The Chinese Room’s version isn’t an “open sim”, cautions Paradox deputy CEO
“With Hardsuit Labs, we agreed on a vision of what they were gonna make, [and] they had a problem delivering on that,” Lilja told me. “We were in agreement, we moved [development] to The Chinese Room and we said, this is the vision and this is what Hardsuit Labs have made. And of course, we gave them quite a lot of freedom to interpret the vision, based on what Hardsuit Labs had made, or change or remove whatever they didn’t like.
“We have a high trust in The Chinese Room, given what they’ve done,” he went on. “We’ve announced again a delay, into the first half of next year. I would stand by that. I’m pretty confident that that’s going to work. I’ve seen the game now. The Chinese Room is really invested in it. They’re taking a lot of initiatives. They like some things that Hardsuit did, they’re changing some other things, and they’re making their own game, that’s still the vision that we had.
“So it’s going to be an action-RPG in the World Of Darkness. If you’ve seenStill Wakes The Deep, they know how to do story-driven action games with good voice-acting, all of that, which is basically what we’re looking for in this game. I hope and feel that we will be able to deliver a game that puts you in the World Of Darkness.”
“I like the first game as well a lot, but we want to clarify what this game is, so people have a clear understanding of what they’re buying, so they don’t come in with weird expectations - because we don’t want that, we want them to understand that this is an action RPG with a storyline that is more fixed. It’s not the open sim it maybe shouldn’t be compared to. Again, we want people to understand what they’re getting into.”
I’m sympathetic to the idea that older games tend to disappear beneath a cloud of nostalgic make-believe - we’re seeing it right now, withcertain chunderhead reactionsto Bloober’sSilent Hill 2remake. So which aspects of the original Bloodlines does Lilja think people are mythologising? Sadly, he didn’t go into much detail.
“But mainly we want to clarify that we’re making a spiritual successor, not an actual same blueprint type of game, so people don’t get disappointed and feel cheated,” Lilja went on. “We really don’t want that.”
If Paradox have learned anything from the past few years of delays and cancellations, it’s that making or publishing games outside their traditional grand strategy dominions is a risky business. During our chat, Lilja spoke at length about the need to refocus and make smaller bets on projects in future. With regard to Bloodlines 2, we shouldn’t expect another action-RPG from Paradox in the near future, though Paradox do expect the game to at least break even.
“We do expect it to recover its investment,” Lilja said, somewhat to my surprise. “But also saying that, it has changed studios, been in production a long time. My expectation is we will release a good game.” He added, however, that “the continuation of this type of games for Paradox should probably be done in a different setup - again, going back to taking risks, how to invest when we’re not sure that we exactly know what we’re doing.”
