Well, it has extended to that to a certain degree - if you demand pay for your work, like, ever, in the third game particularly, people tend to sneer about Witchers being money-hungry assholes on top of disgusting mutants.
So, basically an evolution of the already existing paranoia surrounding Witchers. It’s not what the original hate was about, but it’s been umbrella’d in all the same.
I mean its pretty logical to go from ‘This is an abomination’ to ‘How dare this abomination demand something from me when I’m already being nice tolerating its existence?!’.
Like at this point in the story, ‘chasing monsters that bother us’ is what peasants consider the bare minimum for a Witcher to be tolerated and not get pummeled by stones on sight so obviously they get pissed when someone demand actual payment when they’re already not being run-out of the town.
I tried that one too and ran into the same problem you ran into in your first playthrough in both my (full) playthroughs and it actually sounds like you’ve actually got a bit farther in your second playthrough than I’ve managed to in any of my playthroughs. So I wonder if you could tell me how you managed to pass your first test, like how high your magic and light magic stats were then(spoiler if you like)? Because I wonder if you need to max the light stat by increasing it at every opportunity in order to pass that test, since my character never really had any major increases to his dark magic, but it still wasn’t enough.
Speaking more generally, I don’t mind that there’s a chance of getting a bad ending as your ending at the end of a cog/hg/wip or whatever by failing stat checks. But I do really dislike it when the only avoid that is by maxing 1-3 stats(out of many more) that the cog/hg/wip or whatever treats as particularly important. And I also prefer it when success or failure doesn’t hinge on your MC passing all stat checks, but there instead are more checks that give you a chance for success and failure and your MC only need to succeed in some of them in order to ultimately succeed, like in The Lost Heir Trilogy and the Pon Para series. Both those series also include several different paths to victory, where every scene with stat check that may make the difference between significant success and failure and even ultimate success and failure, include many different stat checks options, at least 3-4. But if you have the combination of high risk of disastrous failure and a really narrow path to victory, like you seem to have in A Trial of Souls, things quickly become frustrating. In that sense I guess it’s better that it’s not been made an official HG, since that certainly wouldn’t have made for a fun reading/playing experience, to put it mildly. And it’s a shame that things are like that in that not quite-WIP, since I quite enjoyed the part up til the actual trial. But things were quite relaxed and easy stat check-wise before that and don’t prepare you for the difficulty level of the actual trial at all, and that is a major error, if there’s going to be some significant and difficult stat checks near the end of COG or HG, it’s important that the reader/player get some warning about that in advance.
Hiding because of spoilers:
Sure! I maxed the Necromancy stats in every oportunity, these were my stats right before the ritual:
I also freed the Necromancer Arundel and refused the boon in light Magic when It was offered tô me
So I was sent to a place Full of skeletons and they gave me this advice:
And I focused on the objective and… died again. Oh my god I hate this game. Maybe the author didn’t finished it?
You have failed yourself, your comrades and the world.
Wow, okay, there’s something I hate, being browbeaten about getting it wrong and losing - ESPECIALLY if it’s a situation like yours, where there was no reason for things to have gone wrong in the first place but for the fact that the story seems to have been written with a heavy bias against a certain play style.
I know in written mediums, you can’t just leave it at “whoops, game over, pal,” you have to explain exactly how things went wrong. That’s fine, I have no problem with that. Seeing how things blow up in my face will help me not do that again. But damn, dude, I already know I got the bad ending, what makes you think needling me about it does anything of worth?
Being told “you died” when you die? Well, yeah, I watched myself die, that’s not insulting, it’s just what happened.
Hearing “mission failed, we’ll get ‘em next time” When you beef it and lose a round? Yeah, it sucks, but at least the game’s trying to encourage you to try again.
Getting slapped in the face with something on the order of, “I’ll never know what would have happened if I hadn’t been such a massive screw up, maybe I could have prevented all this, but apparently I suck too much, oh well,” that’s when I drop that game on its lousy ass and go play something else.
(Fun fact: that was a loose call-out of the “that’s the end of my story” narrations for losing in Indigo Prophecy, where the characters narrate how everything went wrong and now they’ll never know how the situation resolves because the game’s over for them. It’s real cute when David Cage games try and beat you over the head with failure, considering they were made by David Cage.)
Okay one trope I have hated since childhood is that one convenient misunderstanding in a story that carries the rest of the story’s plot (usually in an episodic story but also in other stories too) because the characters became too dumb or unaware that they could just explain the misunderstanding and get that shit over with???
And in worst case scenarios where they should reasonably be given that chance, a random event happens continue that “will they won’t they” of infuriating episodic miscommunication.
This might just be a pet peeve of mine.
One that always gets me is when “a moment” (usually romantic) keeps getting interrupted before it can happen. Like the two characters look into each other’s eyes, lean in, and then “so and so barges through the door” at that exact time and the moment is broken. Once I think can be cute and build tension, but it drives me nuts when it happens over and over and is the only thing the author uses to create suspense haha
“If the people involved would act like adults for five minutes, we wouldn’t have a plot” is a major turnoff, yeah. It’s just lazy writing done over and over again.
Give me legitimate disputes that people can argue over even if they have all the facts!
Even worse is when it’s the other way around and that misunderstanding shoves some wholly unqualified dude who knows they’re unqualified into a job they didn’t sign on for, and because nobody will give them the time of day to clear up the matter, they’re forced into a situation where they just have to wing it, and then everybody acts like they’ve been led on when, surprise surprise, the dude turns out to not be qualified for the job they were shoved into.
