One of which… is to not actually have that many fight scenes and focus on, say, trying to avoid that, for example.
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I 100% agree, that is another good way to go about things. Like the scene where you talk down the situation in the second Wayhaven book. I thought that scene had a great number of ways to go about it in terms of how your character approached the situation. Trust me, when possible, talking around violence is one of my favorite things to play out in games; no argument from me there. But to keep it on topic a little, that’s a trope I don’t necessarily like. When there’s a forced combat scene in a game that hasn’t forced a combat scene through the entire story.
The Last Of Us is my favorite game. Of all time. It’s a masterpiece. You know what isn’t a masterpiece? The section where you have to hold off hoards of infected with David in the small box sized room with literally no other alternative than shoot them for ten minutes straight. That may be one of the only nitpicks I have with that game.
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Or in the opposite direction, where trying to talk is just a pointless venture because the story is bound and determined to make you fight all the damn time, and even if you’re successful at talking one side down, another side will pull the trigger regardless and wrap you up into a fight with them instead just to make sure you don’t get away from having to fight somebody.
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Every time this Wayhaven guns talk comes up I’m reminded of when I played the first demo. After the shooting scene there was the scene of filling out paperwork for discharging our gun and I thought “holy crap someone finally is making a realistic detective story!”
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Frankly, tragic. I mean, personally the lack of inclusion of guns wouldn’t bug me if it wasn’t for the very first scene drawing such peak attention to them. Just seems strange, I guess, but really I hadn’t noticed in particular until this discussion.
I honestly just assumed the Detective had one most of this time but was chosing not to use it or something. Lol. I mean, if a bunch of supernaturals can’t stop something I doubt a bullet can. 
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I clearly needed a history lesson, so thanks for correcting me. 
Not only did I say High Medieval when I wanted to say Late Medieval (1300-1500) but I completely misremembered and thus misrepresented the extent to which the rise of pike-and-shot formations was an early modern rather than late medieval phenomenon. Glad you’re here to set us straight!
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It helps that it’s genuinely pretty neat to research that sort of thing in the first place, which always makes studying up on a topic for use in writing immensely more tolerable.
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Oh god, we’re on this now.
I just want to jump in here real quick to say I wish there were an option to resist being gaslit if you shot A and obviously recognize their voice.
Like, build some initial tension. Have a quick scene with one of them one on one, or call them out as a whole. Allow the detective to be a detective for five seconds, just to make them sweat that their mark ain’t falling for the 4th grade manipulation tactics!
Edit to keep this on topic - I dislike the “Job title in name only” trope that’s a vehicle for getting to the plot. Let the character have that aspect and skillset to themselves, dangit. Allow them to be competent when those areas are brought up.
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Yeah, Wayhaven isn’t a detective game, it’s just a game where you play a character that’s NOMINALLY a detective.
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And nominally a cop. And nominally intelligent…
Yep, that’s why I head canon everything about my main MC, so she’s not so… nominal.
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“Nominally” is something you can say about a bunch of stuff in Wayhaven, true. 
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Now I want a game named “Nominal” that is anything but.
Also hard agree. Also one of the reasons I’m having hard time with some of my projects because characters don’t agree with the plot, but.
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Basically the core component of a dislike I brought up some… What, thousand or so posts ago, by now?
The short version was that there’s an unusual amount of stories where the author is so interested in showing off how cool their ROs are that they (unintentionally or otherwise) hard shaft their MCs to the point of near-uselessness, even if they’re supposed to be the top of their class when it comes to their jobs.
Wayhaven is basically the Ur-example of this, with a detective who is probably perfectly fine at their job, but the narrative insists on making it so they can’t hardly detect their way out of a paper bag half the time, and in the meantime, the narrative also puffs up the ego of a wildly inept agency and makes them out to be perfect at everything they do ever (literally, Unit Bravo already knows who the suspect is and where to find him before you even become a part of the plot in the first game).
I mean, in their defense, they would’ve gone after the guy if good ol’ Rebecca hadn’t decided that their time was better spent purposely stepping on her adult child’s toes in a wildly misguided attempt to protect said child from being targeted by the suspect her unit was after in the first place, because that’s a much better idea than just, you know, going and getting the guy before he has the chance to triangulate where that particularly tasty-smelling blood is coming from.
