Good evening Kindred,

Last month, we announced three of four playable clans in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2: Brujah, Tremere and Banu Haqim. Today, we’d like to share the fourth clan with you: Ventrue. The clan assets for Ventrue are in the process of being finalized, and we will share assets and gameplay showing off the playstyle of Ventrue during next year. Ahead of that deep dive we’re showing off an in-game render of Phyre in one of the Ventrue-themed outfits (all clans can earn all outfits).

Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.

The Clan of Kings, Blue Bloods, Tyrants, Warlords, Patricians, Borgias

Ventrue vampires usually choose their progeny from mortals familiar with power, wealth and influence. Seeing themselves as the rightful leaders of vampire society, Kindred of clan Ventrue take up the mantle of leadership wherever possible, often in the form of high positions in Camarilla Courts.

Ventrue are blue blooded tyrants who incite obedience in both their allies and their foes. Using the Disciplines of Presence and Dominate, they can mesmerize as well as awe their prey. Feeding builds up Fortitude, allowing the Ventrue to soak up more damage in case any enemy is powerful enough to resist their force of will.


Render of female Phyre with one of the Ventrue-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.




Ventrue powers focus on domination, forcing foes to obey your commands.

Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.

Good evening Kindred,

Earlier this month, we announced the first two clans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah and Tremere. Today at PC Gamer Most Wanted, we introduce the third playable clan of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.



The Clan of the Hunt, Assassins, Children of Haqim, Saracens, Mediators, Lawmen

Cursed with a thirst for the Blood of other vampires, the Banu Haqim stalk the night as judges and lawbringers. To this end, most Banu Haqim adhere to a strict code of conduct - derived from law, faith, or personal ethics - sating their Hunger on those that breach these convictions.

Banu Haqim takes the role of a strategic stalker, using shadows to their advantage. You are a predator on a hunt, and your discipline powers focus on stalking, assassination, and silently moving faster than your foes can track.


Render of female Phyre with one of the Banu Haqim-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.


Banu Haqim powers focus on strategic stalking, avoiding attacks and assassination.

Banu Haqim is the third clan we’ve revealed for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, we'll be back in December for the next clan reveal. Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.

This week, we have another recap diary where The Chinese Room Community Manager Josh Matthews meets Ian Thomas, Sarah Longthorne and Arone Le Bray. In this recap, Sarah recaps parts of her dev diary, and is joined by Ian Thomas and Arone Le Bray to go into more depth on the main character, as well as answering a few fan questions relating to the main character and the dev diary on Narrative Atmosphere and Themes.




Render of female Phyre

Tomorrow, 30th of November, we are revealing the third playable clan, at the PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted, and we’ll be back with a new dev diary in two weeks. This time it will be Andrea Sancio, Associate Technical Director sharing his thoughts on how TCR are working with Unreal 5. After the holidays, we’ll be back with more dev diaries in January.

This week, as mentioned in our last dev diary, we’re bringing you our first video recap. Straight from The Chinese Room and their Community Manager Josh Matthews, you’ll hear from earlier dev diary authors Michele Nucera (Senior Concept Artist), Alex Skidmore (Project Creative Director) and Ben Matthews (Associate Art Director). In this recap, they’ll summarize their individual diaries, share additional thoughts and answer fan questions.



We’ll be back with the next dev diary in two weeks and we’re looking forward to our third clan reveal at PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted.

Good evening Kindred,

Last week we revealed the first of the playable clans for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah. Today we’re excited to be sharing the second playable of the four available at release, in Fall of 2024. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.

From the ashes of the attack on their main chantry, the Tremere know the clan is injured, but far from fallen.


The Broken Clan, Usurpers, Warlocks, Haemetics, Thaumaturges, Transgressors, Blood Mages

Clan Tremere embraces scholars, academics, researchers, and other relentless pursuers of knowledge. These Kindred have an obsession with blood and vitae — vampire Blood — beyond even that of other Kindred, an obsession which extends to its control. Whether the blood coursing through their enemies veins, or a Tremere’s own vitae, a drop of red can turn into a deadly weapon in the hands of an experienced Warlock.


