Oh I don’t want my Lydia stanning to be taken as broad endorsement, all bloodsuckers must die. HOWEVER COMMA I think she’s an interesting lady, and makes the usual compelling case for Cammie rule (its better for mortals and vampires, even if exploitative, because Anarchs draw down hunter attention and end up fucking things up far more often).
“Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters” is out now! Topple the vampires from the streets below!
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Well, yeah. Dying unambiguously does tend to suck. (also, damn you for being ambiguous about survival in the high-willpower variant). I don’t think there’s much to argue for the thinblood ending though.
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I dunno, Running Dog with low thinblood trust seems just as screwed as Last Stand Unmaking.
The MC is in a completely untenable position: the gangs and the locals are pissed off, Rod is actively destroying any hope of reconciliation with his ever-increasing demands (while refusing to intervene on the MC’s behalf), and it’s clear that the moment their position collapses—which it inevitably will—they’re going to get pumped and dumped by the vampires.
The only hope for the ending (in my opinion) is through the vengeance drive, as the MC reveals through vague internal monologue that they’re planning to “bring Roderick down” somehow, but that’s a very long shot and the MC still has to find a way to placate everyone once he’s free.
Nothing bitersweet bout this one, much less redeemable, if anything it proves to sell yourself to a vamp with actual resources
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I actually think Running Dog is the “objectively bad ending” rather than Unmaking: Last Stand, for the reasons you’ve listed. It is, at the very least, the bad ending for the Downtown Eastside, as specifically designated in its internal achievement name, dtes_ending_bad_achievement.
That said, Unmaking in all its variants is my preferred ending over all the others. The 臺 – I mean 泰山會 first, because I like Zheng and with his presence, there’s some hope for healing that broken and corrupted institution. Then Last Stand, and lastly St. George because while living with Mandy and Fleur-de-Lys is very wholesome and I enjoy that dreamlike daze of our new normal being somewhere we feel we don’t belong, life going on is a soft taper of an ending and I prefer ones with a little more closure. But I digress, we were talking about Last Stand.
The bittersweetness of Last Stand, for me, comes from how because of our actions and the pain we went through, the DTES still is able to shape its own future, at least briefly free of vampire influence. Sure, that future is mass gang violence; but people have endured before, and they will again. The hunters are driven out because of those past gang affiliations specifically, but importantly even in Last Stand, everyone else gets out. Fighting to protect your home, but being unable to return there in the end: that’s classic tragic storytelling, and one form of legacy that’s still meaningful. Even as it goes to shit, it’s the people of DTES who get to make those choices. As you die, they might never know your part in that, but it’s there all the same.
And importantly, I think it’s the ending that best reflects a pervasive feeling of powerlessness that we can find throughout the game. You aren’t always capable, maybe there was more you could’ve done, and the game makes sure to let you know that. One of the most memorable scenes in the entire game for me is what comes after a singular choice, "I'm sorry, I wish I knew what to say" (to Fleur-de-Lys, the night before the battle), because sometimes that’s the culmination of your choices, there’s nothing more you can say. And that’s life, and sometimes that’s death; of all the endings, this one best captures that feeling.
But Last Stand with high Willpower – that’s where it hits. Sure, it’s ambiguous whether we live or die. The narration might end there because that’s it, consciousness over. Symbolically, going towards the light is one view of death. But we get the choice to believe otherwise, so I do. Balancing on that knife’s edge between hope and despair is what makes it such a poignant ending.
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Incidentally, has anyone considered adding a subpage for A Time of Monsters onto the Choice of Games TVTropes page?
I might just be weird, but I’ve found a lot of media via their TVTropes articles, so I figure having an entry might help with visibility - and I’m also always curious about what other people think about my work in the context of media tropes and conventions.
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The thing is, the thinbloods are - in fact - the people whose solution to late-stage capitalism is terrorism. And by terrorism, I mean killing civilians for the greater good.
Of course, it’s not their fault, right? They need to eat, can’t avoid it. And they don’t have the Camarilla’s infrastructure that allows them regular herds of mortal cattle that’d let them prey safely.
I actually like the thin blood, and I’m glad to see in most cases they make it out alive, except Roderick of course but he’s a bit too much sometimes, like I just helped to kill your biggest enemy, why are you even mad at me?
but I never actually get this, like they don’t have to kill people to feed right? and they should have a better time with the beast since they are thin blood, so why are they even killing people? and which thin blood specifically is keep screwing this up? I bet it’s Roderick.
