Vampire: The Masquerade® - Bloodlines™ 2 [2020]

[Goering]

oooo süper hikaye, JETPA tarzı - FADILSTYLE

[Bone]

sayfa kaybolursa diye buraya yazalım direk:

 

Spoiler

 

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Vampire Role-playing Game Challenges: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 began at the end of 2019, when the release date of the project was postponed for the first time. Then there was another postponement, then it became known about the delay for an indefinite time, the game lost the creative director and lead screenwriter (the latter was fired without explanation), and in February 2021 it became known about changing the developer studio-Hardsuit Labs, which launched the project, was suspended from production.

All this time, the situation around the company was hidden behind an unusual veil of secrecy for our time. Angry anonymous developers didn't write smashing texts on Reddit, insiders threw up their hands, and the ubiquitous Jason Schreier was busy exposing CD Projekt RED and the situation in BioWare.

The only one who spoke about the development of Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 is Chris Avellone, co-founder of Obsidian Entertainment, who was involved in the creation of the game as a freelance screenwriter. According to Chris, he was personally present during the "pitching" of the project, the concept of which was presented to Paradox publishing house by Hardsuit Labs creative director Kai Clooney and lead screenwriter Brian Mitsoda, the author of the original Bloodlines plot.

Where did Hardsuit Labs come from?

Until a few years ago, such a company did not exist. But there was Zombie Studios, whose employees made a fairly successful network shooter Blacklight: Retribution. At some point, the founders of the company decided to "retire", took the money they earned and left the game and the company to their former subordinates.

Andy Kipling (who became CEO) and Michael Ety (the new vice president of the company) took over the leadership. Kipling was the production director at Zombie Studio, and Ety was the director of the studio itself-most likely involved in business and organizational matters.

It was then that Kai Clooney had the idea to repurpose and start working on a dream project. Clooney was a hired employee at Zombie Studios and was not at the top of the management team, taking the position of lead designer. He was also friends with Brian Mitsoda for many years. It was to him that Clooney turned with a proposal to prepare a presentation of the game.

Apparently, Clooney's connections, the ready-made concept of the project, the involvement of Avellone and the approval of Paradox helped Kai climb the career ladder — he was appointed creative director of a reformatted studio called Hardsuit Labs. Most likely, the sign change was made in order to distance itself as much as possible from Zombie Studios and its only project — a shareware multiplayer shooter.

It is also worth noting that some Obsidian Entertainment veterans have already worked at Zombie Studios, and after the company's relaunch, several more people who had a hand in the cult RPGs of the noughties joined its ranks.

Production

About the early stages of working on Vampire: Little is known about The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2, but we were able to find out exactly when the project received the green light. We reached out to Chris Avellone, and he kindly revealed the details of the presentation he wrote about in his article.

"This happened in February 2016, around the same time that the D. I. C. E. event was held (from February 16 to 18-approx.). I wasn't present at the show itself, but I believe that's why Paradox representatives were in the United States at that time."

According to Avellone, the meeting was attended by Mitsoda, Clooney and Kipling, and Paradox's own Frederick Wester, then the publisher's CEO, participated on the side. In early September 2021, it became known that he was returning to his post after the company decided to say goodbye to Ebba Ljungerud, who replaced him in 2018.

In his letter, Chris notes that at that time he was not officially associated with the project and worked for free — he helped prepare the "pitch" and personally arrived in Las Vegas in the hope that the game would be given the green light.

The meeting was marked by success: the game received funding, and Avellone himself signed a contract with the studio, which expired in mid-2018. However, the sequel to the cult RPG is far from the only thing that Harbsuit Labs has been doing all this time.

Having issued a new sign to be associated in the press and among players with only one big name, the studio all this time provided outsourcing services, without advertising it. Only after the scandal and suspension from development, having lost the main source of funding, the company updated its website to attract new customers with its experience, which, as it turned out, is very extensive.

What did Hardsuit Labs do at the same time as producing an ambitious RPG? Below you can see some of the projects that the studio helped implement, as well as their release dates and a list of tasks completed by the company's employees.

