Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong: A game of choices, consequences, and vampires

Sharing is caring!

In 2015 a collective of developers from Cyanide, Blizzard Entertainment, and Ubisoft formed a new studio focused on mature, inward-looking narrative-based RPGs. Their first effort was The Council, an episodic interactive mystery adventure RPG set in 1793 and its delivery cemented the team’s love of the genre. It’s also what led Big Bad Wolf to try its hand at expanding the narrative of Vampire: The Masquerade in a new video game: Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong.

“Our last game, The Council, was also a Narrative RPG game, meaning a game where the player’s actions have consequences that can dramatically change the outcome of the story, whether via dialogues and direct actions, or by the way the player chooses to build his/her/their character sheet,” said Eliott Hipeau, lead quest designer at the studio. “We knew we wanted to continue iterating on this genre, as it’s really core to the DNA of the studio. We also have big fans of Vampire: The Masquerade in the team, and we quickly discovered that a social, political and story based roleplaying game like Vampire was the perfect fit for our next project.”

Next, the studio had to settle on a location for its game. They selected Boston because, while it plays a role in the tabletop games, it hadn’t been visited recently by the slew of games coming out set in the wider universe of World of Darkness.

To read the rest of this story, which first ran on May 19, 2022, visit the Epic Games Store.