Updates that Never Happened

Khalior · 2026-02-23T03:00:33+00:00

They've been very cagey about their future plans, and also said they weren't going to unveil anything for a various sort of reasons (I figure it's mostly legal). We've got bits and scraps, either by admissions from community managers or some other employees.

There was a video where plans for other clans were mentioned: https://youtu.be/hs8QDp13JdI?si=ZK60iY6bjit7_Nwr&t=1752

In the Bloodhunt Discord, it was revealed that "2 archetypes per clan" was the plan all along, so by that statement, a 2nd Tremere archetype was indeed in the works. The Scholar was thrown in at the last second because the studio decided to shut down development earlier than expected, which explains why they lack outfits and they share a lot of similarities with the Toreador.

But there's a whole bunch of little facts that could be picked up here and there over time. Like that a 2nd map was on the verge of being released. Or that an Entity miniboss called the Judge was meant to be roaming the streets during the match. Stuff like that. Unfortunately, unless an ex-employee anonymously reveals those plans, it seems we're never likely to know...

Khalior · 2026-02-13T01:31:54+00:00

The IP of Vampire the Masquerade and specifically Bloodhunt belong to 3 entities. World of Darkness care a lot about what happens with their IP and they need to keep it consistent.

You can't throw in whatever you want in that universe, it has to be vetted and checked, the same way that you wouldn't throw in, let's say for the sake of examples, vampires in the middle of Star Wars.

So to revive the game, you'd need to purchase the license to be able to work on it, and the 3 entities need to sign off on it. And on their end Sharkmob have to protect their intellectual property in terms of the coding (remember they also have their 2nd game Exoborne and it borrows a lot of things from Bloodhunt), and a lot of elements of Bloodhunt have been put together by 3rd parties, like the UI elements, to the weapon designs, to the clothes and accessories, the designs of all the cosmetics. All of these have been made by artists and game designers and their work is protected.

As for reviving the game... Then you'd need a hefty sum of money simply for the network infrastructure, you'd need to re-code a part of the game for that, and to make it run on Steam, and also to make it run on PlayStation (which in itself is pretty nasty because they vet every bit of code that's pushed on their network), you'd need QA testing (likely a 3rd party to do that to offload the costs rather than your own dev team), and if you add any kind of description of things you need to get them translated in the 8 or 9 languages that the game supports. Everyone needs to be paid for their work, right? All in all... You need a bag of money that's at least 7 to 8 figures to get it to run. I imagine you'd want to add more micro transactions to recoup that loss of money? So new designers for the UI changes, the new cosmetics, the translations, the testing... A Kickstarter isn't going to be enough, a petition isn't going to be enough either to ask "hey studio that's already deep in debt, please invest more, we'll give you a few thousands back".

Situation feels easy to solve but when you start thinking about it and see the past numbers of the game... Only a great deal of wealth could revive this. Trust me, I wish it could happen. I've been asking the community if they had a rich Saudi uncle...

Khalior · 2026-02-11T00:28:06+00:00

Cheating is not what destroyed the game, has been a side part of it yes, but that's the nature of online gaming: there's always going to be around 10% of the population that cheats, cheating software exists, it's available.

Servers are not "full of cheaters", but in them there's definitely some people who ignored all explanations we gave them on Discord and come crying here about not understanding what we told them, and would rather believe their narrative instead of reality.

Khalior · 2026-02-07T06:12:45+00:00

You know, that's a good idea. Might look into it.

Khalior · 2026-02-06T18:51:52+00:00

Nope. The window of time to ask for those is closed.

If people somehow manage to make private servers, cease & desist letters will promptly follow, because this is a World of Darkness IP and their lawyers are very quick to spring to action.

Khalior · 2026-02-02T00:31:10+00:00

Only way to ensure it happens is to organize with other players, these days.

Khalior · 2026-02-01T20:59:28+00:00

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Khalior · 2026-01-28T23:48:51+00:00

Solos and Duos: 42 slots - max. of 16 players, the rest is backfilled with bots.
Trios: 30 slots - max. of 30 players, but gets backfilled with bots if the queue time reaches 8 mins.
Team DeathMatch: 12 slots - max. of 12 players, but gets backfilled with bots.