• Bioshock: Infinite (The Collection) — September 13, 2016. Engineering support, optimization, and a port on the console.
• Gears of War 4-October 11, 2016. Engineering support.
• Gigantic — July 20, 2017. Engineering support and optimization.
• Killing Floor: Incursion — August 16, 2017. Engineering support, optimization, and management system in VR.
• A Hat in Time — October 5, 2017. Porting to the console.
• State of Decay 2-May 18, 2018. Game design and optimization.
• Fortnite Creative — December 13, 2018. Separate mode for Fortnite. Hardsuit Labs worked on its design and implementation in the game.
• The Bard's Tale IV — August 27, 2019. Engineering support, port on the console, technical support.
• Battle Breakers — November 13, 2019. Support during alpha and beta testing, support at the game launch.
• Crash Bandicoot 4-September 16, 2020. The studio helped with the design, made a port to one of the consoles and a version for PC and Battle.net.
• Chivalry II — April 23, 2021. Design assistance.

Thus, it is safe to say that during the development of Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 studio very seriously sprayed their forces, doing several third-party projects at the same time. Developers are especially adept at creating ports and engineering solutions.

Bloodlines 2 was moved three times, and all this time Hardsuit Labs hired new employees, including those who absolutely had nothing to do with outsourcing ports of other people's games — graphics programmers, animators, concept artists. It is worth emphasizing this aspect: six months before the expected release date, the studio was looking for employees to implement content that should be ready at this stage. This means that the studio was well aware that they would not make it in time.

From the outside, it may seem that the studio's management "mastered" the budget provided by Paradox Interactive in order to hire more employees who did work unrelated to Bloodlines 2. Gearbox followed approximately the same scheme during the development of Aliens: Colonial Marines — the head of the company, Randy Pitchford, secretly hired a relatively inexpensive outsourcer studio to create the game, and invested the money received from the publisher in Borderlands, the rights to which, unlike the Alien franchise,, owned it myself.

Staff turnover... and shortage?

However, the accusations of implementing such a scheme sound unfounded and unsubstantiated, and therefore we will turn to those who directly participated in the development of Hardsuit Labs projects — its employees. In the anonymous GlassDoor service, the company has only 24 reviews, but this was enough to form an opinion about what is happening inside the studio.

Almost all negative reviews mention the lack of transparency of processes and endless lies on the part of management. The studio has a lot of projects, and employees are constantly being transferred from one to another. Hardsuit Labs bosses convince employees of stability and promise that no cuts will follow, after which they fire developers who have barely finished the next outsourced project in one day.

This is a very unpleasant situation. On the one hand, the studio employs a large number of specialists, but they are hired for certain purposes, and then, after promises of stability and further cooperation, they are fired as soon as they finish their part of the work.

Provided Paradox spending budget for the recruitment of technical specialistswho will deal with the outsourcing of code and porting, the Studio had a constant shortage of personnel working on Bloodlines 2, but in other areas, for example, hire professionals for facial animations already once showed trailers and presented the first gameplay of the game, there is clear unprepared for the imminent release — hence the postponement of the withdrawal.

Former employees say that salaries in the studio are on average lower than not only the market, but also other companies in Seattle, which should be compensated by involvement in a high-profile project. However, most employees are offered to work on other people's games. Some point out certain advantages in this (you can add several notable projects to your portfolio in a year or two at once), while others talk about chaos and confusion that interfere with stability.

Instead of working on their most important project, Hardsuit Labs has been grabbing everything — most likely, solely for the sake of earning money, since outsourcing has nothing to do with creative ambitions or the implementation of their ideas. One former employee notes that some of the right people were constantly being transferred from one project to another, and this seriously hindered progress.

What are we doing in the shadows

On January 11, 2018, a press release on Paradox Interactive's official website revealed that the publisher had acquired a 33% stake in Hardsuit Labs. At the moment, the page has been removed, and this is not surprising, given the breakdown in relations between the two companies.

We have already found out that the studio simply did not use all the resources available to it to work on its own game, preferring to get financial returns in the short term, which is why Vampire suffered in the first place: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2. But it is important to note the stealth with which some of these operations were performed.

The fact that Hardsuit Labs is actively engaged in outsourcing was not particularly advertised — before the loss of the contract with Paradox, the official website did not mention the studio's participation in the production of a number of third-party projects that appeared there only after the breakup of relations. You can easily check this information by accessing the web archive. It seems that the studio did not want anyone (for example, a partner in the face of Paradox) to know about the scale of outsourcing.

For example, in September 2020, Crash Bandicoot 4 was released, for which Hardsuit Labs did a lot of work, preparing at least two ports (on the PC and on one of the consoles). But before the breakup of relations with Paradox, there was no mention of the project on the official website, although this is probably the most ambitious work of the studio.

