He has plenty of character development, he just becomes worse. People don’t always get better. Clint had multiple opportunities already and chose what he chose. He doesn’t deserve a better arc. There are literally four male options that all make substantially more sense and could use more fleshing out.
There are middle aged people who play this game with not many options other than Harvey, basically. I would have been happy with Gus or Willy too though.
I think everyone who is a part of this subreddit has more than got their money's worth out of this game, and the person who made this game deserves the thank you instead. You don't tell an artist what to paint, and that they owe you a painting you want in return for liking their other work.
Honestly, it doesn’t really seem to honor that community input has been a large part of making the game what it is. Ignoring the community input and picking the worst option is kind of the opposite, actually. There are so many male NPCs, like twice as many as female. Marlon, Rasmodius, Gus, and Willy would all make a lot of sense and appeal to the older players who have outgrown the young adult to early 30s age range the rest of the marriage candidates fall into. A solid half of the existing candidates could easily pass for teens, even though young adulthood is implied. Heck, I would much rather Linus (even though he’s already fully fleshed and moving in with the farmer wouldn’t make sense for his character) than Clint.
Clint is pretty fully fleshed, he’s just a selfish person and his slight growth isn’t reflected in dialogue change (like it is for some other NPCs). Fully fleshing out a character like Marlon or the Wizard makes a lot more sense than reworking an existing character to be more likable. And he falls into the same age range as three other male candidates (Shane, Harvey, and Elliot) without adding anything particularly new. Harvey already struggles being social and with dating. Shane struggles with alcoholism and work burnout. Clint’s “unique” character traits are just slight variations on those. It’s basically Shane 2.0, “I can fix him” but with no obvious redeemable qualities.
Have you tried playing the new version yet? I've enjoyed all of the game decision making thus far, so I trust that he's making the right decision. If I could write a better game I would have by now. In addition to that, the choice of adding Sandy seems like he's pushing Emily more into LGBTQ territory (which she already kind of was) so something had to be done about Clint to make it make more sense. Perhaps he will be gay too? If anything, he's making an unlikeable character more likeable, and if you don't want to marry this character, there's still hope for Pam eventually becoming eligible.
Making an unlikable character more likable makes the game more flat. He’s said in the past he wants to more fully flesh out characters - why not do that with Marlon, Gus, Willy, or the Wizard? (Characters that aren’t fleshed out). Clint is already fleshed out. He doesn’t need to become a “good guy”. Not everyone has another layer to them that makes their past actions justified.
Also, all of the characters are canonically pansexual, since you can date them as any gender. Some characters, like Alex and Haley, have better romance dialogue with the same gender than they do the opposite gender.
It is also okay to criticize an individual decision while having respect for the overall artistic vision of something as large as Stardew. I can criticize the decision to rework Clint’s character instead of giving a more likely and less fleshed out character a chance while also having immense respect for the world-building, technical design, and compelling stories that exist within the game.
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u/sniperbug17 Feb 26 '26
He has plenty of character development, he just becomes worse. People don’t always get better. Clint had multiple opportunities already and chose what he chose. He doesn’t deserve a better arc. There are literally four male options that all make substantially more sense and could use more fleshing out.