In a distant future, an enigmatic boy becomes the central figure in the search for a new hope. Who is this kid? Why is everyone looking for him? Sometimes you should be careful of the answers you seek, as the truth may shock you to the core.
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GamingTranscript
00:00 Good evening, Kindred, and welcome to this Halloween special
00:03 where we are going to give you what you want.
00:06 You will get Bloodlines 2 sneak previews.
00:08 We will talk about character.
00:10 We will talk about narrative.
00:12 We will talk to the Chinese Room.
00:14 - Hello, folks, I'm Ian.
00:16 I'm narrative director at the Chinese Room.
00:18 I've been in video games for about 30 years,
00:20 and film and TV,
00:22 spending a lot of time around detective stories and horror.
00:25 In particular, you might have played Amnesia Rebirth,
00:28 which I was story lead for.
00:30 But tonight we're gonna be talking about
00:32 something a bit different.
00:33 We're going to be looking slightly into the future.
00:35 - And I'm Sean Graney,
00:37 executive vice president for World of Darkness
00:39 at Paradox Interactive.
00:41 I've been with this project since 2017.
00:44 I've been working with all of our World of Darkness projects
00:47 and I got into Vampire the Masquerade
00:50 at a very uncomfortably early age,
00:52 and it's been with me since then.
00:54 - Yeah, I spent most of the early '90s
00:57 with Vampire First and Second Edition,
00:59 and I still have scars.
01:01 - So, why don't we get to what the people want
01:04 and take a look at our character?
01:06 - Yeah, absolutely.
01:07 So we're gonna look at a short video now,
01:09 and we're gonna step into the future in 2024,
01:14 round about Christmas, to the Glacier Hotel in Seattle,
01:19 and watch our lead character meet somebody.
01:22 - She didn't murder you, so that's a start.
01:26 - So then, you have me at a disadvantage.
01:30 I assume, of course, that you know who I am.
01:34 So the question is, who are you?
01:37 - You can call me Fire.
01:38 I seek an audience with the Prince of Seattle.
01:41 I've been led to believe you can help.
01:43 - How delicious!
01:46 Whatever could you possibly want with our beloved Prince?
01:49 - That's my business.
01:50 - Now, now, Fire, that is not a fair exchange.
01:54 You came to me, after all.
01:55 Do try and play along, darling.
01:57 It's so boring otherwise.
02:00 Let's try again.
02:01 Who are you, really?
02:04 - Someone rudely awoken from a hundred-year sleep,
02:09 covered in thin blood vitae, with this mark on my hand,
02:12 and no explanation why.
02:14 I want answers.
02:15 - Well, if that's all you wanted, why didn't you just say?
02:19 - So that's it?
02:21 You'll help?
02:23 - And now what you've seen is truly a sneak peek.
02:26 We are post-alpha, but this is game development,
02:28 so certain sections may change.
02:31 Certain sections may remain exactly the same.
02:34 Who did we just meet?
02:35 - So we met two people there.
02:37 We met the person who we were talking to there.
02:42 It's a character called Lou,
02:43 who, if anybody knows anything about Seattle,
02:44 they may be able to figure out who that is.
02:47 Our protagonist, one version of our protagonist
02:50 you saw there, is a character we call Fire.
02:53 Fire is an elder kindred.
02:55 Fire has been asleep for around a hundred years,
02:57 and had just woken up into modern day,
02:59 or slightly near future, Seattle.
03:02 And there are huge consequences
03:05 to dropping an elder into a kindred city.
03:10 Most games, we play a newbie.
03:13 In all sorts of different RPGs,
03:15 we play a newbie who is learning the ropes of the world.
03:18 Fire is different.
03:19 Fire is old, experienced.
03:21 She's a hunter, she's a stalker.
03:23 She knows how to be a vampire,
03:26 but she doesn't know the current day situation,
03:28 and how her actions are going to affect the world.
03:31 - So you're talking about how we're inverting
03:35 the kind of RPG journey here.
03:38 How is the Chinese room handling that
03:41 from a game development and design perspective?
03:44 - Yeah, there's a couple of really interesting things
03:46 going on here.
03:47 Firstly, it's the normal journey of an RPG character
03:52 to gain power over time,
03:53 but we're starting with a certain level of power here.
03:55 You have impact from the very beginning.
