The Chinese Room co-founder and former creative director Dan Pinchbeck has expressed his regret that Bloodlines 2 wasn't called something different, suggesting that his studio felt the game wouldn't serve as a true sequel to the 2004 cult classic.
In an interview with The Goth Boss Podcast's Cat Burton (via ResetEra user doops), Pinchbeck says that he and a former producer at Bloodlines 2 studio Paradox would hold planning sessions for how to get the producers "to not call it Bloodlines 2".
He says that trying to recreate the "magic" of the original Bloodlines is "wrongheaded" in the modern environment, because the finished product wouldn't make anyone happy; fans of the original would be disappointed, and new players would get a "flawed game that was built too fast and with not enough money".
Pinchbeck reckons that it wasn't possible for The Chinese Room to make a true Bloodlines 2 because the studio had neither the time nor the money to do so; instead, he says his studio approached development from a perspective of what could be done with what it had available.
The result of that was, according to Pinchbeck, something that wasn't Bloodlines 2, nor was it an open-world...
