Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a role-playing game in which you play a newly made vampire in a night-time Los Angeles. It was the third and last game by Troika Games, the studio founded by three of Fallout‘s makers, and it came out in November 2004, published by Activision. Its reviews read like arguments with themselves. Computer Gaming World called it “a massive, hypnotic RPG” with “so many rough edges you could use the CDs as saw blades”; PC Games’ Dirk Gooding, in Germany, called it a game you could not leave alone “despite hair-raising bugs”. Troika closed three months later, but players never stopped patching it, and twenty-one years on it got a sequel.
Night in Los Angeles
The game is set in the World of Darkness, the setting of White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop role-playing game. Its central rule is the masquerade: vampires hide their existence from humans. Computer Gaming World’s Robert Coffey explained how that kept a player in check. Break the masquerade too many times and other vampires call a blood hunt, and the game ends. Commit too many inhuman acts and your character’s humanity drains away until you risk frenzy, losing control in a way that breaks the masquerade again.
You start by choosing one of seven clans, which changes how the game treats you. Coffey contrasted the Nosferatu, “so hideous they must move about a city through the sewers” because being seen by a human would break the masquerade, with the Ventrue, who get their way by “irresistible force of will”. Australian PC PowerPlay noted that characters reacted to your clan and your sex. The Malkavians were the strangest choice: PC Games’ clan guide warned beginners that they heard voices, had bizarre conversations and talked back to the television, which made the plot harder to follow.
The story starts in Santa Monica and draws you into a struggle between the Camarilla, arriving to impose order, and the Anarchs who had run the city. Your choices of allies led to one of five endings. Reviewers kept returning to the writing. Australian PC PowerPlay quoted the vampire Jeanette introducing herself: “I’m the fingers down your back when the lights go out.” Coffey singled out “a haunted hotel and a crack house full of shambling dead”, and the hotel quest, set in a house on the coast called the Ocean House, was named GameSpy’s level of the year.
Built on Source, shipped too soon
Troika built Bloodlines on Valve’s Source engine, the technology of Half-Life 2, which made it look like a first-person shooter. Coffey warned that it was not one: much of it rewarded stealth, talking and skills such as lock-picking, hacking and seduction, and its third-person melee combat was “awkward at best”. Edge thought Troika had “the winning formula to give the Vampire RPG a Deus Ex treatment”, and that it “still feels like it should have worked”; Gooding drew the same comparison with Deus Ex. Later, Edge and PC Games both noted that the final stages turned into much more fighting, which was hard going for characters built for talking.
The technical problems were in every review. Coffey reported loading times of close to two minutes, frame rates that could fall to about one a second, enemies running on the spot and a character who fell through the floor “into a black computer netherworld”. Edge listed “spelling errors to crash bugs”. According to The Escapist, Troika had worked with a prototype of Source that lacked Valve’s own AI code, and Activision advanced more money in 2003 to get the game finished. Jason Anderson, one of Troika’s founders, said the studio “just needed more time to test and polish”, but that each game was “pulled out of our hands before we were through with it”. The game went on sale on 16 November 2004, the same day as Half-Life 2.
Computer Gaming World still named it RPG of the Year. Troika released a final patch, its last code, and closed in February 2005 without a publisher for its next game.
Patched by its players
The fixes did not stop with Troika. Fans went on patching Bloodlines for years; the best-known unofficial patch was carried on by Werner Spahl. GOG.com sells the game with these third-party fixes included, and in 2022 it updated its version to unofficial patch 11.1. In 2020 Wireframe described Bloodlines as a game that “withers on the vine, but lives on through community support and intense fandom”.
Bloodlines 2
The sequel came about after Paradox Interactive bought the World of Darkness. Hardsuit Labs’ creative director, Ka’ai Cluney, asked Brian Mitsoda, lead writer of the original Bloodlines, to write it, and the studio pitched the game to Paradox in February 2016. Announced in 2019 for a 2020 release, it was delayed repeatedly, and in early 2021 Paradox removed Hardsuit Labs from the project. The Chinese Room finished it. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, set in Seattle, was released on 21 October 2025.
Sources
- Robert Coffey, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines review, Computer Gaming World issue 248, February 2005, pp. 82–83: the masquerade, humanity and frenzy, the seven clans, the haunted hotel, the combat, the bugs, “a massive, hypnotic RPG”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 250, April 2005, letters page: correction crediting Troika and Activision for “our RPG of the Year”.
- Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines review, Edge issue 144, January 2005: “the Deus Ex treatment”, glitches “from spelling errors to crash bugs”, £35.
- Edge issue 226, April 2011: “2004’s spectacularly buggy” Bloodlines, “whose latter stages are nigh impossible” for characters not built for combat.
- Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines review, PC PowerPlay (Australia) issue 109, February 2005, pp. 58–59: Santa Monica, Camarilla and Anarchs, five endings, Jeanette’s lines, reactions to clan and sex.
- Justin Stolzenberg and Dirk Gooding, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines test, PC Games (Germany), February 2005: the Deus Ex comparison, the bugs, five endings, more fights towards the end; clan guide in the same issue, p. 143 (the Malkavians).
- Joe Blancato, “The Rise and Fall of Troika”, The Escapist, 26 December 2006 (web, secondary): the Source prototype, Activision’s advance, the release date, the last patch, Anderson’s quotes. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-troika/
- Wireframe issue 14, May 2019: Bloodlines 2 by Hardsuit Labs, written by Brian Mitsoda; issue 26, October 2019, and issue 42, August 2020: its delays; issue 35, March 2020, p. 10: interview with Hardsuit Labs’ Russell Nelson on the pitch and Mitsoda’s return, and the original “lives on through community support”; issue 49, March 2021: Hardsuit Labs “shown the door” by Paradox.
- GOG.com, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines store page and changelog (web): third-party technical fixes included; update to unofficial patch 11.1 in April 2022. https://www.gog.com/en/game/vampire_the_masquerade_bloodlines
- Paradox Interactive, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 page (web): developed by The Chinese Room, set in Seattle. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2/about
- “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Werner Spahl’s unofficial patch; the Ocean House as GameSpy’s level of the year; the 16 November 2004 release, citing GameSpot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines
- “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): The Chinese Room’s takeover in 2021 and the release on 21 October 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines_2