Another example is The Bard's Tale IV released in August 2019 by inXile Entertainment, for which the developers also made console ports. The game did not appear in the list of works of the studio until the spring of 2021, but Battle Breakers, released in November 2019, was immediately included in the list of projects.

Thus, we can conclude that Hardsuit Labs promptly updated the lists of projects that it had a hand in outsourcing, but purposefully kept silent about some of them. Most often — about the most ambitious ones, which were spent the most resources. Their full list surfaced on the official website only after the break with Paradox and the loss of funding, when the importance of the portfolio became critical for doing business.

Apparently, the studio deliberately concealed the fact of active outsourcing-probably primarily from Paradox, which might not like this dispersion of partner resources.

One of the employees in his review on GlassDoor notes that managers understood from the very beginning that the studio could not pull a game of the Bloodlines 2 level. According to him, this is why the bosses recruited as much work as possible on outsourcing, which helped to stay afloat when the project collapsed and the game was transferred to other developers.

***

Based on easily accessible information, reviews from former employees, and information from the official website, you can draw a disappointing picture of what Hardsuit Labs has actually been doing all these years. Having enlisted the support of Paradox Interactive and received a stable influx of finances, the studio did not focus on developing Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, and began frantically raking in all possible outsourced projects. To do this, she had to hire mostly technical specialists working on porting — after completing their tasks, they could not be useful in developing a vampire RPG, and therefore they were disposed of in a timely manner. The budget deficit, which was misspent to support several teams working on outsourcing projects at once, led to a prolonged production of Bloodlines 2, three postponements of the release date, and a subsequent break in relations with the publisher that finances the game. The latter probably decided to closely monitor the activities of its partners after repeated deadlines were missed.

It is unlikely that the sequel to the cult vampire RPG has any creative problems. The most likely version of the change of developers is the publisher's banal distrust of the Hardsuit Labs studio and the desire to transfer the game to a team that can finish what it started.

As for the dismissal of creative director Kai Clooney and lead screenwriter Brian Mitsoda, the developers were most likely made scapegoats — Hardsuit Labs used them as a lightning rod in order to avoid reputational losses that could scare off new customers. After all, outsourcing is their main business.

 

 

[Norak]

oyunun yapimini sunlara vermisler deniyor soylenti:

https://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/

[Bone]

biri bitirsin artık bu oyunu ya.

[arcane]

bence o firma talip olmustur. su asamada paradox'un bloodlines icin yangindan kurtarilan mal otesinde bir deger bicmesi akla yatmiyor. umarim chineseroom'un baskasinin zanaatine salca olup vasatlik servis ettigi ikinci proje olmaz. her halukarda vampir gun yuzu gorecek. ba-dum-tss

[kizillelma]

Paradox offers refunds for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 pre-orders, updating editions

Decoffinated.

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/paradox-offers-refunds-for-vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-pre-orders-updating-editions

[Norak]

hangi edisyonda ne vardi ki lan diyorsaniz:

https://www.collectabox.com/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-all-editions-detailed/

icinde hersey olan blood moon 129tl idi biz aldigimizda, hani olurda birgun biterde cikarsa, o fiyatin 3-4 kati olacagi garanti.

Haziran 7, 2023 Norak tarafından düzenlendi

[deadwoll]

Oyunlar cikmadan dlc’leri season pass’leri, expleri falan belli. Cok uzucu geliyor bana. Sagma plani bu kadar da detayli aciklanmaz sjfk

[Sam]

valla ben epic'ten verdiğim 30₺'yi refund etmemiştim, paşa paşa verecekler standart sürümümü.

[ShadowFury]

129 TL'lik versiyona season pass dahilse iyi ya.

hayatta refundlamam ben bunu, dursun bi kenarda. artık 1000 lira filan oldu deluxe editionlar.

[razzRaziel]

Norak, 08.06.2023 01:38 tarihinde dedi ki:

genelde şunu yapan oyun patlak çıkıyo ama hadi bakalım

[Norak]

eski hardsuit labs calisani video yayinlamis gameplay: 16dk

 

[arcane]

bir video daha var galiba fakat ikisi de private olmus. sanirim bunlar 2019'dan?

eylul'de bir seyler gosterecegiz demisler. hangi studyo oldugunu da o zaman paylasacaklarmis ki bu red flag degilse nedir bilmiyorum. taseron tier bir studyoya eldekilerden ne yapabiliyorsaniz yapin seklinde. 90 liradan almis olsam refund etmem tabii.