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Got it started. I have the wikiword in the pipe. Other gentlebeings, feel free to contribute at leisure.
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A: Because they’re dumb thugs who’d rather just kill people they don’t care about.
B: Because they don’t have a secure place to stay and set up herds to grab safe, voluntary bites from. Roderick may have money, but if he stays somewhere too long, he’ll get Cammies on his ass.
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Both explanations provided just doesn’t make much sense, they still care about the second inquisition a lot, and not having a herd doesn’t mean you have to kill people to feed, and at least one thin blood is not ok with killing random people if they don’t have to, it’s not like they are a hive mind.
so in my head it’s just one or two thin blood who have trash self control and keeps screwing it up.
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It’s not so much “trash self-control” entirely as it is the fact that they’ve never particularly felt the need to have ironclad self-control because it’s something the Camarilla’s always handled for them. They’ve spent most of their unlife in a bubble of safety which the rules they consider “oppressive” and “restrictive” ultimately maintain, and in being so sloppy in their rebellion, they’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They see the Camarilla as the main threat against them because, ironically, the Camarilla have been the ones shielding them from all the others. They’re acting like what some kinds of people call “abolish bedtime anarchists” or “contrarian leftists”, in the sense that because they think the Camarilla is an oppressive hierarchy, everything the Camarilla has taught them or has tried to instill in them is also suspect at best, and outright malicious lies at worst.
Like, when the Masquerade gets brought up among the Thinbloods, it’s pretty obvious that (aside from Cory) none of them take it particularly seriously, and see it more as just another tool of Camarilla oppression than something intended to keep them safe.
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Yes, I got The Unmaking with high willpower as an ending. It was… poignant. Very Warhammer, in a way (I guess I brought the spirit of Warhammer Fantasy, of which I am a fan, in this playthrough. Average trust, good investigative skills, but no mending relations with Mandy’s family or Chinatown so… the MC possibly meeting his end as all of the Fellowship managed to leave the place alive was a nice, dramatic passage).
Then tried the second ending I was closest to, namely to serve Ms. Lydia the Vampire Middle Manager, and it was… bleh, what a nightmare doing this with low trust. I guess that’s what you get if you tried to resist the Dominate to “prove your worth”, instead of obeying like a lapdog: you are forced to be one.
Curiosity: is there any way to lose some of the characters, a la Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission?
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Fail the fight in Interlude 1.
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I didn’t think they were particularly poorly written to be honest. I do wish there was an opportunity to mention Morgan to FdL or vice versa, though, or to have some interacting betwixt the two.
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In V5 if you don’t completely drain a person when you feed you will always still a little bit hungry.
No, it’s for all vampires it just gets worse for for higher blood potency.
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I’m on interlude 2 and really liking it so far! It’s a really fun challenge to tackle. My only gripe is that I wish we could actually refute some of the points Zheng makes when unlocking the faith creed, when talking about trust. I don’t disagree with his points necessarily, but him getting the final word on every response we can give, and not being able to poke holes in any of his justifications, kinda takes you out of the story. Suddenly the MC isn’t having a discussion with a character, it’s like Zheng’s face morphs into Paul’s lol
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That’s a really good point. I always sort of figured that when my character said “Okay, I see what you mean,” it didn’t necessarily mean “I understand now, you’re right in every particular,” but something along the lines of “I understand your worldview and you’ve given me a lot to think about, even if that doesn’t mean I don’t still have to draw the line somewhere - but I also see that it would be futile to argue the point further.” Maybe that could be explored a little in an update?
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Yet another idea from 5e that I’m glad to be without.
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I actually think it works pretty well, personally. The way V5 handles hunger and feeding is imo one of its strongest elements. It places the eternal hunger of vampirism front and center, and makes things more dynamic than you just walking around like a blood tick with a big pool of blood mana to be expended for fights. Feeding styles and rouse checks are neat and they create a lot more of an ebb and flow where blood supply is a much more prescient issue.
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Yeah that’s a very reasonable response to a conversation like that in real life. The bottom line is compared to other forms of roleplaying games there’s not a lot of factors that would prevent interactive fiction to delve deeper when exploring these topics. There are no voice actors to pay or cutscenes to animate, so there’s relatively little cost to let the player engage with the npcs a bit more than on a very superficial way. And I think utilizing that potential to its fullest is something that has had a big hand in giving an edge to some books like Wayhaven and Zombie Exodus where the MCs sometimes get a dozen varying choices to react to some scenarios.
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