Happy New Year, and welcome to a fresh and tasty Dev Diary from the team at The Chinese Room. We are starting the year by talking about the player character, Phyre, and how you can shape their legend and add to it as you play. As you’ll see below your story will start wearing rags, but will it end in riches? Seattle’s fate is in your hands.
– Project Creative Director Alex Skidmore
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An Elder of your choosing
As our game starts, an Elder that some call the Nomad wakes up in an abandoned building in Seattle. They don’t know where they are or how they got there, but they are quick to adapt – the Nomad is old, and they have survived for a long time.
It is clear that they have experienced the deathlike sleep of torpor. The last they remember was a smile and a piercing pain in the chest, delivered in their Haven in Tunis at the start of the 20th century.
Now they are awake. What happened to them in their long slumber, and who woke them? Why does their Blood lack the strength and power they are used to? And why is their body carved with arcane sigils?
The Nomad is a legend amongst Kindred. Their name has been whispered for four hundred years – of their presence in revolutions, on battlefields, at slaughters, and at the fall of Princes. Are they escaping these situations, causing them, or taking joy in red wrath and ruin? Whatever the truth, they are a catalyst – when they appear, the world of the Kindred will be irrevocably changed.
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Description: In-game screenshot of Safia recognising the Nomad.
The concept of the Nomad came when we were expanding early ideas of Phyre to make the most of an Elder’s history in the world. There is a reason a vampire survives – and in the game our vampire is always on the front foot, leaving an indelible mark on Kindred society. That must have been true for the rest of Phyre’s existence. So what might people in Seattle have heard?
In our story, different characters have different beliefs about the Nomad and their history. While these events may not have an immediate effect on the game world, they will affect how our protagonist is treated. We have deliberately left it up to the player to decide how Phyre treats these stories and their legend, and how much they tell other characters about their past – and indeed, which stories they tell.
How would a Prince behave if asked for a favor by the legendary and powerful Nomad, who is not yet caught up in local politics?
– Ian Thomas, Narrative Director
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Description: In-game screenshot of Phyre’s mark glowing.
The themes behind the Nomad
In Bloodlines 2, the matter of history takes a front seat. Our protagonist is centuries old, and while they may change things up to survive, adapt and keep pace with the march of time, they’ve nonetheless garnered something of a reputation. If a time-immune forensic detective were to inspect and compare the various crime scenes that are human history, they would no doubt find one set of fingerprints consistent. May you live in interesting times, etcetera etcetera. Playing an Elder was a bold choice; to move forward without leaning into the unique opportunities that provides for roleplay would be a missed opportunity.
In Narrative Design, we often find ourselves pulled between two ideals: providing agency and choice for players to make the story their own vs keeping the story feeling intentional, strong and tightly wound. The solution, then, is to establish what is immutable and, within that, carve out a more flexible play space. Ultimately, a good story is driven by characters being true to their psychology and either following that thread down towards tragedy, making the same mistakes over and over, or seizing upon the chance to challenge and change themselves.
That’s what makes a happy ending triumphant: a character’s ability to sacrifice what they have desired and strained towards for so long, to defy the never-ending hunger of old, painful wounds for a chance at long-lasting healing. It’s what makes a tragic ending tug at our hearts: we see clearly what the character needs, and we see them turn away from it one too many times, too consumed by their pain to do the hard thing, give up their coping mechanisms and save themselves. What I’m getting at is that history, for us, is not merely superficial or textural. Sure, the Nomad’s been around a while, and sure we want to give you folks the chance to say what they did with that time. But as far as storytelling tools go, that doesn’t give us much and, as Narrative Designers, we need tools that will allow us to chisel out those big, emotional moments. So more important than the ‘what’ is the ‘why’. The play space.
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Description: In-game screenshot of Lou meeting the Nomad for the first time.
In this case, we know the Nomad has moved around. We know they are notorious. But the questions that fuel and texture those facts are still up for grabs: You say this Nomad has moved around, so what drove their movement? Were they fleeing something, chasing something, or merely making the most of a long eternity? Where did they go, what did they do there? And what can we surmise about the Nomad’s psyche as a result of these decisions? Are they paranoid, curious, ambitious? What kind of arc does that suggest which might allow us to play with the framing of what they will encounter, to give the impression of those personal trials?
You will have the option to tailor the Nomad’s legacy at various points peppered throughout the game. Importantly, we have chosen not to do this up-front in the style of Bloodlines 1, because this history is a choice as much as any other in the game, and a choice is most effective once you know the stakes. It should make you umm and ahh, maybe even agonise a little: What will happen to X if I choose Y? As such, it was important to us to have these choices occur once play has already begun, once you have started to feel your way around Seattle and its various dangers. These will come in waves — some ‘golden path’, others optional (for instance, if you choose to spend more time with and open up to certain characters) — each tackling a different aspect of your legacy which, tapestried together, suggest a more bespoke story.
