Good evening Kindred,

This week, we have another recap diary where The Chinese Room Community Manager Josh Matthews meets Ian Thomas, Sarah Longthorne, and Arone Le Bray. In this recap, Sarah recaps parts of her dev diary and is joined by Ian Thomas and Arone Le Bray to go into more depth on the main character, as well as answering a few fan questions relating to the main character and the dev diary on Narrative Atmosphere and Themes.

Render of female Phyre

What's Next​

Tomorrow, the 30th of November, we are revealing the third playable clan at the PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted, and we’ll be back with a new dev diary in two weeks. This time, it will be Andrea Sancio, Associate Technical Director, sharing his thoughts on how TCR is working with Unreal 5. After the holidays, we’ll return with more dev diaries in January.

 

[Pyoro]

I thought this was the best material released so far. It didn't feel so completely detached and boiled down to a few bare marketing bulletin points, more like a real conversation. Not that it was a trove of new insight (it's a recap after all), but just the way things were communicated felt a bit more approachable.

Main things for me are -
- okay, it's not really anything, but this is the first time as far as I remember that anyone within the dev commentary/dev diaries etc. actually acknowledges Bloodlines 1 exists and that this is a sequel to it and talks a bit about it (even if Mass Effect had to be brought up. Again). Good. Does kinda makes me feel better that this has now actually been established, even if obviously the devs would have been aware of that either way. But, really, everything should have been talked about in relation to Bloodlines 1.

- I remember that one of the "arguments" for playing an elder was about how it'll feel different from playing a fledgling (now that I'm thinking about it surely BL 1 must have been mentioned in that context? Well...) and that as things got revealed it felt to me more and more like it'd play out exactly the same. Well, a big chunk of this recap reiterated how you are a pawn in other characters' plans, your powers locked away, etc. So, yeah. I'd say I was right about that. It's going to play out and feel exactly the same as in every other RPG.

- I previously went on about how I'd find writing an elder as a player character to be very tricky. First of all, the community question asked about it, and don't think for a second that it wasn't noticeable how nothing was said on the question of social attitudes ^^ ... but that's not the main point; more the aspect that's explained by Fire being a "quick learner" so things will come up once and then not much again. Which, again, just makes me skeptical this will go beyond some relatively shallow-ish clichés in the beginning and then ignored for the rest of the game. But as I said then, the alternative, going on and on and on about whatever it is that's not understood would also just be tedious ... I really don't know.
Vampire Dairies is brought up when talking about it. That's a 600 pages book (that particular one; the pseudo-autobiography). This is a game. Very different medium.
This isn't meant to suggest anything either way, I'm just saying that so far nothing has made me go "this is why I'm convinced it'll work for Bloodlines 2". Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Maybe it won't matter since we're too distracted by something else. I do think the "fish out of water (time)" aspect could be one of the more interesting aspects of the narration; I'm just not sure it can realistically deliver much there.

- Fabian keeps sounding like having a Twitter thread in your head. The more I hear about his suggested role the more I worry. Really worry.

- Writer says "Phyre" and starts singing/laughing. It's like those 5439 comments about how stupid the name is aren't even necessary as clearly at least one person in the dev team noticed. And by that reaction everyone else can't not have noticed. Yet it's still Fire, Pyre, Vamphire, on and on and on. The biggest mystery of our time and undoubtedly about this game is who on earth picked that name and why was it not ditched two minutes later ...

- The roleplaying thing about making choices not as necessarily as defining your character but as the situation demands. Interesting conundrum, that. Because in reality of course people are horribly inconsistent either way, and do also constantly lie, change their tone, dress up some of their comments more nicely for some than for others, and so on. But in storytelling, when creating a narration, that very quickly becomes indistinguishable from just plain inconsistent writing and characterization. Check how often even the antagonists lie in fiction - barely ever. It just doesn't work like in reality.
When roleplaying, this is even more complex, because in a game that roleplaying will inevitably clash with making the optimal decision (ie what gets me the most content, the best quest reward, whatever). I worry about that the waters get so muddied here you'll end up in exactly that situation where you feel like your character isn't anything anymore as the game will nudge you towards an approach that's too wide, making your character too unclear somewhere along the whole lying and pretending and whatnot path. We'll see. Maybe not; far too early to say, and honestly, talking about that when the choices shown so far were Fallout-4-idiocy is not very convincing in the first place; but assuming that that's fixed and dialogues and choices do get better and more complex, then I do wonder whether it'll end up too loose to really be anything. But also something that could potentially be interesting; we'll see.

 

[Prussian Havoc]

Thank you for the update, Dev Diary Recap and of course confirmation that tomorrow will see another Clan revealed! : )

Have a great day, and ever better tomorrows. :bow:

 

[LeandroB]

The more you guys present about this game, the less appealing it gets... It is a shame, but i'm done with it... i had my hopes up, but i guess thats my fault. Good luck with it, i hope i'm wrong.

 

[SarevokAnchev23]

The game looks boring. Why should I play as a preset protagonist? Especially with such a poor appearance? As I understand it, we shouldn’t even hope for characters like Therese and Jeanette, right?

 

[RagnarokCzD]

- I remember that one of the "arguments" for playing an elder was about how it'll feel different from playing a fledgling (now that I'm thinking about it surely BL 1 must have been mentioned in that context? Well...) and that as things got revealed it felt to me more and more like it'd play out exactly the same. Well, a big chunk of this recap reiterated how you are a pawn in other characters' plans, your powers locked away, etc. So, yeah. I'd say I was right about that. It's going to play out and feel exactly the same as in every other RPG.

Each time someone say it, im so happy im not the only one feeling this way.

And yes ... to be perfectly honest, it just feels like somebody had narrative problems with how strong our character "become" ... and so they fixed it.
Sadly, it created other problems in the process. :-/

- I previously went on about how I'd find writing an elder as a player character to be very tricky.

Its weird start point to be sure ...

Imagine yourself as a new player (and every studio should think about new players, communitites that dont get fresh blood regulary have ugly tendendy to dry out):

You have all context for modern world ... but no context about how Vampires set there ...
> Perfect synergy for Fledgling.
But if you play an Elder ... awakened from Torpor even worse ...
Your character have no context about world, but should know everything about setting. :-/

I mean ... its not impossible to deal with it.
Someone would call it challenging ... i would say its unnecessary obstacle. :-/

The biggest mystery of our time and undoubtedly about this game is who on earth picked that name and why was it not ditched two minutes later ...

Agreed 100% ...
I was hoping this question will be answered, concidering that they were talking about "community questions" in this video and this was really big one. :-/

My bet? The song is how that name was picked ...
Someone had it stuck in their head, so they use it (at least, thats how i named my last DnD character, and yes now i regret it too. xD ) ... so they decided to use it as placeholder, but it was never replaced.