03:57 Fire isn't at her full power, hasn't recovered it yet,
04:01 and there are constraints that we don't want to spoil
04:03 that mean she is effectively bound.
04:06 She's in a bad situation.
04:09 You may have seen that mark on her hand.
04:12 That is a puzzle for her, it's a problem for her,
04:14 it's something she's trying to solve.
04:17 So the player journey, the character journey,
04:20 is about regaining and possibly exceeding
04:24 what she once was,
04:25 and making a big change to Seattle
04:29 for reasons which I hope will become clear.
04:31 - So this is the inverse of "Bloodlines 1" in some ways.
04:34 In "Bloodlines 1," you awake as a fairly unimportant vampire.
04:38 You are used as a pawn by a number of different LA vampires.
04:42 Here we'll be awaking as an elder in Seattle,
04:46 trying to get their bearings, I'm assuming.
04:50 - Yeah, that's right.
04:51 So this isn't a blank slate of a character.
04:54 It's worth saying.
04:55 Obviously, you can customize it.
04:57 There'll be a choice of clans,
04:58 there'll be a choice of outfits, a choice of gender.
05:01 And as the gameplay goes through, it's up to you.
05:05 Elements of her background are up to you to choose
05:08 and what she reveals to other people
05:11 and what story she's telling,
05:12 whether she's telling them a fantasy
05:14 or whether she's telling them the truth.
05:16 But there's a certain commonality,
05:19 which is she's stepped into a place she doesn't know
05:22 and she can't grasp yet.
05:23 At the time, she doesn't know and can grasp.
05:26 So like the protagonist of "Bloodlines 1,"
05:29 she will have to learn what the situation is,
05:31 who the major personalities are,
05:33 and how she can deal with them.
05:34 - But how does this not all come apart
05:36 when she opens a laptop or sees a pedestrian crossing?
05:40 - She doesn't understand the modern world,
05:41 but as you may have seen in that last video,
05:44 she's not entirely alone.
05:46 The mark has done something very strange to her.
05:48 She doesn't understand it at the start of the game,
05:50 but she is hearing another voice.
05:52 It is the voice of a character called Fabian.
05:56 Fabian is a modern thin-blood vampire from Seattle.
06:00 He has ended up inside fire
06:03 in a way that will be explained in the gameplay.
06:07 And he is trapped inside her.
06:10 She is trapped with him.
06:11 The two together have to navigate
06:13 their way through this world.
06:15 They may hate each other.
06:16 They may grow to like each other.
06:17 They may carry on hating each other all the way through,
06:19 but they are bound together.
06:22 He has an idea about how modern kindred work.
06:24 He doesn't have the experience that fire does
06:26 of vampire society, but he's got a pretty good view.
06:28 So he can help her.
06:29 He can guide her through Seattle.
06:32 He can also, because he is a thin-blood,
06:35 he has access to things and an understanding of things
06:38 that the elder vampire doesn't.
06:40 So really this is the story of the two of them
06:43 and how they navigate their way through this situation
06:46 and how they affect Seattle.
06:48 - Will there be an ongoing evolution
06:52 in our relationships with these characters?
06:53 And can we affect that?
06:55 - Yeah, absolutely.
06:56 Really that's the meat of the game for fire
06:59 is that she is having to deal with a society of kindred
07:02 and she has to decide how to deal with them
07:05 because they all have different objectives,
07:09 different goals and different relationship to fire.
07:12 It's unlike the sort of game where you might play
07:15 a paragon or a renegade or a light side or dark side
07:20 because fire has to look at each person individually
07:22 and figure out how to work with them,
07:25 how to deal with them.
07:27 Whether she goes, "I am an elder.
07:28 "You have to do what I say."
07:30 Whether she tries to court them,
07:32 whether she is more insightful about what's going on.
07:34 All those relationships will be different
07:37 and people will treat her differently
07:39 because she treats them differently.
07:41 And then the core feature of all this
07:44 will be the relationship between her and Fabian.
07:47 The two are caught together.
07:49 Fire is the only person who can hear Fabian.
07:50 Fabian can't interact with anybody else.
07:52 He sees everything that she does
07:55 and he sees how she treats other people.
07:57 So that long-term relationship
07:59 really is the heart of this story.
08:01 - And for fans of "Bloodlines 1"
08:03 and "Vampire the Masquerade" as a franchise,
08:05 what will Fabian offer as far as feeding back
08:10 that kind of information to the player?
