The Winter Update

Season’s greetings, Kindred, and welcome to the first post-launch Dev Diary for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. Today, we will go through what’s included in the Winter Update, including details of the Custom Difficulty setting, the new cosmetic options to get you in a festive mood, and the changelog.

Description: New variations of the Holiday-themed customisation options for Phyre.

Custom Difficulty

Why we’ve added Custom Difficulty

The base game came with 4 difficulties (Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard) and even before launch we knew we wanted to add more options for players to make the game harder or easier, as “correct” difficulty is very personal to each player. As a post launch update, we targeted Custom Difficulty at players that have already completed the game, to provide more difficulty variety or simple mess around in their future playthroughs. Doing this allowed us to list options that are effectively cheats, or could make a playthrough for a new player impossibly hard. We look forward to seeing the combinations you will try and what challenges you set yourself.

Description: The menu of selecting difficulty options.

How to unlock Custom Difficulty

Custom Difficulty is available for all players that have collected “An Elder Unchained” achievement/trophy. This is awarded for completing the game on any difficulty as any clan.

Once unlocked Custom Difficulty will be available in the difficulty select menu after you select New Game.

Selecting Custom Difficulty presents you with a menu of options that you can tailor to your liking and will apply for the whole playthrough.

NOTE: Unlike the 4 base game difficulties (Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard) you cannot change custom difficulty once the playthrough is started, so think carefully. Description: Menu selection showing some of the options you can change.

What you can change

The Custom Difficulty settings are divided into four groups: HUD, PLAYER, ENEMIES, PROGRESSION.

HUD: Reactive Crosshair - Use this setting to disable the crosshair reacting to nearby secrets or collectables. Applies to both Phyre and Fabien quests. This is for players that want to increase the challenge of exploration and test their memory.

HUD: Character Reaction UI - Use this setting to disable the UI shown during conversations that

states the impact of your dialogue choices - e.g. “Lou liked that” or “Fabien hit a wall”. Applies to both Phyre and Fabien quests. Can make conversations more immersive at the cost of clarity.

PLAYER: Elixir Capacity - Set the maximum number of Elixirs you can carry for each type from 0-10. 0 makes combat significantly harder and 10 much easier. Applies to both Phyre and Fabien quests.

PLAYER: Starting Health - Sets the size of Phyre’s health-bar at the start of the game. The default balance is 2 bars of health. Can increase up to 4 bars to make the start of the game easier or reduce to a fraction of a single bar to make the early game harder. The health-bar can still be extended further by collecting the marks drawn with Phyre’s blood.

PLAYER: Phyre’s Damage - Use this setting to increase or decrease the damage inflicted by Phyre’s attacks. Increase the damage to make combat easier or decrease to make it harder.

PLAYER: Masquerade Sensitivity - Use this setting to increase or decrease the rate at which the Masquerade meter fills when performing actions that break the Masquerade. Can reduce the rate to make the game easier, or increase the rate to make it harder. Can also set to NONE to disable the Masquerade meter completely and freely act like