Clowned a dude that needed clowning and he runs to the mods, lol. I'll just use the ignore button m on him, the first person I m have ever muted/ignored on this site.
I'll shut up about lame drama by saying that if you have a counter to the points brought to by another person you should post it. Don't be a child. Post it but the self-slap brigade can't so they don't. The fact that this is on a 25 year dev cycle is something they cannot comes to grips with.
Anyway, to actual constructive points...
To piggyback off a user above, I would also change the entire timing system from days to weeks or months. As they said, just use quick montages to show minor events in the time between the major events you do show in detail. This would add realism (that he insists he strives for) and can speed up the dev time. Just offload some side stories entirely or offload them to the quick filler/montage scenes that aren't seen as major storylines.
It's a good idea and one I floated a while back.
Again, I come from a place of pure objectivity. I don't even play the game like most here. I check it out a while after an update drops to see progress. That's it. So when I see an issue it's not due to a personal kink being ignored or overused. It's not a lack of this storyline or that storyline for my personal desires. It's from someone sizing up a story.
I think you're responding to me. I think there's a place for small events and side stories, so I wouldn't want them to be completely written off into montages. L&P has to make better use of his time, but I do think montages would be tricky to implement in the game's current structure. Let's take Aiden's tasks as an example. Aiden has 12 tasks for Sophia, but each event can be spread out over a whole day or even multiple days. If Aiden gives Sophia the idea for a task on PD 14, so that she can execute it on PD 15, that would be hard to montage around because there's other stories taking place between Aiden assigning the task and Sophia completing it.
So you'd almost have to revisit how the game is structured. Maybe you drop the "playable day" structure. Since we're doing event based releases, does it still make sense to structure everything into Morning/Lunch/Evening sequences? Maybe the entire concept of the 30 days needs to be reconsidered. Either way, maybe the best solution is this: episodic releases with a single focus.
Episodes could focus on a single storyline. One of the problems we've run into with the event based releases is that they feel very disjointed. Each event feels very independent and isolated from the rest, and that makes it hard to improve pacing through a montage. We jump around between characters and settings and every individual storyline barely advances. Episodic releases would help this. Let's say Episode 1 is all about Aiden and Sophia and covers tasks 5-7. We could montage over tasks 5 & 6, but still get the major developments from them, before really exploring task 7. This would give us a solid block of time with a single storyline which would advance the story in a meaningful way. We would improve pacing with the montage, and we could lessen some of the ponderous pacing by lessening the focus on tedious baby steps.
But this would be a really complex effort to rework the whole game's structure. But without major changes I'm not sure how effective montages would be.
PS- I wrote this on my phone at work. It's a complex topic and if I butchered it with typos I apologize.
