If you were excited about the upcoming Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which is currently in development by Hardsuit Labs and Paradox Interactive, with a scheduled release date of the first quarter of 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, and on PC for Steam, GOG.com, the Paradox Store, and the Epic Games Store, you might want to bottle up that excitement, put in a jar, slap it on a shelf, close the cupboard, and lock it up tight because there’s a huge sociopolitical uphill climb to get over before you can safely say that the game will actually be worth playing.

So first and foremost, various woke gaming outlets managed to get some exclusive scoops on the game during the announcement, which should definitely let you know where the developers’ favoritism lies. One such outlet is the anti–gamer, anti-#GamerGate, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda gaming news site, VG 24/7.

In their piece they revealed that the character creation has a pronoun selector, which is only ever popular with SJW game developers, like with Harebrained Schemes’ Battletech, which went out of its way to prevent players from making white characters. VG 24/7 explains…

“The character creator, which players get to use twice – once at the start to define your human aspects and then a second time later in the game to flesh out your vampire – goes way beyond basic male and female models. Body type, gender pronouns, employment history and fashion can all be toyed with for a very modular build.”

Most Centrists™ would ignore this, because it’s something they’ve been programmed to do by Liberal media. Everyone else with common sense will have their red flags raised.

However, it gets worse. As explained in the VG 24/7 piece, the game will be themed around modern day Seattle politics, with creative director Martin Ka’ai Cluney explaining…

“One of the reasons we went to Seattle for Bloodlines 2 is there’s a lot of conflict in Seattle that is a microcosm of a lot of conflict that’s going on all over the place. It just felt like a good place to start to ground it; the conflict between tradition and progress, conflict between money and artistic endeavours. A lot of those conflicts are happening right now and they’re very real. It seems like the perfect place to dig into something that feels very modern in terms of the conflict and also very timeless; grounding it in 2020 but also very much a descendent of what the original game was. “One of the reasons why that particular conflict attracted us so much was because it’s an inherently political conversation but it’s one of the few ones where it’s hard to… there are valid approaches. The world has to move forward, right? “It is a political game but I think it’s one of those few opportunities that gives us the chance to let people make their own political statement in a way that’s not cheap. I don’t believe you can look at both sides of a political argument without understanding both sides. It’s easy to say this is good and this is bad. But it’s definitely taking some political stances on what we think are right and wrong. In terms of the main conflict what is interesting is it’s one of those truly balanced issues.”

Now if the pronouns wasn’t much of a giveaway and the politics issue didn’t seem to sway you, maybe learning that the game was designed to subvert masculinity is enough to wake you up?

In an article published over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it was revealed that the game will retain its sexiness, but more-so oriented away from a masculine power-fantasy. Senior writer Cara Ellison – someone who has a long and storied, overlapping history with the anti-#GamerGate side and the person responsible for Hotline Miami 2 cutting the rape scene, which effectively got it banned in Australia – both explained and was paraphrased by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, to outline the game’s sociopolitical approach to gender representation…

“’I often look at like, how would someone feel sexy in this situation?’ she explained, and said that there are definitely characters in there that will be shipped like mad. ‘Everyone in the studio is like ‘Yeah I would definitely go for that one. He’s my bae,’ kind of stuff. They’re often very unusual choices.’ “She also said that they’re trying to broaden Bloodlines 2 from the more masculine power fantasy of the original, so that it appeals to way more people this time.”

Ellison reiterated this during an interview of the Bloodlines 2 livestream on Twitch.

Watch Tender from ParadoxInteractive on www.twitch.tv

If you’re unable to watch the clip, Ellison states…

“I feel like the politics have changed obviously, so I think the first game was kind of, of its time. So now the politics have moved on so we’re trying to write to the politics of now. So there’s a lot more… kind of… things that have changed so topics that we might discuss like we would totally push differently from the first one. So we’ve been thinking about that, too.”

Now some people might use the excuse “Who cares, Vampire: The Masquerade has always been about politics!” and that’s true. However, most people were engulfed in the game’s in-lore politics, not the real-world politics pulled out of today’s headlines. Just like, the original Blade movie was steeped in politics… but it was in-lore, vampire politics, not entirely related to the micro-politics of inter-societal squabbles and subcultural dissension.

Nevertheless, if subverting the “masculine power fantasy” wasn’t enough, and if adding pronouns wasn’t enough, and if a typically SJW-aligned former game journalists who worked at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who is now working as a senior writer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 wasn’t enough, I don’t really know what else to tell you… other than that they’ve mentioned that they may be pulling from the 5th edition of the Vampire: The Masquerade book, which features a member of the Vignettes named Rudi that didn’t go over too well with some gamers.

The review on Strange Assembly didn’t really bring up much about Rudi, but over on the Steam forums they linked to a description of Rudi, who is a gay, black, Muslim who fights against misogynists on behalf of oppressed minorities. It’s not a joke. You can read his description page yourself.

Whether or not Rudi will appear in the game is another story, but this was part of the modern day politics that turned off a lot of gamers.

Actually, the 5th edition of the Vampire: The Masquerade game book caused even more controversy than just having a gay, black, Muslim when it tried to portray a real life politician, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, as a bigoted mass murderer who captured, killed, and fed gay people to vampires. Kadyrov’s spokesperson condemned the developers and the game, prompting for Paradox to completely overhaul the White Wolf brand.

The Steam forums have also been on fire about all the talk about politics and pronouns and the general theme of Social Justice.

There is, however, one small caveat that might help save this game: Chris Avellone.

The long-time industry veteran confirmed via Twitter that he did work on the game, but in what capacity we don’t actually know. So it could be something as simple as a few lines of dialogue or as expansive as an entire DLC. However, his influence was understated — nay, not even mentioned during the livestream, which likely means he didn’t have as much input or say as the team members who were heading up the game’s Q&A during the announcement.

It was just as crazy when I got the call, trust me — Chris Avellone (@ChrisAvellone) March 22, 2019

Of course, there’s really no telling whether he did the influencing or was influenced during the development of the game.

And as usual, there will be a lot of people pushing back against this article and this kind of news in order to keep people blinded to Leftist propaganda, which has basically been the status quo for the last seven years.

Now in the case of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, it’s not a matter of whether or not Leftists are working on it (they are), or whether or not it will have influence of the Liberal progressive agenda (it does), or whether or not it will contain modern day politics (it will), it’s all a matter of degrees.

For the most part, people who are tired of all of the sociopolitical agitprop from the Left, they will likely “Nope!” out right now. For most people who don’t mind subversion and propaganda even though they don’t like it, they will probably still give the game a try. And for people who want to see more of the Liberal SJW agenda encroaching on the gaming industry, they will probably celebrate this news and will likely be excited about the scope of politics that will be present in the game.

(Thanks for the news tip Richard Gristle, zac za, and The Positivist)