Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt is dropping ‘traditional’ seasons to focus on faster updates
A new Team Deathmatch mode is on the way too.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The undead battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt is “pretty darn fun to play,” we said in our May assessment of the newcomer to the genre: “Guns are punchy and easy to aim, jumping, sliding, and wall-climbing are slick, and my class vampire powers feel immediately useful.” But it’s also struggled with a number of technical issues—in late May, for instance, developer Sharkmob hit pause on ranked mode because poor controller support meant PlayStation 5 owners were gettingbrutally wrecked—and the concurrent player count hastailed offconsiderably since its full release in April.
In an interview withVG247, producer David Sirland revealed some of the changes coming in the summer update that Sharkmob hopes will turn things around, including a move away from a conventional seasonal structure.
“When we launched the game, we did a 12-week standard season with a Battle Pass of 100 levels and similar value to other competitors out there,” Sirland said. “We realized quite quickly into the season that we can’t really sustain this as the team we are—and it’s also hurting us because the content plan is essentially holding us back from making quicker gameplay updates faster, and fixing the key aspects of the game that our core players are screaming for in some cases.”
Instead, the team is aiming to move to monthly content updates, and will address bug and gameplay fixes “continuously,” separate from those updates. The battle pass is also being reduced in size and price: It sounds like the studio is still experimenting with ideas, as Sirland said developers are looking at options like releasing smaller battle passes on a more frequent basis.
A new 8v8Team Deathmatch modeis also on the way. It’s a fairly conventional mode for battle royale, but Sirland hopes it will help ease new and casual players into the game by giving them an opportunity to figure out how everything works without the risk of near-immediate death that’s endemic to battle royales.
Sharkmob is also updating the game’s internal systems to enablefaster creation of contentfor player characters, and the promised improvements to controller support are still on the way too. The summer update will also disable crossplay by default, so PlayStation 5 owners will have a “safe space” to play in, unless and until they choose to cross swords with PC players.
Sirland said Sharkmob “sort of” knows how many people have the game installed but just aren’t playing, and believes that these internal changes—and the faster response times they should enable—will convince them to jump back in.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
“I don’t really want this update to be like a boost of massive numbers of players, just for it to go down again,” he said. “I’d rather have it be slowly, organically growing. I think that’s where we want to be.”
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt’s big summer update is set to roll out on July 14.
Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill.Lotsof Henry Cavill.
Things look grim for Multiversus as the Warner Bros. suits blame it for a $100 million writedown—‘It hasn’t been pretty’
‘We apologize for not meeting the community’s expectations:’ Tekken 8 makes a rare acknowledgement of fan backlash after failing to include a $5 stage in its season pass
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
