This week marks the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, the game that probably influenced the modern triple-A landscape more than any other, and whose fans remain the most passionate and devoted despite knowing deep down that it will never, ever get a sequel.
It also means that this week marks the 20th anniversary of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, a game that flopped so hard it caused its studio to shut down (in the era before that it was monthly) and a game that is get a sequel, but from everything we've seen so far, it probably won't be the sequel that VTBM* fans really want.
*There are dozens of us… DOZENS!
We've seen this story several times over the years. A would-be hit is overshadowed by an even bigger hit that makes the first one fall into semi-oblivion and become a cult classic loved only by modders, video essayists and those with an unhealthy relationship with their childhood (the only finger I point is in the mirror).
Titanfall 2 was crushed between Battlefield 1 and Infinite Warfare. Mad Max came out on the same day as Metal Gear Solid 5. Alan Wake – though recently redeemed by the sheer force of Remedy's will to produce the excellent Alan Wake 2 – came out the same week as Red Dead Redemption. All critical hits and commercial failures, mostly due to their unfortunately timed release windows.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is different from the others in that the initial critical response was pretty poor. A very overworked studio with unrealistic deadlines (another reason why Bloodlines was ahead of its time), the game was released in an unfinished state and full of graphical flaws, unfinished missions and bugs, many of which were only fixed in 2019 A fan patch came to fill in the blanks . Bloodlines was a bit of a mess at launch, but if fans were willing to go back and fix it themselves 15 years later – a project that continued to receive updates until the end of 2023 – there must be something special.
There's no doubt that Half-Life 2 ushered in a new generation of narrative, highly cinematic, triple-A games, but I can't help but wonder how Bloodlines might have impacted the industry had circumstances been different.
Perhaps a more open release calendar would mean better initial sales for Bloodlines, giving Troica the lane it needed to survive long enough to fix it. Maybe then it would be a classic immersive sim that inspired the industry as much as Half-Life 2, rather than a cult classic entry in a genre that historically never sells well anyway.
Bloodlines' combination of Thief-style exploration and Fallout-style role-playing remains unreplicated. There are games with elements of Bloodlines, but nothing else quite like it.
We will never know what could have been
It's all speculation, but one thing that seems certain is that if the original was successful, we wouldn't be getting a sequel that bears so little resemblance to it. Vampire: The Masquerade is an older tabletop IP and Bloodlines is a household name, so it's no surprise that the increasingly risk-averse gaming industry would like to take advantage of the title, but will this game stay true to the original and aim to please its fans? (dozens!) with a faithful continuation of lego?
With developer The Chinese Room refusing to even utter the term immersive sim, it seems the answer is no. It might be a great game, but it probably won't be a great sequel to Bloodlines – certainly not the sequel we would have gotten if Bloodlines had been a hit.
Of course, we can't blame Half-Life 2. But it's interesting to think about how things might have been different for Bloodlines if Half-Life 2 hadn't changed PC gaming forever in November 2004. Halo 2 launched two weeks earlier and World of Warcraft a week after, so maybe we should have been just thankful that anyone remembers Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines at all.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
