I'm not surprised. Very few games make it out of this kind of development hell. Even fewer make it out as good games.
My guess was the first studio was too activist (VtM is, by it's nature, a very political game, but my guess is that studio wanted IRL politics and went in hamfistedly and ignored all of the actual vampire thematics, theatrics, and lore. You know basically ignoring everything that makes it VtM while reeeeeeing about things that would get us whacked in the dick for violating r8 to talk about) and proceeded to burn a lot of goodwill away, more than they had gained, with the whole series of firings fiasco, which included Brian Mitsoda. Throw in too many meetings, too much management, probable other staffing issues, and not enough actual development, and the game was dead in the water. Which is pretty common to a lot of studios.
My guess is that this studio, despite having a decently storied name, is basically all fresh people with a dash of experience from other studios, working together largely for the first time, it's huge project with a very dedicated fanbase making this a make a studio break a studio game, and they're running into a fucking load of problems, not the least of which is constantly getting roasted about things like 'Elder vampire isn't crushing people 1v1?' 'Elder vampire willingly showing weakness?' 'F and Johnny Vamphand.'
Oh, and probably loads of PDX people breathing down their necks.
Do you know what we need? What would be easy to do? One with none of the problems like trying to do eco-terrorism without actually coming out and doing it like Earthblood? One that doesn't require 900 million endings and incredible depth of writing, just a couple of bad end endings and a good end ending with some decent characterization of some characters and a very straight forward, near impossible to fuck up storyline?
Imagine this: A tactics/warband/dungeon crawl game, (Breadth chosen in exact implementation for some flexibility) like XCOM, FFTactics, Phoenix Point, Mordheim, Necromunda, Mechanicus, Darkest Dungeon 1&2 but with Hunter the Reckoning. Include gribblies from at least Wraith, Werewolf, Mage, and Vampire. Fuck, maybe even throw in a Demon as a special boss battle off to the side.
It'd be grand, and fairly easy. High replay-ability, simple enough DLCs, support with mods, and then probably rake in cash.
