Playthrough Thoughts & Future Changes (Patreon)

Greetings! The full playthrough in May was the first one I'd done in quite a while. It's good I hadn't seen much of this stuff for a bit; seeing things you haven't worked on in a while lets you view it with fresh eyes. There's always parts that seem logical and good while you're working on them, but which fall flat if they're missing the context that only exists in your head. The playthrough was a good opportunity to make sure things were progressing as planned and that there weren't too many rough bits. So I tried to look critically at the game while playing and took a ton of notes in the process.

The good news is that overall I really like the game. There's a lot of things that work really well, and I think the game is actually sorta special - which is a good way to feel about something you've invested so much time in! I did identify a lot of minor problems; most of the ones that were relatively easy to fix were addressed in 10.2.2/10.2.3. There were, however a few bigger ones that will require more work to fix. Some - like the game being a bit weak up until the phone call from Melanie - probably won't be fixed for a while. Others - like the real world using "typical Daz" art (which I hate) - I haven't fully decided how to address yet. But there are still other problems that I do know how I want to fix, and which I feel are important to fix relatively soon. The rest of this post discusses those.

Fixing The Hell's Quest

0.9 was really good - probably the best release yet, IMO - but 10.0 had some problems. It wasn't all lackluster - I thought the second Oracle quest turned out really well, and the Val's Revenge H-scene was one of my faves. But The Hell's quest wasn't that great IMO, which is a big problem because it's both mandatory and soooo long.

Before discussing why it fell kinda flat, I should probably explain what I was trying to do with it. As mentioned before I really liked 0.9, and the main part of 0.9 was the Cape Hope/recruiting quest. That quest was long, had a mystery to figure out, and was topped off by an interesting boss battle. I tried to follow sorta the same formula for The Hell's quest, and while it worked in Cape Hope it didn't work so well in Plains End. The quest just wasn't that fun, and was redeemed only by its ending - which I do think was pretty good, but you had to go through a whole lot of bad to get there.

Why didn't it work? A big issue is that most of The Hell just aren't very likable. I personally like Savik, and to a lesser extent Yulia, but the rest of them are just unpleasant to be around. And you're around them a lot. Almost everyone you interacted with in the recruiting quest were likable or interesting, which made hanging out with them on a long quest enjoyable. This was not the case in The Hell's quest - not only were most of The Hell unlikable, a lot of the human townsfolk were, too. Both of these were intentional; The Hell are what they are, and I didn't want to make the humans too sympathetic given how the quest turns out, but this makes spending time around them a chore rather than fun.

Another issue is that the mystery you have to solve just doesn't seem that important for most of the time you're working on it. In Cape Hope, the mystery starts off with trying to figure out why you can't do what you've been sent there to do and ends with trying to figure out how to save the world. Both of these are important, seem so while you're working on them, and thus you're motivated to continue playing. In Plains End, the mystery starts off with you and your companions being bored out of your skulls and ends with trying to figure out how to save a small, sparsely populated corner of the world. But this last part isn't obvious until the end. For most of the mystery you're playing a bored character, which is... well, boring.

There were also some unfunny and try-hard jokes, which probably stand out more because the quest around them was kinda boring. But that's small stuff.

How to fix this, then? The problems in this quest stem from a bad conception. No amount of tinkering around the edges will make the bad parts good, and it's too late at this point to do a complete rewrite of the quest. And there was some good stuff in there - the arena registration skit was funny, and the quest itself was actually pretty good once you got to the dungeon. The solution, then, is to get you there faster. If I can't make the bad parts significantly less bad, I should be able to make them shorter. I'm thus going to try to aggressively edit down the quest - the parts before the dungeon, anyway.

This will probably take some work. Everything needs to continue to make sense, and saves from the longer version of the quest will need to continue working with the shorter version. I'll probably eliminate a few objectives and significantly shorten or eliminate some of the less interesting scenes. The quest should still mostly have the same feel, but the bad parts will be shorter and thus hopefully more tolerable.

The Embassy Quest

This one should be much easier to fix. The problem with this quest, from my perspective, is that it's the first time any human-ish character tries to kill another human-ish character. TPE is a nice, positive game and so I've generally tried to avoid having any characters be maliciously cruel. Well - Tal'thelas does try to kill you the first time you meet him, but even then it's not that he's really being cruel - it's just that he's a powerful mage, you're interfering with his plans, and he's busy and doesn't have time to deal with you. (He probably would've rather had you in the Pleasure Gardens, anyway.) Not saying characters will never be cruel, but if they are it should serve a purpose, and be (and feel) important.

The Embassy quest isn't particularly important, and Darkblaze as a character is not important. The quest thus kinda violates the themes and feel I've spent so much time establishing. It was just lazy writing, to be honest - you need to save the Ambassador from something bad, and I went with the first thing I saw on the shelf.

The fix here should be pretty straightforward. You'll still be saving the Ambassador from something pretty bad, but it'll be less mean than killing him. The quest isn't all that long, so rewriting this part shouldn't be hard.

The quest wasn't one of my favorites overall, but the Agency 11 stuff was pretty cool. Introducing them was the whole point of the quest, anyway - you'll definitely be seeing them again!

Ana

Ana is obviously a pretty likable character, and I've been generally pleased with the way she's developed over the course of the game. I do feel I've made a few minor missteps in how she's been presented/treated, however - this started in 0.9 and continued in 10.0. It's nothing major, and I'm not going to make any major changes, but a few tweaks are probably necessary.

The problem is that there's a few parts where Ana evokes pity. I'm thinking here of her nervousness about public speaking, her nervousness at your first dance, and so on. This stuff was intended to humanize her a bit, showing her vulnerable side and what have you, but I think I went just a little too far and turned sympathy to pity. Ana was never intended to be a pitiable character, and I don't want her to be. Though flawed, she's probably the most noble and heroic character in the game.

Addressing this shouldn't be too hard. Dialing back the nervousness/vulnerability just a little bit in a few scenes should fix it. There's also a couple of places where the weight jokes/teasing feels gratuitous and unnecessary (and probably feel more so because of the pity she evoked.) I'll eliminate or tweak those as well.

The Dark Pits

The dungeon was pretty controversial, but I still really like it. I have to concede, though, that in a few places it isn't clear what you're supposed to do. This isn't the same as being hard - the final puzzle in the second Oracle quest was hard (probably too hard) but you know the objective, you know what tools you have, and the challenge is figuring out how to use them to accomplish the objective. This isn't the case in a few rooms of The Dark Pits - particularly the ones where you have to push bombs off ledges or into the water. You never see anyone else doing that so it's not even clear it's possible. The only way you can get through those is by experimenting - which is fine, but providing just a little guidance to the player here would dramatically improve the game design.

I haven't figured out exactly what to do here, but I doubt it'll be too difficult. A long time ago one supporter (shout out to O.O.!) suggested having your companions give you advice if you seem stuck for too long - maybe I'll do that. Better still would be to have something that demonstrates to the player that these things are possible, but it may be too late for something like that. But these problems are black marks on an otherwise pretty good dungeon, so I'm going to address them somehow.

Conclusion

Those are the issues that'll be addressed in a future release. Probably in 10.5 or so, since that will probably just be another H-scene and thus will provide more time for these sorts of fixes. In other news, my assignment got extended by a few months, and is now set to end in late October. After that I'll have a lot more time to devote to the game, which should translate to faster releases. (There won't be any further extensions, and believe me, I'm counting down the days!) Please let me know what you think about the changes outlined above. Do you agree with the rationale? If not, why not? Not looking for an argument, I'm just interested in other perspectives on this stuff. Thank you for your support!