08:13 - Well, the two talk through the whole game
08:16 and then as the story develops,
08:19 the effects that she has
08:21 and the effects that Fabian has on her,
08:24 really, she's an elder vampire.
08:26 She spent a lot of time not really thinking about humans
08:30 as anything other than prey, really.
08:32 She's distanced from that.
08:34 In the same way that we as players
08:36 are often quite distanced from violence in games
08:39 and from the strange in games,
08:42 Fabian is much more grounded.
08:44 He's much more human.
08:46 And really, we're playing off the contrast between the two,
08:50 the contrast between the elder and the younger,
08:52 the contrast between the olden times and the new times
08:55 and how the two interact.
08:57 So he's very much an anchor for her, I think it's fair to say,
09:00 and very much a compass for her
09:04 if she chooses to pay attention to him.
09:06 - And so for fans of the IP and also the original game,
09:11 Fabian will sort of play this role
09:12 of explaining to the character how humane they are.
09:16 - I guess that's part of it, yeah.
09:18 Fabian's got many roles.
09:19 He's a very rounded character.
09:22 It's also worth bearing in mind
09:23 that it's not just going to be fans
09:24 of the franchise who play this game.
09:27 So new players are going to want to learn about the world.
09:32 Fabian knows about some of it.
09:34 Fire knows about a lot more of it.
09:37 But the way the two talk about it
09:39 and the way the two discuss it
09:40 will help us open that window into a world
09:44 and tutorialize it to a certain extent, I think.
09:46 And also how the powers work
09:47 and how powers interact with other characters in the world.
09:50 Somebody needs to know that stuff, and some players won't.
09:54 And so the interplay between the two characters
09:56 helps us with that.
09:57 - So Fabian sounds like a very interesting character.
09:59 How will players be able to customize
10:01 their narrative experience with Fire as the protagonist?
10:05 - So as we talked about earlier, you have options.
10:09 You have clan choices that affects, for example,
10:12 the powers that you have.
10:14 Although, again, the story gives us a bit more opportunity
10:17 to play around with that.
10:18 It's a bit more flexible because of the presence
10:21 of things like thin bloods.
10:23 There's the interactivity with all the characters
10:26 you talk to, the choices you make with those characters.
10:29 And then there's the wider city, Seattle itself,
10:32 and how Fire deals with the citizens of Seattle.
10:37 And as a predator, there are times when she is going
10:42 to want to feed, gain power from some of the citizens
10:48 and hunt, and this will affect how Fire's powers
10:53 can change as the game changes.
10:58 And that depends on how she treats those citizens.
11:01 If she approaches them as a bully,
11:04 trying to push them into a certain reaction,
11:07 then that might work, that might not work.
11:09 It might scare them off, something else might happen.
11:12 It also depends how she looks.
11:14 If she's dressed as one type of character,
11:16 somebody may have a very different reaction
11:18 to her compared to if she dressed like another.
11:22 - And so it sounds like you're hinting at a system
11:26 that we have in Vampire, the Masquerade, resonance,
11:28 which is the emotional state of dinner, essentially,
11:33 of your prey.
11:34 - Yeah, absolutely.
11:35 It's important to Fire sometimes what the resonance
11:39 of the character she's feeding on is,
11:43 and she can push that, and she can change that,
11:45 or attempt it.
11:46 It might not work.
11:47 But as I said, it depends how you're dressed,
11:49 depends who the character is and what they feel about
11:52 how you've approached them.
11:53 - Players will have options to choose outfits,
11:56 and those outfits will have a narrative and dialogue impact.
11:59 - Yes, yes, that's absolutely true.
12:01 People will recognize you as a different thing
12:03 depending on what you're wearing.
12:05 - Very, very cool.
12:06 So let us return to Seattle and another sneak peek.
12:11 - It's you.
12:12 The gnome man.
12:14 - Willem, I take it.
12:16 You had some interesting guests outside.
12:19 Expecting trouble?
12:20 - That depends.
12:21 Why are you here?
12:23 - Earlier tonight, another kindred by the name of Isabella
12:26 used this mark to sap my power.
12:28 Do you know anything about it?
12:30 - No, no, no, no, no, no.
12:32 All I had to do was keep my head down
12:33 for just a few more nights.
12:35 - He's hiding something.
12:36 - Tell me, Willem.
12:40 What rumors have you heard about me?