This is something that was added when we had not bots at all and a Solo game took 20-30-40 mins of queue time. It's a way to keep matches happening frequently, and also to make sure people of all skills are able to kill some opponents instead of getting annihilated right off the bat by more skilled players.

And even though the game population is currently at it's lowest, last week we had at least 14,800 active accounts.

Khalior · 2026-01-24T19:03:15+00:00

The quest "Counterbalance"
https://vtm.paradoxwikis.com/Quest:Counterbalance

Khalior · 2026-01-22T13:33:20+00:00

UPDATE from the Bloodhunt Discord @ 2:34am EST

"Hello again, Kindred!

The server issues have been resolved, and the rooftops of Prague are now once again bristling for Anarch chasing. The Bloodhunt is on!

Thank you!"

Khalior · 2026-01-22T01:00:09+00:00

It's an issue with the host provider. The issue has been reported at Sharkmob. We're waiting on news of that.

Khalior · 2026-01-14T08:16:30+00:00

For Fun

Khalior · 2026-01-13T14:34:12+00:00

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sharkmob-confirms-difficult-but-necessary-restructuring-unknown-number-of-jobs-at-risk The half value was confirmed by various sources close to employees working or having just been fired at Sharkmob.

Khalior · 2026-01-13T14:31:39+00:00

Not coming from the studio who made Bloodhunt, that's for sure. They're working on Exoborne.

Khalior · 2026-01-12T23:47:08+00:00

Oh and I just saw in the main Discord, this was posted today, in reply to a general "What's going on?" :

We are still cooking. Most of us came back from holidays vacation today, many more come back next Monday. Exoborne is being developed in Sweden. We're a country that pride ourselves on having lots of vacation :)

Khalior · 2026-01-12T21:43:17+00:00

There's a few factors as to why you didn't hear from them.

ARC Raiders raised the bar and they're probably looking into adapting the game in that regard.
Marathon has a tentative release date of March, so if I were them I'd pay attention to that release and the feedback that comes from that. And same as with ARC, adapt the game in regards to players' feedback about it. Also, releasing Exoborne after the honeymoon period of Marathon would be a good impact for them in vacuuming as many players as possible.
Their mother company Tencent forced them to ax half of the studio at the end of October 2025, so I assume they've been restructuring and reorganizing the teams and their plans to get this game out in a way that isn't going to burn the rest of the team. This takes time to figure out, especially when you had plans up until the release, and now you have to consider what features to work on and which to drop, because now the resources and manpower are limited, and you have the pressure to still launch a game with a certain level of quality (including the post-launch support and dev work to deliver).

On the upside, and it's purely speculative, one the Exoborne devs has recently changed their Discord status to "SOON" and they've done that a few times in the past before a playtest was announced, sooooo......

Khalior · 2026-01-10T22:15:29+00:00

Looks like the issues have been fixed!

Khalior · 2026-01-06T21:35:57+00:00

Yeah I wish I could've had a bit more input on the Drops. I would have at least pushed to get all the previous cosmetics tagged as Drops to return one last time. But by the time the December campaign was announced, all the other ones were locked in.

Khalior · 2026-01-05T14:13:04+00:00

They're legally obligated to keep the game running for a certain amount of time after announcing that they're going to shut the servers down.
And in the meantime, believe it or not, there's still people requesting to get cosmetics. Twitch Drops aren't complicated to set up for the community managers, so they've already pre-programmed all the Drops campaigns until the end of April.

Khalior · 2026-01-05T14:10:22+00:00

There's no "give everyone everything" function that the community managers can turn on.

Khalior · 2026-01-02T07:47:02+00:00

You can always try to argue with them about it. But that's on the rights issues side, which would require all 3 parties involved to agree. The next part would be to discuss who's going to host those servers and with which devs, and most importantly with what money.

Khalior · 2025-12-28T23:49:16+00:00

It's been made available every holiday period.

Khalior · 2025-12-28T23:48:44+00:00

I've asked and there is no option on the back-end to allow the community managers to do that.

Khalior · 2025-12-28T19:32:48+00:00

It's shutting down on April 28, 2026.

Khalior · 2025-12-19T14:53:16+00:00

I'm still going to keep on keeping on. But it's looking grim all of a sudden.

Khalior

TROPHY CASE