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-juneupdate

birkac ekran goruntusu paylasmis paradox




 

Haziran 9, 2023 arcane tarafından düzenlendi

[axedice]

90 bile değil ya epik sağolsun 20 lira gibi saçma sapan bi paraya almıştık sırf o yüzden refund etmedim uğraştığım dakikalara değmez diye asd.

Emo saçlım parmaksız eldivenlimi projeden uzaklaştırdıklarından beri bişey beklediğimiz yok hatta keyifle takip ediyoruz yangını. Yalnız projeye yakın isimlere bakıyorum işte wesp mesela şey demiş

Alıntı

The videos only deepen my suspicion that some polititcal issues were the reason why the old team was fired.

Hardsuitin hiç bişey yapamadığını düşünüyorduk ama şimdi bu kaldırılan vidyolara bakınca kötü de görünse baya alpha seviyesinde elle tutulabilir bi gameplay ve level design var ortada. Projenin büyüklüğünün altında kalıp komple deliverlayamadılar gibi bi durum yok sanki ortada.

[Norak]

paradoxun apar topar gorevden aldigi kadin bir ceo vardi o ara, hepsi onun sjwligi buyuk ihtimal 

Haziran 9, 2023 Norak tarafından düzenlendi

[Dragonutopia]

steamde collectors ed. 125 tl aldım diye hatırlıyorum, sonra sıctılar refund basmıstık. Paradox düzgün yapabilir bunu 

[Norak]

[Bone]

Norak, 22.08.2023 19:46 tarihinde dedi ki:

 

 

[fenris]

Çıkmasın bu saatten sonra. Berbat bişey olur...

[Norak]

 

[Xenocide]

keşke refund etmeseydik dedirtecek galiba

 

 

gerçi sanırım otomatik refund olmuştu. 

Eylül 2, 2023 Xenocide tarafından düzenlendi

[Sam]

yok benim epic library’de duruyor hala. o 30 lira şarap gibi yıllanacak umarım. 

[Komutan]

Benim de duruyor da oyun tekrar ön siparişe açılınca iptal edebilirler. Başka bir oyun için öyle bir şey yapılmıştı diye hatırlıyorum.

[Komutan]

https://www.pcgamer.com/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-has-been-quietly-rebuilt-by-dear-esther-developer-the-chinese-room-with-different-gameplay-mechanics-and-rpg-systems/

"The Chinese Room has kept Bloodlines 2's initial planned setting of Seattle, and while Greaney noted that they "have been able to reuse a significant amount of art and level design" from Hardsuit's project, Skidmore was quick to clarify that The Chinese Room is using "a new code base with different gameplay mechanics and RPG systems." Bloodlines 2 is also still set at yuletide, but is now in the grips of a historic snowstorm, and Bloodlines 2's new trailer and concept art remind me of the OG Max Payne's grimy, modern NYC Ragnarök.

We're also getting a completely different sort of protagonist than Hardsuit Labs had planned. Bloodlines 2 was to originally star a recently-turned "thin blood" vampire. In World of Darkness rules, older is better, and the legendary bloodlines of Antediluvian vampire patriarchs have diluted over the millennia⁠—they just don't make new-gen vamps like they used to.

"We don't want it to be just a sort of poor homage or pastiche of Bloodlines 1. We want it to be its own thing," Skidmore explained. "We're not doing what Bloodlines 1 did, which is a traditional RPG game start: the very first day you're a vampire. The actual character you are has been a vampire for quite a while. And that was to create something different from Bloodlines to give a different experience."

Bloodlines 2 will now star an "Elder" vampire awoken from an indeterminate torpor (read: long-ass vampire nap), and going off old Vampire: The Masquerade rules, you get Elder status after 300 years of undeath. Since Bloodlines 1's days, a joint Vatican-global intelligence "Second Inquisition" has hit the vampire underground hard, culling its ranks. An ancient, supremely powerful big boy vampire waking up in Seattle is a bit of an event.

Skidmore seems keen on striking a balance between having this ancient be an established character, and letting the player sketch out their vamp of choice: "You have enough that you can fill in the character a bit as you go and roleplay, but they're also an established thing that you understand as aspirational."

[Sam]

thin-blood yerine elder olma fikrini çok beğendim, gaz verdi bana doğrusu. hadi bakalım.