The one thing I’m really focused on here is the feedback for the characters - because I really did try to make this one more character focused than my previous work, and I want to know if I succeeded or not.
“Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters” is out now! Topple the vampires from the streets below!
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I’d definitely say it worked, I’ve only done one playthrough but I really liked all the fellow hunters especially fleur-de-lys
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I like how each character seems very different to each other, each one has a sense of who they are. FdL and Zheng are my favorites, they both have aspects in their personality and dialogue that I like. I also like how depending on your Social stat for example, different sarcastic dialogues can be unlocked with some of the characters.
One of the things that I noticed right away that stands out is the choice of joining the gang or staying homeless at the start. The dialogue makes it seem like going along with the gang is the only choice. When I play CoGs I try to keep in mind what the author is saying the character is thinking, so taking that route feels more natural.
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I think my favorite thing about Lydia is that it’s possible to manipulate her just as much as she thinks she is manipulating you. My first playthrough I sided with her to kill the thin bloods and then killed her, and I really loved that she didn’t see it coming at all.
I would probably have liked a lot more of the characters better if I’d been able to interact with them at more of an arm’s length for longer, or just to lie to them. Like, my first introduction to the gang leader was him basically saying some bullshit about what I need to do to earn his trust and I’m like, “Let me stop you right there. I don’t want your trust, where’s the exit?”
Lydia is a lot more inviting and seductive, she’s sees you as a potential resource to use so she just offers you an invitation and wines and dines you. It’s 100% a trap from a literal goddamn vampire but the soft approach is going to get me to give this character the grace to make a good impression.
You know who made a terrible first impression is Wil. I don’t even know anything about him because I skipped over every subsequent opportunity to speak to him because he was hostile on our literal first interaction. I feel like that’s the fastest way to make me hate a character, is my MC walks in the room and some asshole goes, “Oh you think you’re so tough huh well I am dark and brooding and I don’t trust easily.” Like for real you’re dead to me, I don’t plan to think about you again.
And I know from looking at the code that you implemented a romance with the thin bloods but I’m literally never going to be interested. Their leader is a vampire and a cop. I can forgive the vampire part but some things are just unacceptable.
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He’s not actually a cop, he’s something even worse: a trust fund nepobaby.
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I think there’s a missed opportunity with some characters to make me really hate them. Like there are plenty of characters out there where I don’t like them but not enough where I can spend most of the story like, “Can’t kill them yet, not the right time…” and getting the satisfaction of ending them. That was honestly the best part of Atlantis Academy - there was a character who was like the “school bully” character and after like the third or fourth time he tried starting some shit like it’s a teen drama on the CW I just put him in the fucking ground.
It’s so difficult to do the “villain you love to hate” without doing the much worse thing of having the villain monologue at you and then escape with a flourish. But there have to be ways to make me go from, “Ugh, fuck the thin bloods” to “Ugh. Fuck the thin bloods.”
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I mean, in my opinion this is because the characters in AToM have less depth to them than in the Dragoon Saga. You pretty much get to understand their personalities right away, and they hardly ever deviate from that (with the exception of Wil) even after you understand their backstories, which are also made pretty obvious even if you don’t interact with them much.
Mandy was probably the most obvious example of this. I genuinely can’t recall a single conversation she had with the PC where she didn’t talk about either her privileged background or her activism.
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I was torn with how I was supposed to interpret Mandy’s character. Was she just doing a Common People thing or was she just doing a great demonstration of rolling up your sleeves and doing your best to help people?
Or was it both, and she’s not a savior but she’s still admirable?
I kinda landed somewhere in the middle but still found her less interesting than FdL. And, obviously, Mistress Lydia was terrific. So dumb. So crazy. But still hot.
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I interpret Mandy as being consumed by guilt and doing the Privileged Liberal Thing (what’s the Canadian equivalent of this?) of trying to help in some way. Her preferred method assuages her guilt more than anything concrete, but is still better than most. She should run an NGO or be in government.
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It’s pretty much this from what I could tell, which is why I found her both boring and annoying. I interacted with her at every possible opportunity, and never once did she seem to have an actual character flaw besides “wants to help too much” (which, when executed like this, is the equivalent of saying “I’m too much of a perfectionist” at job interviews when asked what your weakness is, in my opinion). She’s this morally pure activist who cares deeply about the community and is never shown to have any blind spots in her beliefs or politics. It doesn’t make for a compelling character.
Agreed, but I also think FdL is probably the best written character in the game. She and Zheng are the only ones who’s friendships with the PC seemed authentic to me.
@AletheiaKnights The website is always funky on mobile for me, so I can’t quote your message, but I don’t recall Mandy ever really interacting with people who earnestly wanted to do good and rejecting them in the text. I mean, there was Steve, but the text makes it pretty clear he doesn’t earnestly want to do good (and he tried to tase a homeless guy so like, I don’t think her not wanting to work with him is a flaw). Also it’s unclear whether her rejecting her family money does more harm than good, so I’m not sure I can argue that point, since the text never really shows us whether or not she could’ve done good with it in the first place.
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I think she does have blind spots - she sees the world in black and white. She’s rejecting the world she came from harder than is actually helpful. She’s impatient with people who honestly want to do good but don’t have her level of enlightenment or commitment.
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Mandy is a bit too principled for her own good, yeah. In some scenarios that can help, but in others it stops her from doing significant good.
