Turns out it might be a misread from Gamespot's peeps, as there is a preview elsewhere that mentions the direct opposite.
That's good to hear. It would have put a nail in the coffin *boom-tish* of the game's moral complexity.
On a similar note, the most important thing any RPG needs to nail is characters that feel TRUE. And I think this gets overlooked when talking about the politics of a game world. For example, the original VTMB's portrayal of vampire hunters was a cartoonish cliche. They tried to kill you, you killed them back. That was really all there was to it. There was no nuance. No feeling that these characters were real people with sincere beliefs fighting for something they believed in. In general terms, vampire fiction has long had a problem with vampire characters who are dicks because, well, because they're vampires. There's been a tendency to shortcut beliefs, history, motivations, etc in favor of "They're a vampire so they're a smug dick that kills people." It's my hope that VTMB 2 features a world filled with characters from all walks of life, varying belief systems, varying day to day (or night to night) perspectives.
Vampire fiction often suffers from vampires being a bizarre stand-in for whatever interest group the writers felt sympathetic towards that morning in the writer's room. A question such as, "Should vampires be exterminated? If we are a vampire, is that a goal we should work towards? Or should we fight to protect vampire kind. Even fight for supremacy over the humans. How should vampires treat humans?"
I really disliked that mission in VTMB where VV sent you to kill that stripper vampire hunter. Maybe I don't WANT to kill the vampire hunter. Maybe I think that vampires careless enough to get noticed by stripper vampire hunters deserve what is coming to them. That should be my choice. It's an RPG after all. I really hope VTMB 2 lives up to that potential. VTMB is the strain of RPG where player self-expression extends to the sides they take on murky issues with unclear outcomes. And the very cornerstones of vampirism are among those issues. In the words of Adam Jensen, "I never asked for this." Yet at the same time, cybernetic implants and being undead are quite different, aren't they?
Those questions get super awkward when writers start using vampires as babby's first interest group metaphor -- I'm looking at you, True Blood. Oh, I just a killed a dude but people are mean to me for some reason. I'm the victim here! Heck, it's the same problem something like Dragon Age had with its Mages as some kind of weird persecuted minority analogy.
"Hi, I'm a mage."
"You're going to do blood magic, aren't you," asks the Templar, eyes narrowing.
"Holy shit! Does the persecution never end?" screams the Mage, as the audience scoffs at the bigoted templar.
*15 minutes, and one blood sacrifice later*
"I had no other option!" whines the mage, "This is totally the Templar's fault because they suspected that I would kill people to use in arcane blood rituals and that made me turn to blood magic."
"This is just like how bombing funerals creates terrorists," muse the writers to themselves as they huff their own farts.