There appear to be a number of issues plaguing the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 launch, including bugs, crashes, and performance issues. Publisher Paradox and developer The Chinese Room have listed the highest priority of these, assured players they’re being addressed, and suggested workarounds to use in the meantime.
Some workarounds are fairly crude, though. There are people who’ve found the Lasombra and Toreador clans – once destined to be paid DLC additions – are still locked when they play. The workaround? Update and reinstall the game. And there’s nothing yet to solve crashes on PS5 in particular. All that’s said is, “We are also working on some platform-specific performance issues, such as crashes on PS5.”
The other problems and workarounds:
- Problem: There’s no way to turn off motion-blur. Workaround: Try turning post-processing to low
- Problem: The game doesn’t launch or gets stuck on the starting screen. Workaround: Try running the game and launcher as an admin
- Problem: Seattle is not populating correctly (in the game!) with NPCS during quests. Workaround: Reload from the last save (an inconvenience considering you can’t manually save)
- Problem: The AZERTY keyboard does not work, or keybinding does not work. Workaround: Enable the QWERTY layout in Windows
Other issues mentioned include the lack of a field of vision slider, the ability to disable elements of the HUD, and “facial hair in character customisation” – which I presume means people want more than stubble as an option in the character customiser. But no workarounds or promises are listed alongside these. I assume they’re there to say “we’ve heard you and are working on this”.
Otherwise, Paradox, The Chinese Room, and Vampire: The Masquerade IP holder White Wolf thanked players for the support and encouraged them to keep sending in feedback via the bug report form.
I reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 for Eurogamer and sadly I didn’t think it was up to much. Every area of the game felt thin and lifeless to me, pardon the pun, though I didn’t have an entirely horrible time with it. Some characters were great, some of the action sequences were engaging, particularly later on, and occasionally the fantasy of being a very powerful elder vampire shone through.
