>>723993806
>Vampires are supposed to be cool as fuck, how do you fuck that up?
Easily, but this demands a bit of a breakdown. There's like 2~3 schools of thought as to what vampires are:
>Nosferatu
Cursed batlike motherfuckers out of some torn-down castle fucking around in NIMBY land. Stoker's Dracula is the blueprint here, collating a bunch of superstition into some foe for the Byronic man.
>(Sexual) Assault Vehicles
Anne Rice shit, with a side of Carmilla (change proportions as you like). They by definition go almost exclusively social, and make it sexy enough so that people stick around for the ride/fetishize it. Basically amounts to navel-gazing stuff like ennui.
>Pulp
Near Dark, Underworld, tons of vampire vs werewolf crap. Super low-brow, exists just for slasher fun and tits. VTM is here, with dashes of the other stuff to hook people.

All of that is kind of irrelevant to what kind of game the devs want to make, though. They gotta have 3 things:
>vision
>direction
>message
For VTMB all three should be plenty obvious - if it's not, just imagine Rik Schaffer walking out of an LA prison in '04, and take it from there. For BL2, however, all 3 things have the same answer, and that is:
>money
Or, if I'm being charitable, survival, cause they got bought out (minority stake, but still) by Tencent recently. Now, they can continue being creatively bankrupt even longer - and creatively bankrupt people make shitty games.

Hope that answers your question.