It has now been a month and a half since the release of A Time of Monsters, and the feedback has been… divisive, to say the least. While a lot of people have definitely enjoyed the story and engaged with its characters in the ways I’d hoped, quite a few people have also expressed their disappointment with the end result. While I will be getting initial sales figures by the time this article is published, I don’t have them now as I’m writing this piece. However, my expectations for sales aren’t particularly high.
This wasn’t always the case. When I started this project two years ago, I was genuinely excited to be handed access to a license this prestigious and with this expansive of an audience. I tried my best to create a work which fit the themes of the Hunter the Reckoning game line, while creating an intimate portrait of a city I know and inhabit, and populating that portrait with compelling characters which the players would come to know and love. I genuinely tried my best to create the best game and the best story that I have ever written, and in this particular attempt at this particular goal, I have failed.
So, what happened?
First of all, this post-mortem will obviously contain spoilers for Hunter the Reckoning: A Time of Monsters. If you haven’t played it yet, go do that first.
1: Things I Got Right
Mechanical Design:
This was actually one of the things I was worried about the most, and the fact that I have literally gotten almost no negative feedback over it seems to imply that I was worrying about the wrong thing.
Basically, World of Darkness has a character stat system (which has variants based on game line) which previous adaptations have adhered to pretty faithfully. That system gives you a plethora of skills and attributes to choose from. However, I came to the conclusion early that a system designed to build individual characters in a party-based RPG with a human Storyteller would not translate well to interactive fiction. As a result, I reduced the skill system to three stats, and then filled the gaps by using the Edges mechanic. This made the game a lot easier to balance, made sure that most character builds were viable, and ensured as few “trap” options as possible, especially since I also took out the character-building aspects which previous adaptations have also used (more on that later).
Signposting:
This has been a persistent problem for me over the course of my Interactive Fiction career, but I think I’ve finally gotten it down. In past games, I’ve always struggled to convey the potential risks and consequences of skill checks in ways which weren’t too cumbersome. This meant that a lot of players were burned by making decisions they didn’t really understand the risk factors of, and created a level of artificial difficulty which was entirely unintentional.
Despite some early mechanical hiccups, getting to grips with the World of Darkness Storyteller System gave me a way to establish those risks and skill requirements in an unambiguous, easily comprehensible way while not breaking immersion for those who’d rather avoid knowing the full consequences of their actions. At the same time, I tried to carefully walk the line between not giving players enough information, and giving them so much that every twist and every mystery gets spoiled before the fact. I think I walked that line pretty well this time around, and I’ll definitely be using a system like this going forward – including in Shadow of the Eagles, and Wars of Infinity.
Characters (Kind Of):
A Time of Monsters was meant to be a story which was carried by its characters, and this meant that those characters needed to be likeable and personable and possessed of enough depth for players to want to get to know them. When it comes to writing these characters, I think I definitely succeeded. My playtesters all had their favourites – but their favourites were each different, which meant that that the main cast were different enough and likeable enough in their own ways to make a connection.
This was not the reaction I got from the general audience, and there’s a reason for that I’ll go into later. However, there is one exception to that general reception.
Lydia:
If there was one standout character which worked precisely the way I wanted her to, it’d be Lydia Parker-Cunningham, the seductive voice of the Establishment, both mortal and vampiric. When I first envisioned Lydia’s themes and character, I wanted to create a compelling counterpoint to the foundational themes of not just Hunter, but its real-life analogues: if there are monsters in the night who prey on the weak and grow rich and powerful off the suffering of others, why aren’t all of us out there hunting them?
Lydia was supposed to personify the reason why, because she isn’t just an antagonist, or a villain. She represents the ways in which entrenched power is able to pacify or co-opt those who would otherwise be its enemies: by offering security, stability, and affirmations which hold within them the promise of advancement and opportunity. If the Hunter storyline is about collective action and the need to make do in a flawed world, and the Thinblood storyline is about the hypocrisy and myopia of revolutionary vanguard politics, then Lydia’s storyline is about why so many of us in the real world choose to allow ourselves to be co-opted by power instead of fighting it. As much as some of us complain about the world we inhabit, we still inhabit it in ways which make us perpetuate that same society, because the alternative carries too much uncertainty and too much risk and too much fear.
The “Vampire Lawyer Dommy Mommy” may be a bloodsucking parasite (and a Vampire), but to many players, the comfort she offers (both material and emotional) is enough to make her the least of subjective evils – something which was exactly what I wanted to get across.
