Yes, no ... More in the sense of how much more any writer and developer getting their paws on the franchise is able to twist it into something only The Perennially Outraged™ would recognize - and enjoy - if they even play any of it after being done storming publishers, writers, developers. That's about how it could become worse than this failed effort of Bloodlines II could ever have.

probably dev team wanted to push representation more than to make a good game

That seems to have been perfected, though. It smells like something else entirely. Remember, the outraged are not really genuinely outraged, these days. My guess is, they were upset they couldn't find a reason to be outraged at the devs. Outrage makes money, and there's nothing to do here to explain the shortcomings.

Following the footsteps of Bloodlines 1. I'm still hoping it's good.

You joke but I'd be super excited with this ;)

Obviously never going to happen, but I can imagine 2 more years of polish on the Cyberpunk engine modded to smaller "hub" cities like in Witcher 2, with Vampire abilities sort of modelled after the way potions worked in that game (a bit more deliberate, impactful) and a smattering of the investigation stuff in Witcher 3...

The melee combat in Cyberpunk was actually awesome...

If the CDPR of the past, the ones who developed The Witcher 2 and 3, were to develop Bloodlines 2, it would be awesome. But the current CDPR who botched Cyberpunk so severely would be completely overextended with a successor to VTM:Bloodlines. They would make your joke a reality, just change some textures, release a buggy GTA clone and call it the best vampire game ever.

This is easily one of the more baffling ideas I've read for a project.

imho it is only leadership fail for cyberpukk the dev team could be still great
i wonder why they wanted their own engine, who in their right mind wants to make an engine for an average looking shooter game...

That's true. The dev team probably did their best, but they may well be shackled by an overly meddlesome and incompetent management. Just like the communication of the mods with the customers in this forum was probably shackled by the PR-management.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - they were f$&#ed by the decision to shoehorn the game into last gen consoles. I can't even imagine the amount of time, effort and energy they spent just to produce a barely (if at all) playable version of the game.

I say this as someone who enjoyed the game for what it was, AND played it on Win 7 (probably another decision that cost them valueable time and energy even though I totally appreciate it).

As someone who occasionally visits the dark underbelly of PC gaming forums I can tell you many are genuinely outaged by anything they see as "PC," just like many on the other side are genuinely outraged by anything they see as offensive. The culture war is in full swing, don't underestimate how crazy it's making people. Bloodlines 2 was constantly bashed for being developed by evil "California socialist soy boys."

According to recent insider whistleblower declarations, precisely the success of pulling out The Witcher 3 by sheer crunching, seems to have established a sort of elite within CDPR that to a large extent (allegedly) exerts a toxic influence. According to these declarations he devs who were working on that project would have spread a culture of mismanagement while making Cyberpunk 2077 where everything was considered to be solvable by crunching. Eventually, this lead to miscalculation and simply there was too much to solve. Compound this with the urgency to reach deadlines and you find a product that by Christmas was not 100% ready, and an unhealthy work atmosphere.

Another way of "dying of success". In this case, for learning the wrong lessons from the success of The Witcher 3.

Essentially, as you would proably know, big productions had budgets around 40 million $. Now they can be about 120 million $, yet the prices remain around 50$ and, most importantly, the customer base has not really increased too much. This means big pressures to make games profitable, while trying to manage larger and larger budgets that increase the complexity of the work to be done. Again, whistleblowers claim that workers in the industry are pawns that are expected to crunch without complaining, with pressure from both bosses and peers. There are some managers that have been devs themselves that try to curtail this, but they remain a tiny minority overall.

crunch is very good thing , if somebody doesnt like it they should just refuse and take smaller wage ,easy

they spend more money but they expect more buyers in return , if they overspend that is entirely the leaders fault
i bet most of dont need these supercostly games , just look at Valheim 5 guys made that game already 3+ million sold units they got rich , no need for fancy super large games
and i bet these guys crunched a lot , they deserve the money for their hard work

At least Mitsoda would be great to have back but to make an educated guess if this would happen under Microsoft's tutelage would require information on why he was so unceremoniously booted off in the first place, so - who knows...

Rumor has it that the whole thing has been given to Paradox's other Seattle-based internal studio Harebrained Schemes in the meantime. Which is not the worst alternative to go with, if true.