Posted in: Games, Tabletop | Tagged: Modiphius Entertainment, paradox Interactive, Vampire the Masquerade, White Wolf Publishing
White Wolf No Longer Writing Vampire: The Masquerade Moving Forward
While Wolf Publishing announced this past week that they are officially handing over creative control of Vampire: The Masquerade to other entities. The company came under heavy criticism from players leading up to the official publishing of 5th Edition, which saw beta testers criticizing some of the content within the guide, some of which they claimed pointed toward neo-Nazi sympathizing and homophobia, as well as getting flack for themes about sexual assault. Despite the company having to come out and make a statement against these claims and condemning those behaviors and ideologies, as well as editing out those portions of the beta out of the final product, the company was still felt the criticism and has been seeing sluggish sales because of it.
Following more issues with the 5E Camarilla and Anarch books, the company published a statement letting fans know that changes would be coming to the company's structure back in November. This week, we now know that after White Wolf folded back into Paradox Interactive and stopped being a separate entity under the banner, the decision was made to have Modiphius Entertainment take over the reins of the franchise, while Paradox will have final approval on all creative endeavors and the direction of the series.
On the one hand, it's kind of disappointing that it had to come to this, but on the other hand, something needed to be done to dig the company out of the publicity hole it dug itself into. As per our review, the current version of Vampire: The Masquerade is a pretty good RPG, but it is clunky and needs some fine tuning (creative issues aside). We're not saying they need to scrap it and get to work on 6th Edition, but it certainly could use the help moving forward.