Code Vein 2: How to kill a successful new IP
Peak gaming hours on the first Saturday after launch and it cannot even crack 12,000 players. The refund button is likely seeing more action than the game itself.
Bandai Namco is on a roll lately. We watched Blue Protocol crash and burn last year, and now we have this. You know your game is Dead on Arrival when it is a Saturday, the absolute prime time for gaming a day after release, and your highest player peak is not even half of the first game's record from over six years ago. It is sitting at a stable, pathetic 52% positive review rating on Steam.
Today we are talking about the disgusting failure that is Code Vein 2.
For context, I played the first one. I stopped around the halfway point at the Cathedral of Sacred Blood because the level design was lacking and confusing. Yet even then the game had charm and personality. In a sea of generic 'Souls-likes', it easily stood out with its hard gothic vibes. It sold over 3 million copies as a brand new, niche anime-style IP which was a huge win. It just needed more polish and a bigger budget. For a long time, many people including myself wondered when the improved sequel would come. We waited six yearsโฆ
First off, the technical disaster:
The move to Unreal Engine 5 is just plain and simple a mistake. Nobody asked for this engine shift if they could not optimise it. The performance is currently a huge issue, with stuttering and frame drops that make the game a chore to play. But technical issues can be patched. The real rot is in the design.
The Elden Ring envy and removal of Co-op:
They chased the trend and built an open world that no one asked for. Unlike the game they are copying, this world lacks density or unique content. It is just a pointless open world for the sake of being open world. Worse yet, this design choice gave them the excuse to remove one of the biggest selling points of the franchise.
I am talking about co-op. Instead of improving the multiplayer functionality, they seemingly decided it was too much trouble to make it work in their empty open map. So they removed a CORE pillar of the Code Vein community and slapped in an AI companion instead. It feels like a completely different game wearing the skin of Code Vein. It wears the gothic vampire aesthetic but it has no soul of its own. It is just a generic open-world anime game that does not even look much improved visually.
Localisation and the 'modern audience':
The out-of-touch executives at Bandai did not stop there. Next we have the 'global modern audience' chasing. This is the Reddit and Twitter Americanising and sanitising of Japanese games.
There is a line in the game where the original Japanese dialogue discusses the fine line between Justice and "Madness" (Kyลki). The 'localisers' changed this to "Bigotry". It literally has no context in this post-apocalyptic world. It makes no sense in the lore and is purely American political garbage injected into a script where it does not belong.
The sterilisation of the game:
Then we have the blatant censorship. It goes beyond just the outfits. The entire presentation has been sterilised. The first game was unapologetic about its style. A huge part of the community enjoyed showing off their characters and fashion as it is a selling point of the genre.
Now, they have not only added shorts and spats to outfits ported from the first game, but they have locked down the camera angles in photo mode and toned down the physics. It feels like the developers are terrified of their own character creator. They have taken a Mature rated franchise and stripped it down to a safe, corporate "Teen" product to please a consultancy firm. They removed the edge that made the IP unique.
The virtue signalling tourists:
This is where the discourse gets truly toxic. You have these people on social media defending this rubbish with malicious virtue signalling. They swarm the comments to mock valid criticism as "gooner" behaviour. These people are not customers. They are tourists. They have no intention of buying the game, yet they get off on seeing a product ruined for the actual fans just to validate their own sense of moral superiority. They actively cheer for the sanitisation of art they do not consume, just to "own" the people who do. It is pathetic.
Look at Stellar Blade. That was a fairly mid game in terms of gameplay innovation, yet it sold over 6 million copies precisely because the developers stuck to their vision. They kept the fanservice and did not sanitise their art for a Western market. Bandai did the opposite and they are paying the price, again.
โ The Verdict
This is straight up a DOA game. That 52% rating and low player count is a death sentence. Unlike the first game, it has no community and no co-op legs to keep it alive.
To top it all off, the game ships with Denuvo DRM. The irony is palpable. They are actively adding more to the game's poor performance with heavy anti-tamper software to "protect sales" for a game that people just arenโt even buying. They are paying a premium to guard a pile of rubbish that nobody wants to steal.
They can try to fix the UE5 performance, but by chasing an audience that does not buy their games and actively mocking the people who do, they have ensured this game is a failure in every metric.
Thanks, Sony and America! I was looking forward to this, but maybe I will just play it a year or two from now when the "Complete Edition" is ยฃ20.