No, but that’s kinda what I mean: anybody with a lick of sense recognizes that the agency and the Bravos actually kinda suck at their jobs, and the detective can easily call them out as such, but any time that happens, it’s treated like an unfair insult and argued back against, and whenever the chance to brag about how cool the agency is comes up, the narrative jumps on it, in spite of the fact that they’re constantly shown to be tripping over their own shoelaces.
In the same breath that it’s demonstrated that the agency has the intel and the means to track down and catch their guy, and realistically have no reason to have not done so by now, they also demonstrate how bad they are at what they’re supposed to be good at doing by the simple fact that he keeps getting away.
Meanwhile, the detective tries to do the best they can (unless you purposely play a lazy, cowardly lump of a detective), ultimately catches up with the guy the agency keeps missing in record time, even with the purposeful attempts to waylay them, and more than likely plays an integral role in actually apprehending him, and yet they’re forever getting crapped on, to the point where it’s treated as a genuine shock to everybody when they actually excel at something.
Well yeah, and it’s implied that they got the job because they needed a body in a chair after the last guy retired, but even still, their first case upon promotion was a serial murder, and (with some player influence) they performed spectacularly at it.
So, you know, in times where Wayhaven does see crimes in need of proper investigation, the detective can reasonably be expected to perform at 100% when called upon.
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And then they don’t, for some reason, do just that and just whine and moan about Detective’s workplace, dress and preferences in furniture.
Christ, I don’t even have to search for reasons for my Detective to utterly despise their mother. Deadbeat, obstructive, incompetent, shady, a full on damn package.
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It’s not like the Wayhaven ROs are shown to be competent at anything, though. In that respect, they’re no different than the Detective.
This doesn’t feel like fair criticism, though. The Bravos don’t know about not!Murphy because they’re super-good at their jobs, they know it because they’re part of a shadowy international agency who has a metric fuckton of resources and from whom not!Murphy has no desire to hide his previous activities from. In fact, this just shows the Bravos are INCREDIBLY BAD at their jobs, because, like you can point out to A early on, they have all these resources and headstart over you and they STILL completely failed to catch him. Not!Murphy plays them like a fiddle during the attack on the apartment, and even when they DO catch up to him, outnumbering him four to one, they’re STILL unable to stop him even before he gets super-charged with Detective blood.
EDIT: (I mean, it’s fair criticism in that somebody in this entire story should be at least mildly competent at their goddamn job, but not in the sense that it props up the Bravos, because it definitely doesn’t)
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To be fair, Wayhaven doesn’t seem to see any crime that requires detectives until Unit Bravo moves to town, so in that case “being fine at their job” could just as well mean “lets the mayor golf in peace” … it’s not an uncommon narrative.
Ah. Right. It’s been a while, I forgot who the golfer was.
It always did strike me as odd to have the detective be officially in charge of the station though.
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The stated in-game canon is that “being fine at their job” is “lets the captain golf in peace”, so you were almost 100% correct.
By the way, the captain pretty much never shows up at the station, even though Wayhaven only has the one, so I’m pretty sure golfing is ALL he does.
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We’re more or less the captain in all but title and rank, honestly. I tend to be more forgiving of him than the mayor, though, because the few times he does show up to work, he at least pretends to actually give a crap about public safety, while the mayor is much too busy gladhanding and being a crap father to even do that much.
Also, the captain thinks as lowly of Rebecca as I do, and I appreciate that.
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Imagine what the captain would think of Rebecca if he knew she hid information that, ultimately, got Garrett killed. That’s something the MC was able to bring up once to fling in UB’s faces, but it should’ve been directed at Rebecca, and it should be brought up every time she appears to be stepping on the MC’s toes when they’re trying to do their damned job.