Which is why it’s a shame the rest of the characters didn’t land anywhere near as well.
2: Things I Got Wrong
Too Much Branching:
In 2013, when I released Sabres of Infinity, one of the major complaints I got was that the story was too linear, that it would have been better off as a book, that there wasn’t enough branching, that there was only one optimal playthrough and that if you played through that one perfect route, you didn’t ever need to play it again.
So yeah, I kinda took that personally.
Over the years, I’ve developed multiple ways of adding replayability and narrative divergence: time-sensitive segments, mutually exclusive branching, free-form hub-and-spoke interludes. I’ve used each of these before, but for A Time of Monsters, I wanted to create as much replayability as possible – so I used all of them.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Almost all of the major issues with A Time of Monsters stems from this. There are those who say the game is too short for its price point because that price point was set based on a million-word total size, as opposed to the relatively more modest (I’d say 150-200k word) playthrough length. There are those who say the characters are one-note because they were only able to interact with those characters for a fraction of the time they’d have needed to thanks to time-sensitive interludes. Most damningly, I haven’t heard a word at all about the Romances (of which there are either four or five, depending on how you define them) because I suspect that most people haven’t been able to figure out the precise sequence of individual mutually exclusive decisions they need to unlock them.
This all slipped by partially because none of this was a problem for my playtesters – but that’s the thing. Playtesters are by definition going to be more dedicated than most players are. They’re going to go through a game multiple times in rapid succession, consciously trying to explore every branch. That means the game they played will be fundamentally different from the game most people play.
When I started work on A Time of Monsters, one of my goals was to create a game that was better each time you replayed it. In that goal, I succeeded – but only by arguably creating a game that would be mediocre on a casual player’s first – and likely only – playthrough.
Player Customisation:
I’ve never been a big fan of explicit character customisation. This isn’t a secret. I always advocate for simpler character generation, and I have never seen the point of letting a player choose the colour of their character’s eyes if there’s no meaningful consequence to that decision. In A Time of Monsters, as in most of my games, I wanted to leave a lot of the player character’s description to the imagination, so I didn’t give the player any real chances to define that character.
That was probably a mistake. Not allowing the player to choose a past or a real origin for their character robbed the player of a lot of opportunities to define their characters in ways which would give them connections both to themselves and the other characters they interacted with. In the past, a minimalist approach has worked for me because the story itself defines the player character with certain identities: the Dragoon Officer is always a male Tierran Aristocrat, for example, and that gives him a very strong character voice which I could rely on pretty heavily. Setting the story in a city like Vancouver doesn’t really allow for that. This is a crossroads of the world, a place that literally anyone could realistically live in. Not having that definition hurt the story in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise.
Tone:
It’s not a secret that I’m not well-versed in World of Darkness lore, especially the new edition of the setting. This was a problem which I was aware of going in. I tend to be pretty conservative when playing around with other peoples’ lore, mostly because I’ve seen my own favoured continuity of “lore” (in this case, actual history) trampled on and distorted by adaptations enough to be annoyed by it. As a result, I had a very hands-off attitude towards anything I didn’t understand too well, and tried to make sure that the lore I did use was used correctly.
This meant that instead of leaning into the lore itself, I leaned into the tone of Hunter the Reckoning, which describes itself as Gothic Punk.
Punk, as a cultural movement, has a very explicitly transgressive and political inclination. It’s characterised by its opposition to unwelcome authority and a form of radicalism which is aggressive in both its display and performance – an endless, potentially hopeless, fight against institutions, causes, and powers which are far better resourced, better entrenched, and more outwardly respectable. It is, quite obviously, not something for everyone. Radicalism can be a quiet movement, but Punk is famously the opposite of quiet, and that sort of earnest conviction can easily come off as stridency or preachiness to those who don’t answer well to it.
I tried to leaven this rather grim and combative tone with moments of levity and satire. Some of these seemed to land pretty well (especially when Fleur-de-Lys is involved), while others didn’t (there’s a particular commentary on the pinkwashing of police procedure early on which flew over a lot of people’s heads). I also tried to inject as much local flavour as I could, which apparently came off as unrealistic to some people because this city’s just that foreign to them, I guess. The end result wasn’t a fatal weakness on its own, but it did exacerbate a bunch of other issues, mostly stemming from the overbranching I’ve already mentioned.