12:42 - That you were there in Cairo.
12:45 They called you the Slayer.
12:46 - I have been many things to many people.
12:49 And what will I be to you, Willem?
12:52 And to this lonely, forgotten warehouse?
12:55 - You're exactly what he said you'd be.
12:57 Guess that makes it easier.
12:59 - Makes what easier?
13:00 - What happens next?
13:02 - So vampires aren't traditionally paragons of truth.
13:05 And I think here when we're talking to Willem,
13:07 we can see that Fire is more interested
13:10 in pushing her agenda
13:13 than necessarily being completely accurate
13:15 about her biography.
13:17 So what do these kinds of decisions mean
13:19 for the dialogue and the story arc?
13:22 If you decide to tell Willem about your killer reputation
13:26 versus take another route.
13:27 - So this is one of the advantages of playing Elder.
13:32 You have a history.
13:34 You've been heard of before.
13:36 Fire has this legend associated with it.
13:40 There are several legends,
13:41 a whole collection of legends.
13:43 Which of those are true
13:45 is to a certain extent a decision for the player.
13:48 We're leaving that deliberately.
13:50 Was she at this particular incident?
13:52 Did she cause the incident?
13:53 Was she escaping the incident?
13:55 And the variety of different background choices
13:58 which we feed into it a little bit like the way
14:00 that Commander Shepard in Mass Effect
14:03 has a series of background choices.
14:05 Although ours is slightly more complicated.
14:07 But that means that when she approaches people
14:09 in Seattle, they may have heard of her.
14:12 And they may have some idea what she did.
14:15 And that can be a scary legend
14:19 or it can give you a bit more nuance to it.
14:21 I like to think of her as the Wild West movies
14:26 where the gunslinger comes to town
14:30 and people know the reputation
14:31 and that makes them approach things
14:34 in a very different way when they suddenly realize
14:36 who they're up against.
14:37 And that is the weightiness of the character
14:40 we're dumping into Seattle's society.
14:43 So the background, this unreliable duration,
14:48 as you said, it's left for the player to hint at.
14:52 But the decisions that the player makes
14:54 about Fyre's background will be reflected
14:58 by other characters in the game.
15:00 And that might affect them differently
15:02 if they have a particular opinion about that.
15:04 - I mean, it's very interesting referring
15:05 to the gunslinger coming to town.
15:08 The legend is built because of distance
15:10 in those kinds of scenarios.
15:13 The stories don't reach each town accurately.
15:16 Here you're playing with time.
15:18 If you're hundreds of years old,
15:19 there's very few people that can confirm
15:21 or deny what you've done.
15:23 And so as you make these decisions,
15:25 as we move towards the end of the game,
15:27 will they come together to produce different endings?
15:31 - Yes, I think it's fair to say
15:32 that the choices you make for characters,
15:37 the way that you portray Fyre,
15:39 the way that you behave around other people,
15:42 the story ends in different ways.
15:47 And obviously I don't want to spoiler any of those.
15:50 But the way that you affect Seattle long-term
15:55 and what will become of some of the characters,
15:58 if you left them alive, because you might not,
16:01 will change the story of Seattle going on from that point.
16:06 - I did say that there'd be sneak peeks.
16:08 They did say there'd be previews.
16:09 So I will say, in Vampire the Masquerade,
16:12 there are things that are much worse than death.
16:15 And in this game, there will be those options.
16:17 I have to ask, can players expect a yellow taxi?
16:20 - Ooh, we're more about Uber these days.
16:24 But you don't get a lot of taxis around in Seattle
16:29 that are yellow in the middle of a snowstorm,
16:31 but let's wait and see.
16:34 - Well, there's been a coffin full of reveals this evening.
16:38 And very, very soon we will be back
16:41 revealing the playable clans in Bloodlines 2.
16:43 Very happy you could join me tonight, Ian.
16:46 Very happy to be able to give this information
16:49 to the community.
16:50 Any last words?
16:51 - I just want to say that at the Chinese Room,
16:53 we're really looking forward to you meeting our characters,
16:56 spending a bit of time with them
16:57 and seeing how your story develops in Seattle.
17:02 (eerie music)
17:04 (birds chirping)
17:07 (eerie music)
17:09 (birds chirping)
17:12 (eerie music)
17:15 (birds chirping)
17:18 (eerie music)
17:20 (birds chirping)
17:23 [MUSIC]