Tremeres are experts in Blood Sorcery, giving them Discipline powers that can shape vitae.

As a Tremere in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, you use your arcane powers to control your own Blood and that of your foes. The playstyle is rewarding when keeping your distance in combat, making enemies scream in agony as you boil their blood, shaping your own vitae into projectiles, or even ripping the blood from their veins.


Render of Phyre as a female with one of the Tremere-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits..

Next week, we’re on hiatus for Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back with a third playable clan at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted on the 30th of November.

Good evening Kindred,

Today the countdown begins! We’re revealing the first of four playable clans available at release in Fall 2024 in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 today. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.

No huge surprise in which clan’s boot is kicking open the door first… Don’t get too comfortable though, there’s always something unexpected in World of Darkness.


The Learned Clan, Rabble, Punks, Hipsters, Prometheans, Rebels, Philosopher-Kings, Hellenes

The learned clan, the clan of radicals, the clan commonly misjudged as punks looking for trouble, the Brujah are guided by passion and dedication to an ideal. And if they have the supernatural strength to back that passion up, who are you to argue? Rebellion unites their blood, whether that rebellion is of the subtle lend me your ears kind or the fists out, fire in the streets sack of Rome kind is down to the individual.




Brujah powers enhance your speed and power.

If you’re a player who leaves the shadows to the cowards, knows the frontline is where the fun is and idealistically rebels against power, Brujah is your clan.

In Bloodlines 2, Clan Brujah will offer a brutal melee playstyle with its abilities (in Vampire: The Masquerade, known as Disciplines) getting you into the fray and rewarding you for staying there. Exemplified in the video, our Brujah uses charge to gain a burst of momentum, grab an enemy, drag them with you and body slam them into a wall. Don’t assume you’re limited to charging just one enemy either. In early 2024, we’ll be back with a complete list of Brujah discipline powers you will be able to use in game.


Render of Phyre with one of the Brujah-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.

Brujah is the first of four clans available at release in Fall 2024 and next week, we’ll be back with the second playable clan. The following week, we’ll be on Thanksgiving hiatus, before coming back to reveal the third playable clan.

Hi, I’m Michele Nucera, Senior Concept Artist. I’ve been looking forward to showing you the hard work that our art team has done to bring life into our game. We’re using a relatively new technique in concept art to help us. Normally all the screenshots you see are fully finished levels with lighting and details in-game. But today I’ll be showing some of the earlier versions that we use to visualise what that final product will look like.

The first thing we keep in mind is the Bloodline 2 art direction. We want to create a foggy, dark, and neo-noir environment where the player can hide and attack from the shadows. The perfect setting for a vampire!


Paintover, View of Seattle – Art: Jordan Grimmer

Our goal is to provide the 3D team with a few images to show them our idea for a location or a character. We try to keep our concepts grounded to the real world, but we try to push reality up to 11 (as our Art Director John McCormack always suggests) so the player can experience something unexpected and never seen before.

Building worlds directly in the game engine is incredibly easy and fun. Thanks to our experience on other TCR titles, we had the chance to learn Unreal and experiment with a Concept Art pipeline to add this piece of software to our workflow.

Bloodlines 2 was the perfect game to push our skills in Unreal to the next step. We had a huge asset library available in this game, including props, characters, and materials. The most logical step forward was to use Unreal to create our concepts rather than creating everything from scratch.

The fog system and the lighting in Unreal are much closer to reality than other real time engines, especially with the recent update to UE5. So this was the perfect tool to visualise our version of Seattle. We have built these underground scenes in Unreal 5, using a fog volume and lights with volumetric options active. Once the composition is approved we then rendered them and quickly painted over in Photoshop.



Paintover, Underground area – Art: Jordan Grimmer


Before working on an environment, we usually receive a brief from Ben Matthews, Associate Art Director, who provides us with a rough idea of the environment he needs, together with some references. After spending some time searching for references we jump on Unreal and start working from a block-out scene done by the Level Design Team where we import our 3D assets and give “life” to their level.

