Good evening Kindred, in our recent Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 stream, we shared exciting news about the game and our first extended gameplay trailer. On the stream, The Chinese Room (TCR) Community Manager Josh Matthews was joined by Alex Skidmore, Project Creative Director at TCR, who shared insights on the game, the narrative background, and how the game plays. If you missed the stream, you can check it out below. The gameplay stream contains several spoilers, and if you wish to avoid them, there are sections marked in the video timeline, or you can watch the trailer version of the gameplay video, which does not contain any major spoilers.

Matthews and Skidmore highlight an early-game mission, discussing why the player character, Phyre, infiltrates an abandoned warehouse to uncover clues about the mysterious mark on their hand. Players must choose their actions wisely, whether confronting the court's secret keeper like Willem or meeting unruly ghouls and illusions that cloud the environment. Acting as "The Sheriff" of the Court, Phyre's choices impact how the world perceives them and bring them closer to uncovering Seattle's secrets.

At PAX West, Paradox Interactive revealed that The Chinese Room (a subsidiary of Sumo Digital) has taken over development of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. The publisher's key note announcement stated that the British studio: "brings their award-winning storytelling to Bloodlines 2, creating a high-quality Vampire: The Masquerade action RPG by talented developers with triple-A experience. Fans eager to sink their teeth into Bloodlines 2 can look forward to the gameplay reveal in January 2024 and its launch in Fall 2024." The original team at Hardsuit Labs was relieved of all development duties back in early 2021, following a year of key staff dismissals. Worried fans were offered the chanced to receive pre-order refunds a few months ago, with Paradox uploading a small batch of alpha screenshots, but not yet unveiling the new dev team.

Industry watchers have noticed that The Chinese Room has undertaken a large recruitment drive lately, so the ambition seems to be there to get into AAA game development leagues, despite a track history of producing critically acclaimed indie hits such as Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Ed Daly, Studio Director stated: "Vampire: The Masquerade holds a special place in our hearts. The story world's dark setting filled with intricate narratives built on top of modern society perfectly fits our studio's catalog...Bloodlines 2 is our most ambitious project to date. Fans of the franchise have been eagerly awaiting this game, and we are up to the challenge. We are bringing more than 15 years of award-winning (BAFTA & TIGA) experience to the project, creating a game that honors the legacy of its predecessor while bringing its gameplay to the modern era."

Dear Bloodlines fans, it's been quite a while between updates while we've had our heads down working on the game. We remain just as dedicated to delivering a great Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines game as we were when we announced, and are looking forward to showing you more in September this year.

We acknowledge it was a long time ago that many of you pre-ordered Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. As development continues, we will be updating the game's editions and bonus content, and we want to provide the best value to those of you who supported us via digital pre-order after all this time. We are thus offering refunds to anyone who has pre-ordered any edition of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. As part of this process, we are proactively refunding all pre-orders of physical products, including the Collector's Edition. The digital versions of the First Blood Edition, Unsanctioned Edition and Blood Moon Edition remain, but can be refunded if you choose.

Hello Bloodhunt Community! Bloodhunt is a game that we developed as a standout title in the popular Battle Royale genre, where we focused on creating an immersive and unique experience for players that enjoy games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven't been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.

With that said, Bloodhunt servers will stay up and the game will remain available to play. Our aim is to keep the servers going for as long as we have an active player base and community. For those who enjoy the game and want to continue playing, we have worked on some solutions to ensure that the game continues to be interesting. An in-game player voting system will be deployed to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh. We will share more granular details about how this system works when we get closer to releasing our next update, which will be the last planned patch for Bloodhunt. Beyond that update, patches will only be related to maintenance.