Polish:
I finished the first complete draft of A Time of Monsters on the evening of September 15th, 2025. Release day was November 13th. That gave me less than two months to polish and edit. Beta testing, aside from the very small group (half a dozen) of early playtesters I had opened on October 9th. That gave me one month to parse and implement any feedback they might have.
In contrast, I had over a year between finishing the final epilogue of Lords of Infinity and release.
Part of this was my fault. I was first approached to do Hunter the Reckoning before Lords of Infinity even launched, but due to a bunch of personal factors (which I won’t get into here), I wasn’t able to start preliminary work on A Time of Monsters until September 2023, and I wasn’t able to actually start writing until February 2024. That meant instead of the 2-3 years I should have had, I essentially had to write this whole thing in 18 months.
The end result was that a lot of things ended up undercooked: the epilogues, for example. I also didn’t have as much time to do background reading on a franchise I wasn’t familiar with. There were also other elements which I wish I could have gotten more input on, like the cover art and the release day (I did ask for more time, but it was too late by that point). In a way, getting the whole thing in a more or less ready state by release day was already a minor miracle.
I’d like to think if I had another six months (or even three months), the game that would have been released would have been better than the one we got. Yet it’s just as likely that I’d have made the same mistakes, just slower. Dwelling on could-have-beens in a development postmortem is like administering homeopathy to a corpse – doubly useless. All you can really do is take stock, and try to avoid the same mistakes next time.
3: Lessons Learned
Less Branching:
This one is going to hurt. It’s going to go against all of my instincts as a narrative designer – but the alternative is to write more and I don’t think my audience is going to appreciate either waiting until 2035 for Wars of Infinity, or the $30 price tag a game with three million words is gonna probably carry.
Going forward, I need to commit more to the story’s critical paths, and less on freeform, missable content. I can do branching, mutually exclusive storylines, but that means I have to be careful that they don’t explode into a dozen different outcomes which nobody will see. I need to make sure character arts can be comprehensible and complete, not just for the repeat player, but for the first time player. For the past decade, I’ve been coasting on the idea of “more is better”, but I’ve hit diminishing returns here. More content accessible to the player still is better – but that content will need to be accessible.
What I think this will end up meaning is that I’ll start consolidating branching along multiple critical paths. That means instead of having to account for a dozen potential outcomes (some of which will get neglected), I’ll be able to focus on three or four at most, giving me more of a chance to make sure each one is complete and satisfying.
Insist on Polish:
This one might have been out of my control this time around, but it won’t be the next time. With Shadow of the Eagles, I will be setting my own schedule entirely, which means I will be able to decide precisely when a game is ready for release and not a day before.
Thankfully, I will also have a much larger pool of playtesters to help me along as well. I currently have over 200 people on the Patreon-supported development Discord, and the feedback they’ve given me has already served as a reminder of just how much a large pool of committed feedback-providers can add. Having them from the start will mean the end result should be far more polished.
Write what I Know:
A Time of Monsters was a great experiment, but it demonstrated something which I think I already knew: that I should try to avoid writing in continuities which I am not intimately familiar with.
I’m sure there are other writers who’d be able to do better in that situation, but I’m not one of them. Being naturally conservative with someone else’s lore means that I tend not to take as many creative risks with it as I could get away with, and the result is that the license is, in a way, “wasted”.
I was approached to do this license because they guessed I would be a good fit and I think they may have guessed wrong. Next time around, if I’m ever approached to do a licensed work again, it’s going to have to be something which I already know well enough to work with properly.
Signposting:
A clear, concise and consistent mechanical signposting system works. It cuts down on tutorialisation, it makes onboarding easier, and it makes unlockable content more accessible simply because it removes the degree of difficulty that uncertainty otherwise brings.
I’ve already implemented an even more comprehensive system for Shadow of the Eagles, and no doubt I’ll continue to iterate on that system as time goes on.
4: Conclusion
Every game is a learning experience, and games that don’t live up to their expectations are ones which can teach more than most. I don’t know how well A Time of Monsters is going to do financially, but I do know that I’ve already learned a lot from the development process and the feedback which I’ve already received.
Now, the challenge is applying what I’ve learned to my next projects. As you’ve probably noticed, this is already something I’m trying to do with Shadow of the Eagles. My hope is that the past two years have made me a better writer and especially a better game designer. Over the next year or two, I’m going to put that hope to the test.
Paul Wang 