The battle royale’s servers will stay open, though
Vampire: The Masquerade‘s battle royale is winding down. Developer Sharkmob has announced it is ending further development on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.
Fully launched from Early Access in April 2022, the studio says in today’s blog post that Bloodhunt did not reach the “critical mass” of players it needed to sustain development.
“Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.”
The Bloodhunt servers, however, will stay live for as long as the game has an active community, Sharkmob says. The studio is working on some solutions for sustaining the game long-term, including an in-game player voting system to “regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh.” Those will arrive in the upcoming final update. After that, patches will only cover maintenance.
Currency purchasing will be turned off on September 26. Prior to that, Sharkmob plans to implement a way to earn in-game tokens so players can continue playing and unlocking cosmetics past the shut-off.
“While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end, please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games,” said the studio.
On the hunt
Bloodhunt was certainly a different take on the genre. Despite it not clicking with me, I did see at least a few people get into it, and I like seeing fresh ideas in a space that’s become as crowded as battle royales had become when Bloodhunt fully launched in April 2022.
Many live service games have come and gone over the last few years, though. Fellow battle royale Hyper Scape shut its doors last year. And the start of 2023 saw the closure of multiple live service projects, from Rumbleverse and Knockout City to Apex Legends Mobile.
Still, I look forward to seeing what the Bloodhunt crew does next. It sounds like those who enjoy the vampire battle royale will, at least, still have ways of taking part in it well after Sharkmob has moved on.
More Stories by Eric Van Allen
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