As always when designing, we start from the big shapes first and then place some provisional lighting and fog. Traditional concept art generally captures the world from one perspective and you have to start from scratch if you’re painting something from another angle. Choosing a good camera angle early on is important and we usually set up a few cameras so our art director can choose what shot works better for him and then we are good to go with the final touches.

Once the first pass gets approved, we then move onto detailing our scene and this is the most fun part. This stage feels like playing a real-life simulator game where you can create little dioramas and add storytelling to the scene. If needed, we create additional assets with Blender and then import them in Unreal Engine. For example, in this bathroom piece we have modelled the toilet and bath using Blender and then imported the assets in Unreal where you can easily assign materials to them.


Paintover, Abandoned Building Bathroom – Art: Isobel Hine

Finally, we render our scene using the high-resolution screenshot tool in Unreal, import the render passes in Photoshop, compose the scene and paint over it adding more details and pushing the mood even further.

We are also lucky that we can easily import 3D characters and plug specific animation loops onto them so our environment will instantly come to life! Here we have used our 3D model of a Hunter done by Kjartan Tysdal, Senior 3D Character Artist, to populate the scenes and add storytelling elements.


Paintover, Radio Tower Callout – Art: Jordan Grimmer




Paintover, Hunters Entering an Underground Area – Art: Michele Nucera

If you are in a rush, you can skip the thumbnailing process and do it directly in 3D, also you can show a real-time 3D scene rather than one single image so it’s easier for Directors to have the right feeling of the space. Lastly, you can provide the 3D art team with your scenes so they have a base to work with when building the scenes for the actual game… if they can figure out how to deal with our very messy layers!

The below concept shows the police looking for you in an abandoned building. To showcase this, we have built a few rooms and a corridor using our assets in Unreal Engine and then rendered a few shots to follow the story of this policeman looking for you. Since the scene was done in Unreal, the Art Director could easily navigate the space and experience the flow and mood of it.





Paintover, Abandoned Building – Art: Michele Nucera

Obviously this game contains a LOT of blood. We were lucky enough that the 3D Art Team provided us with a few blood decals to use directly in Unreal. We placed them in our scenes and lit them in an interesting way to enhance their shiny property, adding a slight hue of red light so the blood colour is not affected by the mood of the scene!

These pieces show a vampire haven under attack. We placed a lot of corpses and blood directly in Unreal and then did a paintover to add all the extra details we needed to sell the story and mood.


Paintover, Vampire Haven – Art: Jordan Grimmer

I think that creating concepts in Unreal is the future of Concept Art. A lot of Concept Artists are expanding their skill set to learn this fantastic tool. Being able to create a real-time scene that your directors can navigate and give you live feedback is priceless and it makes the game better.

We’ll be back in another two weeks, but this time with a Video Diary where we will summarise the content from our latest Dev Diaries. If you have any questions relating to the first four dev diaries, feel free to send them to us on Discord and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.

Good evening Kindred,

Today we shared some very exciting news on our Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 news stream! We were joined by Sean Greaney (EVP of Darkness) and Ian Thomas (Narrative Director at TCR), who discussed some of the game’s features relating to both narrative and roleplaying. In case you missed it, you can find it below.



In the stream, we were introduced to the protagonist of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2; Phyre, an Elder vampire at odds with the voice in her head, who confronts Seattle’s powerful elites at war over the City’s fate.

Players choose Phyre’s clan and gender and begin exploring a reimagined Seattle filled with compelling characters while maneuvering through complex relationships. Choices and conversations (even outfits!) shape how the environment and characters react to Phyre, changing how the story unfolds.


Render of Phyre as a female character.

We are happy to share that over the coming weeks we will reveal the four clans playable at launch. The first will be revealed next week. In addition to these four clans, an additional clan will be made available via DLC. A sixth clan will appear in a unique, standalone DLC. Details on the DLCs will be shared during 2024. Some of the clans will be familiar to Bloodlines players, but some will surprise!

If you still want more, we can recommend checking out our live-play chronicle Seattle By Night season 2, as Jason Carl leads our Coterie on a journey through Seattle, encountering challenges linked to the events that will unfold in Bloodlines 2.

