Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will have a voiced main character: 'it draws the player in that much more', says the game's ex-Bioware narrative designer
Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 (which I'll be calling 'Bloodlines 2' from here on) has had a troubled history. Its initial developer, Hardsuit Labs, fired both the game's lead writer Brian Mitsoda and creative director Ka’ai Cluney in 2020. A senior narrative designer, Cara Ellison, left later that year. Then Hardsuit Labs got booted from the project entirely in 2021.
It wasn't until September 2023 that its new developer stepped from the shadows: The Chinese Room (TCR). To describe Bloodlines 2 as 'out of their comfort' zone is an understatement. TCR has previously made narrative-heavy games like Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and Little Orpheus. An encore to a cult-classic action RPG is a bat out of left field.
I had the pleasure of speaking to TCR's Arone Le Bray, the game's narrative designer, about the project, and particularly about the game's newly announced protagonist Phyre (pronounced «Fire»). They'll be fully voiced in the vein of RPG protagonists like Mass Effect's Commander Shepard, Cyberpunk 2077's V, or the Inquisitor from Dragon Age Inquisition. That's a major departure from the first game, which leant on a more Dragon Age: Origins-meets-Bethesda style of doing things.
«Ultimately,» says Bray, the choice «was down to, 'How immersive do we want the story to feel?' What having a voiced protagonist and a slightly more established character gets us is, we can go deeper into the customization, and deeper into experiencing [Phyre's] role by doing that—as opposed to trying to go more broad and encompassing all the various possibilities»
The idea of a character limited in thematic scope, with just four of Vampire: The Masquerade (VTM)'s clans to choose from (down
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