Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 delayed to later 2020

Paradox Interactive and Hardsuit Labs have announced that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed from its March 2020 release window to later in 2020. Hardsuit Labs states the delay was made to achieve the best experience possible and to avoid similar issues that plagued the original game at release, which 'famously launched too early'.

Paradox's PDXCON takes place in Berlin this weekend, where the development team will offer an update on the game at the main stage event. You can find a full schedule for PDXCON here, which will be live-streamed.

Hardsuit Labs has issued a statement regarding the delay from Narrative Lead Brian Mitsoda. You can find that here or copied in full down below.

To all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

For the last three and a half years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a worthy successor to Bloodlines 1. To us, that meant not only making good on the ambitions of this remarkable game, but also a duty to ensure we would not repeat its mistakes. Today, we have to tell you that we need some more time to get you the game you’ve been waiting for. Although Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will still launch in 2020, we have decided to value quality over making the Q1 launch window. 

There are some things we wanted to hit under all circumstances when we set out to follow in Bloodlines’ footsteps: A deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness. We firmly believe that we’re on the right track to get you all of this.

On the flip side, there’s the responsibility to avoid some of the issues that plagued the first game, which was famously launched too early. Over the last few months, it became clear that to stick to our original date would risk repeating that mistake. We won’t do that. In the end, everyone working on this game wants to offer you the best Bloodlines 2 we can.

This hasn’t been an easy- nor our first choice. Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised. 

Your feedback was invaluable in this. It helped us give the proper weight to what we saw, as well. We’d like to thank you, and hope you’ll support us in the decision that came from it. 

Many of us from Hardsuit Labs will be in Berlin for PDXCON. For those of you going, we look forward to seeing you there! We will be sharing insights into the development of Bloodlines 2 along with other steps we’ve taken to strengthen our development team  to realize our ambitions for Bloodlines 2.

For those of you who won’t be there, we will be sharing more about this during the PDXCON Announcement stream on Saturday the 19th. We are also opening up a Reddit thread to answer any of your questions in the Bloodlines stream on the following Sunday. 

Thanks,

Andy Kipling and Brian Mitsoda, on behalf of the team at Hardsuit Labs