Her whole diatribe about how her parents don’t really care about their legacy because they don’t live up to Colonel Tye’s example rings a bit hollow when you finally meet her parents and (besides being rich snobs) you learn her dad has been pusbing the government and directly took up leadership of an NGO to help the homeless - which is likely to aid a lot more people than her handing out food.
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I’ll be honest, I’ve played through the game like three times by now, interacting with Mandy each time, and I’ve never gotten this scene, so I had no idea about that. While I can appreciate that the scene does exist, and I do agree that it makes her more flawed than she was before. I think my point still stands, because it seem like even if you do interact with Mandy significantly (like I hung out with her every interlude and before the main fight), if you don’t get the scene with her parents, she’s one-note. And it’s clearly not an issue of not spending time with the character, because I did plenty of that.
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I’d argue this is her character flaw.
Like yes, Steve is a dick, but he’s not wrong when he accuses Mandy of “seeing every perceived injustice as a personal affront”. She has a need to fight for everything and everyone, against anything which she thinks is wrong - what some people call the “omnicause”. And doing that means she pushes away potential allies, she burns bridges with people who can help her, and she gets angry over people who are well-intentioned, but aren’t willing to do what she thinks is the right way to do things.
And this is what lets you neutralise her if you’re playing on team bloodsucker: because she can’t prioritise the different aspects of her omnicause, which means she just needs a little push to be convinced that she needs to be somewhere other than fighting the imminent and very real vampire threat she knows is coming.
I think part of the issue is that a lot of this is gated behind a particular section of Act 4, which is based on two decisions you might have made in Act 2 - and that’s the case for basically all of the hunters. Their personal arcs culminate in Act 4, and it’s not easy to unlock more than one of them.
Again, I think I may have girbossed branched too close to the sun here.
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Genuinely running for local office on like, a campaign of police and housing reform would be a good thing for her. I’d vote for Mayor Mandy.
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This reminds me, I got to check out Flashlight because I had a high enough Wil relationship, but that honestly made very little sense to me. My relationship description with him was something along the lines of “Wil trust you a little,” and the only time my PC ever interacted with him was when he saved them in the beginning. Besides that, I’m pretty sure my Wil relationship only ever went up when I made decisions that boosted all the hunter’s relationship, so it felt pretty out of character for him to suddenly trust the PC with his past when they’ve had one real interaction. Not game breaking, but something that did throw me a little.
I did go to Gastown, so I’m not sure what the second choice it was locked behind was. It’s possible I might have missed it, because I didn’t end up trying to save Steve and his crew given that they had literally just tried to tase a homeless man, so if that was the choice, then I would’ve missed that.
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That’s fair - you do need to go to Gastown in order to kickstart this, but I do feel like the game kind of telegraphs this well as long as you make that choice. Steve is pretty insistent on Mandy’s family and her entire interactions in the following interludes constantly speak about his connection to her family and so on.
Yeah, that would have been it. You need to maintain good relations with the Knights so that you can call on them in Act 4, which is where you get to go to Mandy’s house.
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I think you’re FAR more likely to get Cata to do this for Lydia than for the thinbloods.
Vampires are, metaphorically, late-stage capitalism: they’re parasitical predators who add nothing of worth to the world and have tricked some people into thinking they have anything resembling class or honour or whatever by dressing up, like leeches in waistcoats. The only way there’s more vampires is if the current vampires make more people into vampires, either by tricking the starry-eyed deluded or by forcing them through violence. And the made vampires are ALWAYS beneath their sire in power and hierarchy.
And the thinbloods are part of this, but they’re basically office drones, which means that while they do parasitise humans they’re ALSO brutally exploited by their seniors, so I’m pretty sure Cata would never write “fuck the thinbloods” content before he wrote “fuck the middle management Lydia” into the game.
(the board is obviously the Camarilla, so they’re outside the math)
Re.: Mandy: she’s undoubtedly doing good (people are literally not dying because of her), but if she made use of the privilege she was born with instead of rejecting it I feel like she could do stuff with more widespread/intense effects than she’s doing now.
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I never got the scene with Mandy’s parents either, but she does mention their philanthropic efforts. She wants to get her own hands dirty, awesome. But she’s going no-contact with some decent people who love her and are in a position to do a lot of good that she could be perfectly positioned to influence. She has her own prejudices she can’t see past, and I suspect her condescension is off-putting to people who would otherwise be her allies. She’s one-note because she chooses to be, and she’s exchanged the echo chamber of privilege for an even smaller (but virtuous!) one of her own making. I envision Mandy, if she survives the next few years, either burning out completely or mellowing and actually becoming a more extraordinary force for good as she moves through both worlds with empathetic understanding. She’s nowhere near my favorite character, but I do want to understand what drives this person who is so levelheaded in some ways to be so extreme in others.
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I dislike the fact that I’m forced to be the the leader of a criminal gang that’s also involved in drugs, Jangles yaps about being forced to be the leader even though the MC could choose not to or straight up leave.
Even if we do good, we’re still leading a criminal gang that does a lot of heinous sh*t and all under the supposed idea that the Downtown Eastside will be worse if there’s no criminal gang controlling it.
Can’t we at least get the option to kill three eyes and Dead Red? In the epilogue, we don’t get the option to think about taking out one of them or both for the sake of ensuring your authority and doing more good without being stopped by 2 particular criminals.
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