Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 (tba 2024)

Pitch creation and creative leadership, concept adaptation to fit publisher and IP requirements, gameplay vision (including mechanics, tone, player experience), Creative Direction (prototype, pre-production & production, until Alpha (spring 2023)), Narrative Direction (including story and character creation, overseeing writing and level design team, establishing narrative architecture, style guides, working with Kate Saxon/SIDE on casting, voice direction and editing), Publisher liaison (specifically IP/Branding teams).

Like with Deep, this game is still in production so I don’t want to say too much about it here, so let’s keep this one brief.

The VTM franchise is a really amazing one. I grew up on paper-based RPGs, even if I’ve got fairly basic tastes when it comes to video games (I’ve got more hours clocked up on Far Cry and Just Cause than is healthy). VTM is special even for an RPG. It’s incredibly rich and deep, it’s morally and ethically complex, it combines modern politics with ancient supernatural evil, it’s biblical, it’s personal, it’s queer. It just screams TCR and everything we’d always tried to embed in our games. When the opportunity to pitch for it came up, it was Dan Pinchbeck catnip. I was confident we could deliver - we’d been scaling up and bringing on more and more people with serious development chops and history. I knew I wanted to write the story too, we’d never been a studio that were going to finish someone else’s work.

As it turns out, that dovetailed with what Paradox wanted and the state of the project. The inspirations were clear for me: dark US dramas like Succession, The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards. Anchor the gothic in the contemporary. Know that monsters exist in boardrooms and bars everywhere. Know that we live in a world that pretends it’s slick and sophisticated but where we’re still beating each other to death with the jawbones of asses. Know that you could get knifed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but you’re as likely to die from the poison dumped into your water in the pursuit of profit. Know that immortality is a curse as well as a blessing and that too much power strips humanity away like acid. One of my favourite lines from a novel comes from William Gibson’s Count Zero:

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

As a writer, working in that space is just bloody inspirational.

And until more about the game drops, that’s pretty much all you get. The central character, Phyre, encapsulates everything that VTM means to me and it was a blast writing her and the rest of the gang . Once I’d put together the story and background, characters and context, I worked with a great narrative team - Sarah Longthorne, Arone Le Bray and Frances Wakefield-Harrey on putting flesh onto those bones - and again worked with Kate and SIDE to put together a fantastic cast.

I led the project from inception through until alpha in spring this year, then handed the narrative reins over to Ian Thomas and the creative leadership to Alex Skidmore, both hugely experienced devs. If you love VTM as much as me, then I reckon you’re in good hands. And I hope the dark heart that I started beating at the centre of this thing does it justice.