It’s a tough year to be a Vampire: The Masquerade fan. Following the delay of Bloodhunt and a year when Bloodlines 2‘s future felt more uncertain than ever, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is the latest game to run into trouble. While this narrative-focused role-playing game was set to launch in February 2022, it’s now been delayed nearly four months and will instead arrive on 19 May 2022.
According to developers Big Bad Wolf Studio, Nacon and Cyanide Studio, the delay is designed to give the team more time to ensure the game is of the ‘highest possible quality’. Importantly, it will also allow a healthy work-life balance for the team and ensure the game is not a product of crunch.
‘Our focus is on crafting a world that draws you in, that requires you to make difficult decisions and live with the consequences. Swansong features lots of characters, choices, dialogues, and opportunities to decide how the story plays and our ultimate focus is on quality,’ an update on Twitter reads. ‘With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to delay the launch of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong.‘
What is Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong?
The news of Swansong‘s delay isn’t particularly surprising, given that we haven’t seen much of the actual game outside of cinematic trailers, short gameplay snippets, and key art.
What we do know is that Swansong adapts the world of Vampire: The Masquerade into a narrative role-playing game which uses action-adventure and exploration mechanics. Very early beta gameplay showed off players using vampiric abilities like shadow-dashing, as well as intense conversations between between vampiric clans.
Unlike recent games Shadows of New York and Coteries of New York, Swansong will lean more into traditional action gameplay, with players taking on an active role as one of three powerful vampires living in Boston.
As the power dynamic of your vampire clan shifts in Swansong, you’ll need to contend with ‘rumours of betrayal, murder, and power struggles’ as you protect your own and try to prevent Boston from falling into chaos and ruin.
While Swansong has gotten less attention than its Vampire: The Masquerade rival, Bloodlines 2, it looks set to be just as fun and intriguing as the rest of the franchise.
For now, we’ll have to wait longer to see more as the development team shifts their priorities to ensure Swansong is high quality, and that the team is able to avoid crunch.