Premiering on October 31st, Seattle by Night season two will include eight episodes that air every Tuesday at 5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern on PennyArcade Twitch channel.

The events unfolding in season two set the stage for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2!

Hello, I’m Ben Matthews. My job is Associate Art Director on Bloodlines 2. A couple of weeks ago Sarah talked about the narrative themes of Neo-Noir and how it fits into our game and now I’m here to give you the artist’s perspective.

Neo-Noir is a revival movement of Film Noir from the mid 20th century. Artists focus on modern day cities, painting them in bright neon lights and deep shadows. It’s very moody and evokes places that harbour sinister characters. Think Blade Runner or John Wick. Subversive, Dark, and Threatening, are all Neo-Noir conventions we’re focusing on for our game. VtM is all of these tones and so naturally it worked hand in hand when it came to creating the seedy underbelly of our Seattle. From Locations to Characters our vision is about showing a side of Seattle at night that goes deeper than what you see on the surface. Whether it’s dark-cornered alleyways to roam or interiors that host Machiavellian politics behind closed doors. Neo-Noir puts atmosphere and contrast at the centre of its palette and that’s something that works perfectly with our Vampire fantasy and ultimately Bloodlines 2.



The haven of a vampire can be a good insight into their mind.

As an Elder thrust into a modern and unfamiliar world we’re playing on all of the visual elements of Neo-Noir to paint a picture of Seattle through the eyes of our Vampire. Contrast is very important to this visual identity in lots of different ways. A classic of Neo-Noir is light and dark. We use this to split the world into two. Vampires inhabit the dark, it’s a place you need to use for safety but dark places feel more dead because of this. The darkness becomes the place where we feel the most secure, the most in tune with the world around us.



You need to be able to see where you’re going even in the dark so that’s why we’ve used a very cold colour pallet for these places. That lets us use warm colours to add life to the rest of the world that’s lit up. Humans live in the light and because you need to maintain the Masquerade, that makes the light more dangerous for you. Whether it’s delving into the depths of Seattle's nightlife or stalking your prey for the next feed, leaving the darkness and entering the light, warm human world should be a calculated risk but one we ultimately need to take. Vampire senses are stronger than a mortal person’s so we have very a vibrant style juxtaposed between the dead Vampire world and the dangerous, energetic human world. All of these elements are accentuated in Neo-Noir’s unique use of colour and tone; the changes between light and dark have always been sudden and stark.



No Neo-Noir world would be complete without an eclectic mix of miscreants and personalities. The characters we meet throughout the game themselves have of course also taken a lot of influence from Neo-Noir aesthetics, each having their own visually striking home in Seattle creating a world of vibrancy and contrast.



It’s not a 1:1 scale replica but we’ve created our Seattle by spending a lot of time researching with Google Earth, maps and real life visits. We haven’t taken things verbatim but we have tried to capture the soul of the city and give it a Vampire Skew. The focus is on creating a world that lives in between the living world. Dark places just outside of the streets and high rises of the living world. We also looked at other American cities like New York and San Francisco. References on alleyways, pipes and fire escapes have helped us make it feel lived-in.

Snow is a big feature of the city’s look. It organically changes the shapes and feel of streets, rooftops and buildings. It fills the air around you to create a beautiful mood. Noir is famous for its rain but we love the look of how it covers everything.

We’re always learning about art of every type. Movies, books, fine art and even dance have given us inspiration. Neo-Noir Photography and Cinema visuals have been big influences. Whether it’s Nicolas Miller’s eerie elemental cityscapes or the visions of cultures hidden in plain sight in movies like John Wick and the works of Nicolas Winding Refn. We’ve worked hard on painting a picture of a dark, otherworldly underbelly hidden in the recesses of modern Seattle. Nicolas Miller’s work focuses a lot on the environmental atmosphere and the effect weather can have on people to make impactful images. We’re leveraging UE5’s atmospherics in the same way, creating dense scenes thick with warm glows and cold spotlights. Snow and fog play a large part of that in our Seattle helping to create layers of texture and visual storytelling.

Next Dev Diary is in two weeks! We will be talking about creating concept art.