You know how in the early 2000s, a lot of PC games got sequels on consoles, and players complained that they removed complexity from the game to make it work on consoles? This feels like that. I don’t see anything here about quests, skills, character sheets, or different ways to solve problems depending on your character’s strengths. The skill point system from the previous game is replaced with a more commonplace XP system, judging from the UI; note that I’ve never played the pen and paper game, so maybe this is closer to what the pen and paper game is or has become in the past 20 years, for all I know, but I really appreciated how Bloodlines 1 did it.
I knew back when this game was handed to The Chinese Room that something like this was possible, but I thought surely they’d respect the reputation of the project they’re working on and try to do it justice. Surely they’d attempt to make an actual sequel to that game, even if they aren’t good at it. It doesn’t appear so.
All the flexibility of Bloodlines 1 is gone, it seems like we are stuck with a single character who could be from just a stingy roster of four clans. It’s reported that Phyre’s gender can be player chosen, I read an article about it. The writing at least seems interesting, but they only showed a small portion of the opening; The quality of the narrative and dialogue could obviously degrade as a player gets further into it. I’m honestly disappointed that The Chinese Room was even given this game to develop, they didn’t seem the type to be able to pull a game of this scale off. Especially with the rich history of this iconic World of Darkness tabletop game! If anything, Larian Studios would’ve been a better choice. Obsidian Studios (give them an awesome budget and some additional technical help, they’d make a wonderful game too).
I’ll naturally withhold full judgement or dismissive disinterest upon reading some reviews from Gaming Sites that I trust.