TLDR: Dev is The Chinese Room, developer of Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. They still won't say what happened with Hardsuit Labs, the OG dev, and the mechanics and system will be totally different.
Instead of a thin-blood (new, weak vampire), you're an Elder (old, scary vampire) fresh from torpor (long VampNap).
Neither of those had any NPCs, did they? I'm not familiar with Dear Esther but from looking it up it says you just explore environments, and I remember Everybody's Gone to the Rapture having like, vague humanoid models but I don't recall them being animated, could be wrong.
Depends on how long the torpor lasted. If it was for a couple of centuries, a lot of has changed in 200 years. The player is going to have to find out the new political players, guns, vehicles, new clans, etc.
If the player was in torpor for a couple of decades, yeah the world exploration will be dull.
No no see you just woke up from Torpor, so yeah you're an elder, but also you're super weak, and nobody knows who you are so you won't get any respect until you've done some basic bitch errands. But EVENTUALLY, you'll be powerful and respected.
Yeah this "Elder fresh from torpor" angle just completely killed my excitement, shit sounds so... bland now. So typical.
I played the shit out of Blacklight: Retribution back in the day, and saw the whole transition from zombie studios to buildblock to hardsuit labs. The devs were really active on various forums, and all seemed like great people.
I've been waiting so long for them to release something new, but this sort of game was a complete departure from anything they worked on (as the main dev) in the past. I'm not shocked that it didn't worked out.
To be fair, an indie like Coffee Stain went from an absolute dumbass meme game like Goat Simulator to something crazy complex like Satisfactory.
You can't really judge what a young studio is capable of.
As for you not being a thinblood in this game, you're named as being a thorped elder waking up, so there could be RPG mechanics of you growing as you get stronger from waking up.
And they don't say which elder you are, so you could wake up as any type of elder, even a Nosferatu.
I actually had this game pre-ordered a long while back but with the huge upheaval around the developer I canceled it. I haven't played any other games by this developer but I like the concept art. Still, I remain ever apprehensive.
I really hope they have Malkavian (clan of madmen and prophets) with unique content as a starting option, I would love to run through the game for the first time not 100% sure what's real.
A mainstream fairly well funded sequel to a cult classic owned by a company that has yet to develop anything even close to the same quality as a janky pre-release third-party source game that has switched developers at least once now?
...I'm sure it will be fine, it's not like there's at least two other examples of that exact scenario failing miserably.
They don’t have a history of developing system heavy games / immersive sims.
They seem to specialize in very linear narrative experience that are extremely light on gameplay systems. Walking sims is what people like to describe them as.
While I wasn't hugely excited about Mitsoda's thin-blood idea, I'm even less excited about being an awakened Elder. Also, knowing the heart and soul of the original will be missing does not fill me with optimism.
The content of the trailer gives me nothing to work with really, either. It will have first-person action combat, that's about it, and it's the last thing anyone excited for a Bloodlines sequel would care about.
I know characters, writing and atmosphere can be hard to get across in a trailer but I would have liked something more. The previous trailer at least had similar undertones to the first game, you could tell it had some of the same people involved and it gave me some optimism.
It Paradox wanted me to get me on board for this attempt they could have at least used one of Rik Schaffer's new tracks for the trailer, but I assume he has been scrapped too.