Honestly, I don’t even blame A for that because it’s who they are. A is a mindless sycophant to Rebecca and does whatever the Agency tells him like a good little mindless slave. N tries to get A to see reason, but gives up because A “Mr. I’m the team leader and you’ll do what I say!” won’t back down and N doesn’t have the spine to push the issue. And the other two? M literally could not give less of a shit about humans and their stupid problems and F has opinions but A ignores them more than N’s opinions.
The team is dysfunctional as hell, and has a handler with practically no conscience. She’s another one who obeys the Agency up until the point where she sees her kid will die, otherwise. And she’s too stupid to see that it probably never would’ve gotten to that point if she had given the MC some information. Also, that kid would still be a live. But as M told the MC–the Agency cares more about protecting its secrets than anything else. And I’m supposed to see this as a benevolent group??
The most fun I have play this game is with my F-mancer, who is literally just as incompetent as she’s written to be. All she does is snark at everyone (the Falk scenes were hilarious with her) and avoid work. The narrative fits her better than my other three, one of whom is way more capable than any of these bozos. And I’m hoping we have a chance for the MC to butt heads with A when they follow orders without questioning, because she’d do it in a heartbeat, and she will not back down if she knows she’s right.
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You know, since we’ve been on the topic (no, this is not a continuation of the Wayhaven grumbling, I promise), I’d like to focus in on something that several comments, including my own, have touched on as part of the demerits against Wayhaven, but never on its own:
When a story goes out of its way to tell the reader that a certain person, certain persons, or certain groups are these big, awesome, incredible things… and then the subject of all this praise turns around and swiftly demonstrates themselves to be anything but.
And I don’t mean the version of this which is done on purpose to build up a sort of benevolent propaganda that gets shattered before the protagonist’s eyes at a climactic moment, because that’s fine, if a bit overdone at this point.
I mean the stories that actually, genuinely want you to believe that this is one of the good guys, and when it turns out that next to nobody thinks so, the narrative (or author, themselves) is incredibly shocked and confused why anybody wouldn’t think they’re the best thing since sliced bread, and openly attempts to punish players for not agreeing.
I know I said that I’m not keeping on with the Wayhaven grumbling, but unfortunately, I would be remiss not to point at Rebecca, who the game would love for you to believe is a wonderful, caring mother and powerful agent, while in the very same breath having her actively hinder her child’s efforts, get nothing of worth done, fall to pieces at the slightest emotional pushback, be absent for twenty solid years of her child’s life, and acting incredibly shady and two-faced in order to get her way. Most everybody seems to be in agreement that there’s nothing about her worth liking, and yet the story will try its hardest to make you feel bad for behaving so.
Wayhaven isn’t the only story guilty of this, mind. Black Magic in the Heroes Rise trilogy is pretty clearly the author’s intended canon romance for your character… But they’re kinda reprehensible once you start learning more about them. I think the fact that it ultimately culminates in them attempting to turbo-murder you in the third book if you tell them no enough times really says a lot about the quality of their character. (Also the fact that you turning down their advances directly leads to their hero career falling to shambles, real subtle on that one.) I had it wrong, it happens no matter what, my bad y’all.
Not to mention the Millennium Group, in general. As far as super awesome superhero organizations go, I can’t say that I was ever terribly eager to be part of the gang. It was one crappy first impression after another. Do I think that my only two options being to either fawn over them, or seek to blackmail them, are acceptable responses? No. I feel like there should have been a more neutral third path of, “yeah, I’m just really not feeling it, I think I’ll just bow out of this job opportunity quietly and be on my way,” but, well, it is what it is.
Probably the biggest one I can think of is the Soul Stones in the Soul Stone War series. Boy, those things sure wasted no time making sure it was impossible for me to ever have anything nice to say about them, huh? Shame that I have no choice but to rely on them in order to defeat Manerkol, since he’s practically covered in the damn things. This example is a bit more hazy, since I feel like the author absolutely intended for people to be like, “hey, wait a minute…” about the Soul Stones.
Ultimately, I feel like if you really want your audience to believe that someone or something is what you make them out to be… maybe put a bit more care into making sure that, you know, they live up to the hype, instead of shooting themselves in the foot all the time?
If you present a character you think is awesome to a room full of people, and every single person in that room thinks they suck, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s not just them being naysayers.
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