Overview
- Dan Pinchbeck says he and a Paradox producer held early planning sessions on how to avoid using the Bloodlines 2 title because expectations would be impossible to meet.
- After Paradox removed the project from Hardsuit Labs, The Chinese Room reworked the game to use what it could from the prior build while reshaping it around its own storytelling vision.
- Pinchbeck’s pitch was a non-open-world, non-traditional RPG approach that played more like Dishonored, reflecting constraints on scope and resources.
- The October release drew broad criticism for limited RPG depth, combat, and linearity, with Steam user sentiment hovering in the mid-50% range and PC sales estimated via SteamDB at roughly 120,000–300,000.
- Pinchbeck left The Chinese Room in 2023 citing burnout, later describing development as untangling a tangle of competing stakeholder priorities.