'Bloodlines 3 [Will be] Done by Someone Else:' Paradox Is Done With Vampire: The Masquerade After Bloodlines 2 Debacle

ign.com:

Paradox Interactive seems ready to be done with Vampire: The Masquerade — and with RPGs in general — with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja telling PC Gamer that any potential Bloodlines 3 will be "done by someone else."

Lilja opened up about Bloodlines 2's development in the course of an unusually frank interview, itself part of a media tour seemingly designed to show how Paradox was being reset after a string of problematic releases and reports of a toxic work culture. Paradox's overarching message? It's sticking to what it's good at, and what it's good at is strategy games.

"It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game," Lilja told PC Gamer. "So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the license from us. I would say it's the sort of strategic way this would work. So it's still an outlier from what we're supposed to do, we don't know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it."

In short, Lilja considers Bloodlines a "dead end" for the company regardless of how well it does, which is made more awkward by the fact that Paradox Interactive owns Vampire: The Masquerade creator White Wolf Publishing. Lilja didn't talk about Paradox's plans for White Wolf, but it seems as if any future Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines RPGs will be licensed out to other developers.

"I think some studios do strategic investments, long term things, because they feel that the cost of not doing it is too high. But, I mean, I think it's fairly clear, at least to me, and I think to you, even in the best of cases, Bloodlines does not have a super long shelf life. That's not the way these games behave. You have an influx of players, there's a bit of word of mouth, and they have a high peak, and then they trail off. And it's not the type of gameplay that develops over time that much. So I think that's part of why these types of games are not really that attractive to us."

Lilja's comments come amid the still-ongoing