A month or two back I penned a 1500 word whine about feeling too powerful in Blood of Dawnwalker. “Gimme a vampire sim in which I’m a pathetic vein-nibbling goblin,” I wrote, using many more adjectives than that. Well, never let it be said that I’m biased against vampires, for I am equally keen to play an RPG in which I am the least capable vampire hunter in the universe. A vampire hunter who screams when he wakes up with his hair over his face. A vampire hunter who has to spray the vampires with antibac before staking them.
An RPG like Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish, perhaps, which presents you with a choice of Advantages and Flaws when creating a character. You have to balance these out on a gnarly weighing scale, before they’ll let you through the game’s front door. Here is a video showing all that off, together with a lot of sixpacks.
Watch on YouTube
The Advantage/Flaw system looks familiar on the surface. Advantages include Warrior, which gives you +15% chance of a critical hit, or Charmer, which gives you a +1 to Persuasion skill checks. Flaws include clumsy, bad reputation, fear of darkness, hypochondriac, and claustrophobia.
I don’t know much about the tabletop game on which Deathwish is based, and the video skims the detail here, but I suspect the last three Flaws will boil down to something like “-1 Constitution in Unlit Closets”. Still, I really enjoy the idiocy of going up against crypt-dwelling undead while being unable to tolerate shadows, small spaces, and disease. In general, I’d love it if Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish steered well away from any possibility of simply overpowering the vamps, to say nothing of the werewolves and other creatures of the night.
This appears to be the idea: devs Teyon have stressed their desire to make something more story and investigation-driven, after the stomping gibfest that was RoboCop: Rogue City. As narrative designer Mateusz Działowski put it in a previous dev diary, they’ve “switched from action with RPG elements into RPG with action elements”. Amongst other things, you’ll need to put together a team of fellow would-be slayers, each with secrets and traumas, and gather clues about best tactics while roaming the game’s condensed and shiny New York City. You can read more about it all on Steam.