If it wasn’t for Disco Elysium, I’d say that this week has been a hard week for RPG fans, as first Divinity: Fallen Heroes was delayed undefinitely and now, Hardsuit Labs have just published a blog post revealing that Bloodlines 2 will also miss its March 2020 release window.

Here’s the text of the blog post:

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

As you can see, the game is still aiming for a 2020 release, but it won’t make its Q1 launch window since the developers need more time to fully realize their vision.