't quite agree with that. If your game is good then people will like it. I mean, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Disco Elysium turned out to be mainstream successes. If you make a good game set in urban fantasy I am sure people will like it. But it has to be good on its own merits.

The key operating words here are mainstream success. KCD and Disco are not jockeying for the forgotten realms audience. They transcend the pure rpg audience by default. A better case study would be Shadowrun. As far as combat rpgs go the Shadowrun trilogy is rather garbage. As far as settings go it is non standard in both ways: not only futuristic, but having elves in the middle of cyberpunk should be enough to weird out more than one buyer. And yet it was all successful anyways. So it's not impossible to succeed outside of realmesque, you just gotta appeal to the wider normiedom than the normies who mostly play rpgs.

Urban fantasy is big, it just requires a good author.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I have the "Berlin by Night" source book at home and some real world Nazis are described as being vampires there.

Heinrich Himmler himself, in fact. 8th generation Tremere.

And Churchill is Nosferatu I guess?

 

[ColaWerewolf]

What brand recognition does an obscure tabletop game have anyway?

I mean it's pretty good, and for the first time in years it's actually gaining momentum. It's a cascading effect. Like how Demon Souls sold just over a million copies in the span of two years and now Elden Ring sells 12 million copies in under a month.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

What brand recognition does an obscure tabletop game have anyway?

I mean it's pretty good, and for the first time in years it's actually gaining momentum. It's a cascading effect. Like how Demon Souls sold just over a million copies in the span of two years and now Elden Ring sells 12 million copies in under a month.

And you’re sure that’s because of the tabletop IP and not the already huge recognition of GeekAndSundry? I’ve seen complete nobodies get millions of view by sheer luck many times, so that’s not really a compelling argument. Also, Elden Ring is a different IP from Demon Souls, so you’re basically saying that Paradox is setting themselves up to be overshadowed by a competitor even in a best case scenario. That not brand recognition, that’s genre oversaturation.

It’s also a moot issue now because Paradox fucked up the brand.

 

[Cross]

Because companies want to play it safe, in a way that still gets them money. Urban fantasy out of nowhere won't sell all that much without brand recognition - and you have what exactly when it comes to urban fantasy? Dresden Files?

the problem isn't urban fantasy or lack of brand recognition. the problem is making an rpg that isn't faux medieval fantasy. anything outside the world of wizards and castles is considered a risk. and, frankly, it is. the audience was raised in a very specific cocktail of early modern and fake medieval aesthetics and it is rather unwilling to let go.

The majority of the Codex's top-rated RPGs are not traditional fantasy.

 

[vortex]

What about VTMB2 to be Urban Victorian fantasy?

 

[Modron]

What about VTMB2 to be Urban Victorian fantasy?

Vampyr?

 

[0wca]

I think we can all agree that no matter how recognized the brand and legacy, VtMB 2 is still going to be shit.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

What about VTMB2 to be Urban Victorian fantasy?

Vampyr?

I like what Vampyr tried to do, tried to be original, but it was held back by things like the story going in weird thematically contradictory directions and the atmospheric worldbuilding being sloppy. Apparently Victorian London’s streets are infested with monsters a la Yharnam but nobody notices and there’s no explanation why. It also falls into the trap of using a traditional good/evil karma meter where the evil option is boringly evil and isn’t even roleplayed during the course of the story. It’s not bad, per se, but the sloppiness breaks my SoD.

I think we can all agree that no matter how recognized the brand and legacy, VtMB 2 is still going to be shit.

And it’s probably going to kill the brand recognition anyway.

Remember the wargame Confrontation? It got bought by Cyanide who made a couple mediocre games with the IP and then let it die. How likely do you suppose the same outcome will happen here?

 

[Spukrian]

Spoiler

I've only played 25 of these games. Does this list really matter in the context of this thread?

 

[Harthwain]

I like what Vampyr tried to do, tried to be original, but it was held back by things like the story going in weird thematically contradictory directions and the atmospheric worldbuilding being sloppy. Apparently Victorian London’s streets are infested with monsters a la Yharnam but nobody notices and there’s no explanation why.

Indeed.

Vampyr should've been closer to its narrative approach and less about stupid fights in the streets. I imagine a game about vampires to be more like a spy game (especially if you allow the player to play as vampire hunter(s). Or some twist on Hitman, where if you kill people you at least try to do it quietly and hide that fact, not engage in some open epic battles with other vampires.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I like what Vampyr tried to do, tried to be original, but it was held back by things like the story going in weird thematically contradictory directions and the atmospheric worldbuilding being sloppy. Apparently Victorian London’s streets are infested with monsters a la Yharnam but nobody notices and there’s no explanation why.

Indeed.

Vampyr should've been closer to its narrative approach and less about stupid fights in the streets. I imagine a game about vampires to be more like a spy game (especially if you allow the player to play as vampire hunter(s). Or some twist on Hitman, where if you kill people you at least try to do it quietly and hide that fact, not engage in some open epic battles with other vampires.

I think Nosgoth had an interesting idea with action battles involving several different vampire clans with unique physical mutations. Too bad Square canceled it.

 

[Jenkem]

The waiting will make the eventual reveal all the more glorious. Hang in there, lads!

 

[Semiurge]

A work of art incoming.

 

[Cael]

A work of art incoming.

They are bringing in the Addams Family now?

 

[Semiurge]

A work of art incoming.

They are bringing in the Addams Family now?

It's ms. Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira.

 

[negator2vc]

For those (myself included) that have lost hope about the bloodlines 2
and hope that it's cancelled instead of whatever woke infested game they plan to release

here is a quite good fan remake of the original bloodlines as an 2d adventure game
https://emontero.itch.io/bloodlust-santa-monica

and here is the same game under development but as 2d turn based rpg
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=70899.0

 

[RaggleFraggle]

For those (myself included) that have lost hope about the bloodlines 2
and hope that it's cancelled instead of whatever woke infested game they plan to release

here is a quite good fan remake of the original bloodlines as an 2d adventure game
https://emontero.itch.io/bloodlust-santa-monica

and here is the same game under development but as 2d turn based rpg
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=70899.0

Last I heard, the rpg has been canceled by the author in order to refocus on the adventure version.

Also, I don’t want to play a ripoff/remake/whatever of Bloodlines. I already own that game. Make new games with original plots and IPs. Please.

 

[Outlander]

They should hire Wesp5 as Game Director to make it.

 

[Sykar]

Oh so you would be fine waiting until 2104 for it to release?