The first thing we establish is the theme. Who does the Nomad say they are? A legendary warrior? A curious traveler? Or a desperate survivor, fleeing disaster to disaster to avoid their foes? Once this is chosen, we branch out into further options — each unique to that choice — which both refine roleplay and drill further into that initial theme with your motivation. These sub-choices layer in more texture, allowing your mind to play it all out like a movie and start filling in the details. Later, you’ll have other opportunities to further fill out this narrative, even (if you wish) touching on details that preceded or even caused your embrace. As a personal note, the research that went into fleshing out these options and bedding them into interesting (but no less real) history was a veritable warren of rabbit holes — too many, even. Many, many darlings suffered their final death in the making of this game (may they rest in peace). Even so, nerding out with this stuff was a complete joy.
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Description: In-game screenshot of Phyre and Fabian discussing the Legend of the Nomad.
These choices, once made, are not lost to forgotten metadata. Many will have direct nods or follow-ups, sometimes much further down the line. For instance, here’s a line from Lou that directly references a choice made during an earlier conversation with Fabien, showing how talk of the Nomad’s deeds have spread:
LOU: You’ll have to tell me some time how you escaped Madame Guillotine and her… cutting tongue.
Others feed more subtly into the narrative, affecting the framing of why you might choose something to make it fall in line with your chosen psychology and resulting arc…
PHYRE: Katsumi is being pushed into a corner and must fight merely to exist. I know the feeling well.
VS
PHYRE: Merely holding where you stand is not enough. You need to gain ground.
VS
PHYRE: Were I in her shoes, I would leave this place. The world has more to offer than a dingy bar in a city that hates you.
…or else affecting how others perceive your motives based on what they can surmise from your legacy, branching their reactions to your choices:
MYSTERY CHARACTER: The Black Hand locked you behind iron doors under Paris, and you only escaped the blade by crawling through sewage. You are no mere survivor. You are the plague rat, the harbinger of wretched misery.
Others still will crop up more concretely in the game world. But now I run the risk of getting ahead of myself, so I’ll wrap things up here. After all, it’s always better to leave a few things unsaid, a little to the imagination…
– Senior Narrative Designer and Writer Sarah Longthorne
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Description: In-game screenshot of Safia discussing the Legend of the Nomad.
Process and style of the ending cinematics
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Description: Test storyboard for the art style by Senior Concept Artist, Jordan Grimmer
Because they begin and end your experience, our intro and ending sequences needed a unique and recognizable look. The True Detective opening titles were a big inspiration and so we blended atmospheric images of Seattle with unique and recognisable shapes from the game.
Our narrative team led by Ian Thomas ideated all the possible Bloodlines 2 endings. There are almost 40 images for all the different ending options in the game. To help, they made a map of all the endings so we could see how they connected, and the concept team used it to create a series of storyboards and select the right images for each ending shot. We had to pick where the endings overlapped in location, event or character to make the parts efficiently.
Some of our shots needed to be flexible enough so we could, for example, swap characters but keep the same environment if different endings were happening in the same place. The cutscenes you’ll see are built from combinations of a few images from those created.
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Description: Concept Art of the transitional scenes by Senior Concept Artist, Jordan Grimmer
To visualize how to transition between two images and how a static image could be animated, we made some tests and used them as a proof of concept to scope the work that needed to be done for the ending cinematics.
Ben Matthews, Associate Art Director, directed our concept team to create transitions that were like blood undulating and curling through water. All the images are wreathed in soft lighting, so they melt together beautifully with these animations.
Art Direction
As we’ve mentioned, the art direction set its roots in Neo-Noir and the intro and outros are also designed with this light and dark contrast in mind. To give Bloodlines 2 a unique look, we wanted to use red and black combined with blood animations overlaid to add secondary movement and drench the city in blood. Each individual image should be evocative, and this is why our shots aren’t too literal.
We wanted to leave something to the player’s imagination and together with the voiceover it results in an ending cinematic personal to each player, based on their choices in game.
Assets Creation
Creating the ending shots towards the end of production gave us the chance to have access to a vast library of assets from the game. We took advantage of this assembling the ending scenes using the character models and props.
Once the shot was approved our concept artists had to separate each layer in a way that the animators could easily create a parallax effect to bring the shot to life. For example, in the images with a main character plus an environment, the scene happens inside the main character shape, like illustrated in the scheme below.
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Description Cinematics making methods
To draw your attention to the focal points we leant on balancing lights and darks which was important to make the message of each image stand out. Then to give it more life we added secondary motion with snow, blinking lights, or smoke.
Final animation
Motion graphic animation has been done by our studio partner Atomhawk Design Ltd. who worked closely with our Art Department. The concept team provided them with layered images and Atomhawk have animated and timed each shot in sync with voice-over.
