Fans of the popular role-playing system Vampire: The Masquerade have long been waiting for the continuation of the legendary game Bloodlines. However, that has been postponed far into the future. Instead, fans will soon get a Battle Royale game called Bloodhunt. However, this is not the game that fans probably wished for.
What kind of game is Bloodhunt? At the E3 2021, a new Vampire: The Masquerade game was also presented. This setting builds on the popular Pen&Paper RPG of the same name and was successfully implemented as a game back in 2004 with the legendary Bloodlines. To this day, the game continues to receive attention from numerous modders and fans. Since then, fans have eagerly awaited the successor, Bloodlines II.
However, the new Vampire game called Bloodhunt is not a role-playing game, but a free-to-play Battle Royale game. In it, various vampires fight on and above the streets of Prague until only one bloodsucker remains or the sun rises and turns them all to dust.
In the game, you choose an avatar from the typical vampire clans, including clans like the brutal Brujah, the ghastly Nosferatu, or the magically powerful Tremere.
Then, it’s all about killing each other using vampire powers, blades, and firearms, while mysterious agents from an organization called “The Entity” hunt you down. During the skirmish, you can feed on civilians, but you also have to be careful that they don’t notice you. In July 2021, a closed alpha will begin; you can sign up on the homepage of Vampire: Bloodhunt.
Fans sigh ironically: “Exactly the game every Vampire: The Masquerade fan wanted”
How is the game received by the community? Looking at fans’ reactions on platforms like reddit, the new game is not well-received by the target audience of Vampire fans:
- Secret_Maize2109: “Sigh, exactly the game every Vampire: The Masquerade fan wanted.”
- NoKYo16: “Can we not have a proper VtM RPG video game instead? Does everything have to be so focused on combat?”
- NoKYo16: “I see where this is going, and it’s sad. This started with the canceled VtM project by CCP and continues to this thing here. This is just cursed!”
- AFaultyUnit: “YES exactly, people were asking for another hastily thrown together Battle Royale.”
- Vegetable_Dirt: “Wow, I joked about this recently. They really did it. I wonder how the original developers feel about this.”
- FPSrad: “That was by far the “cringiest” announcement yesterday. Seriously, who is this for?”
What are the reasons for the rejection? Vampire: The Masquerade established a new trend among Pen&Paper RPGs in the 90s. Before that, such games primarily focused on descending into dungeons and killing monsters using complex rules and looting.
With Vampire and its spin-offs, which also included werewolves, mages, and fae, it was about experiencing personal horror and simulating a vampire’s unlife. It was about ancient mysteries of vampires, power struggles among vampire clans and factions, and coming to terms with one’s own existence as a bloodsucker.
Fights did occur, but players tried to solve their problems through intrigue and clever maneuvers. A massacre of the scale seen in the trailers for Bloodhunt does not fit the setting at all and genuinely seems like a cheap exploitation of the Vampire license for arbitrary games to many fans.
What happened to the other Vampire game? The frustration of Vampire fans is further fueled by the fact that there is otherwise nothing from the setting. Those who don’t want to play the old Bloodlines for the umpteenth time will have to wait a long time for new content, as the successor to Bloodlines has been postponed to 2022 after massive layoffs among the developers, and the Vampire MMORPG by the Eve developers CCP was buried a long time ago.
