Delterius
Arcane
It was more along the lines of White Wolf and the HS/Mitsoda people working together to create mechanics and game concepts, both for Bloodlines 2 and Vampire. From what I understand the idea of Resonance - that the blood of people carrying certain emotions go on to affect the Vampire, includig mechanically - was developed for BL2 and V5.Wasn't the thin blood protagonist meant to promote their new ruleset? It could have been an interesting choice to have a weak player character with the need to actively use the blood alchemy system (harvesting resonance from humans to get limited use disciplines).
The way I see it, the problem with the thinblood concept is two fold. First, one of marketing, ie the idea that playing a thinblood is merely playing a vampire except shittier. That's not really true. But wax about lore all you want - it won't matter. It's in the name, you're a creature whose blood is thin.
Then you might ask, what if we lean on it? What if we promise the strange and unearthed powers of thinblood arcana, as well as the experience of being caitiff in ruthless camarilla society? That brings us to the second problem: the devs didn't really want to lean on it. One
I have no reason to believe the same dynamics isn't happening with TCR. The screenrant interview (bear with me, I'm reading tea leaves here) is interesting, in that Alex Skidmore (TCR) takes the lead with almost every question, except the one which talks about the new game's premise, where Sean Greaney (WoD-PDX) starts answering:
I'm not sure how much you can reveal right now in general, but I would love to hear some about the different powers that players will be able to have in this game. I know you start as a Thin Blood, so you're not quite as powerful, but I assume that doesn't last forever.
Sean Greaney: We can talk a little bit about this. So first of all, we've actually taken the other approach in this project - you don't start as a Thin Blood, you start as an elder vampire, and this is the first time that we're doing this in a World of Darkness product. I'll leave that for Alex to talk about. On the powers front, we won't speak specifically because that's the next thing we're going to go into; we're going to start talking about the playable clans, and then eventually the player experience of those and revealing those sorts of things.
But a lot of this is about claiming the vampire fantasy that Alex can also speak to that is a bit undefined in video games, I would say, very well defined, obviously, in film and television. But there's an open fantasy that I think the team is doing a really, really good job approaching and defining. And I've never felt quite as much like a vampire as I do in this game.
Alex Skidmore: Yeah, thank you, Sean. For clarity, when The Chinese Room started on the project in 2021, we're building our own vision; it's our own narrative, our own sort of world and gameplay and everything. So things you would have heard before, now it's a new thing. As I said, instead of starting as Thin Blood, it's a game about being an elder and exploring that side of VTM. Because elders are quite rare, so that for us in a really, really cool thing to do, and also a nice contrast to the first Bloodlines game as well, where literally the start of the game was the scream as you became a vampire. And we went, "Okay, that's kind of done. What if we did an elder vampire?" So very much our own vision, if that makes sense.
Odds are that there's a mutual collaboration in place, and it's hard to say which side had the most pull. It does seem like both the TCR and the WoD people are taking ownership of the premise behind BL2. To what extent it's a matter of professionalism - we've been hired to do this job, let's do it - we might never know. One thing might be certain though. Without a Mitsoda, TCR isn't married to any sort of vision. Which can be both a good and a bad thing. It's down to wether the developers can grow to become interested in the project. RPG developers have done merc jobs before that turned out well.
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