“Wait, I thought you were supposed to be a pro at cracking locks?”
“At what point in time have I ever said that? At what point in time was I ever given the chance to say otherwise?!”
It’s just a plot beat that’s never connected with me.
This is something I hate about Wayhaven, as much as I love the books. They do this a lot, right before a revelation about feelings then the rest of Unit Bravo comes over, as if there are not moments of quiet where the Detective and their RO could have plenty of time to talk to one another.
That drove me crazy in book 2’s N route. And I loved N in Book 1!
The thing that always bugs me is the implication that the Detective wouldn’t have had hundreds of opportunities outside of the ones shown to talk to Nate about it lmao
This is because it’s more about romance plots than the characters themselves. The ROs seem to shape the romance, to an extent, but Sera flat out said in a recent ask about A and M that, and this is a direct quote:
But their routes will be angsty and heavier to begin with. It’s just the type of romances I want to write for them.
So the plot is dictating character action rather than the other way around. She wants A and M to be long haul plots where the MC doesn’t get very far with them until way down the road, and she wants them to be angst-filled for most of the “romances.”
Once she said that, I pretty much realized that there will be brief moments of seeming progress with A and M, followed almost immediately by taking several steps backwards, before there is resolution several books from now.
With N, it will be N holding back and having interruptions until she decides it can progress. If I had to bet, there will be a lot of progress in b3. In a very old ask, she had given an idea of when to expect there to be an actual romance with the ROs, and N and F were tagged for b3 or beginning of b4.
The amount of misunderstandings that have lead to my partner not talking to me for an entire day demonstrates that this trope has legs. One misunderstanding leads to another. Then leads to confirmation bias. When everything is said and done, the exact words are no longer remembered and only interpretation of what was said is left. Which leads to an argument of “That’s not what I said.” and “Are you calling me a liar?” or “Stop trying to gaslight me”.
I understand what you are saying. Too often the misunderstanding does not have enough support or is not done properly to merit the conflict to carry on for the length of time that it does. The fact that humans are so emotional and become illogical which said emotions sometimes kicks the “being an adult” thought process out the window.
I see we’ve been assimilated into another topic, it was inevitable that this would happen.
I swear, the more I hear about the Wayhaven romance routes, the happier I am that I went no-romance and therefore don’t have to deal with it.
Setting the genders of gender-variable ROs based on the PC’s sexuality.
There are a lot of reasons I’m not fond of this mechanic, including:
but most of all, I dislike how it prioritizes the character’s status as a RO over everything else. Out of all the ways and reasons to set a character’s gender — RNG, player-choice, storytelling potential, cast-balancing, subverting topes, setting verisimilitude — the winning consideration is making them fuckable in the eyes of the PC.
It’s a decision that says, “this character was designed to be an RO first, and a character second”§.
To be clear, I don’t think RO first / character second design is bad design. A romance game should ultimately prioritize the characters’ design as romance options over other considerations. A romance game with incredible characters you can’t actually romance because they aren’t attracted to the PC or dead by Chapter 2 fails harder at being a romance game than one that has romanceable cardboard cutouts.
This gripe isn’t so much with romance games (though I’d argue allowing the player to chose RO genders is still often better due to the other reasons above) but with games that ostensibly care just as much about things other than romance only to have NPCs’ genders determined by the PC’s sexuality.
If you have platonic paths and romantic paths, but NPC gender is determined by PC sexuality, those paths aren’t on equal footing.
When obviously romance-inclined ROs never get together with anyone else or so much as mention past relationships, who was that design decision for?
If I’m constantly encountering/dodging romance tropes (e.g., only one bed, mistaken as lovers, undercover as lovers, falling on your RO) and repeatedly being asked whether the PC is experiencing attraction every time an RO breathes onscreen, is it really true the game “cares just as much about friendships :)”?
Again, this is not to say romance-prioritizing design is bad! Because of course it isn’t. I just wish more games were upfront about it. Making “platonic relationships just as viable” is a noble design goal, but it’s hard to prioritize them both and they often call for mutually exclusive design choices.
§ Unless you’re making Choice of The Bachelor(ette) or any game where all the ROs being a gender you’d be attracted to makes sense in narrative.
Romance is the only genre where I just turn off my brain 
, its best served with little to no critical thinking on my part. Unless otherwise or the romance is a subplot. But if it’s the main course, nah.So I will leave the critiquing for the smarter folks.
What if the game let you pick the gender individually of the ROs instead of a blanket sweep to have them all meet your preference? Like as they are introduced you get the option for selecting the gender. Would that fix your issue with with gender variable ROs?
I typically like to be respectful on threads relating to specific games, so this is as good of a place as any to rant:
Damn it, I feel like every new WIP thread is fantasy or occasionally science fiction. Granted, I know that people have a right to write what they want to. But if I had a nickel for every time there was “you’re the heir to a kingdom and you must…” or “you’re in the same type of universe but you’re not an heir, surprise…” I think I’d have a nice sum. There are so many settings that you can write about: every period in history, gothic horror, steampunk, modern life, the list goes on and on. And yet I feel like so many games are just minor variations of a few tropes. Am I off the mark?
I’m hardly qualified to speak at length at this topic, but those tropes happen to be what garners attention and what sells. Stories with those settings or main characters receive far more reader than those that don’t. It’s unfortunate, but the truth. I’d love to see more cosmic horror, personally, but I’d imagine that’s difficult to pull off with a CYOA type game.
