- Oct 6, 2017
- 609
- 3,604
The variables introduced by L&P in his game often serve to define, rather than future plot developments, parts of the dialogue between the characters involved in the scenes. Take, for example, Aiden's fourth task for Sophia.
- The most interesting (and somehow strange) thing for me is where to place this event in the storyline.
If you played all the possible paths of the meeting, you see that she always has the choice to flee at some point. And somehow one could expect that this will break the deal with Aiden, from fleeing right away to refusing any of his requests later on.
Well, if you look at the code you will see that the choices for this event will only increase GW and FW points and set only 2 variables to distinguish the final choice of Sophia, breast (day20_Sophia_showed_her_breasts_to_Aidens_gang
) or groping (day20_Sophia_let_herself_getting_groped_by_Aidens_gang
). Nothing else. This means that
- at least at the moment it seems that the deal is still on no matter what happens.
- in any following event if he needs to check what happened (what choices have been made) in this event to e.g. determine the dialogues or some future choices he can only check whether the two variables are false to detect that Sophia didn't go through the last part. But e.g. he has no way to express the fact that she left as soon as she saw the gang members and hence nothing really happened.
- Unless this is a bug (possible/probable), this means that the whole event is basically "meaningless" in term of the future events. It won't have an impact on the deal with Aiden and even in dialogues and choices nothing much can be related to what happens. He could still use the FW points to try to figure out the choices that have been made but it is hard because all FW points are in common with other paths. And he has abandoned this way of use them since the early PDs.
If it is a bug and he forgot to set some variables on the way, it also means that if fixed the scene will need to be played again for the variables to be in your save game.
If the event instead is just what we have, i.e. it does not count at all for the story, what was the purpose of the event. It feels almost like it was not a planned event until the last release and rather added along with the Morello's boy visit to make it a standalone (as in it would have taken more time to finish v0.160 with the fight scene so let's split it...).
Regardless, story-wise the purpose of the event seems only to increase the FW and the corruption of Sophia and show what Aiden is up to. But because of the above it does not seem to have a real impact on the story.
Sophia chooses Zac as the beneficiary of her show for:
- a practical reason: he is positioned in the center of the classroom and is therefore perfectly visible to both Aiden and Andre,
- a sentimental reason: she already has some familiarity with him (as her son Dylan's teammate she has also frequented him outside of school).
However, there is no relevant reference in the code to his counter value (zac_price):
- neither as a possible limiting factor for choosing him ( there is no if zac_price >= x) and thus performing the task,
- nor as an increment at the end of the task itself (there is no $ zac_price += 1), despite the obvious progress made by Zac as Sophia's LI.
The only reference to such a counter is to determine, based on the "close experiences" Sophia had with Zac, certain parts of Sophia's inner dialogue during the selection of the "right student" and other parts of dialogue between the two once the task is completed. When the task is completed, a new variable is introduced (day20_Sophia_fulfilled_Aidens_4th_task = True) which, while not (by its name) directly correlating with Zac, is nonetheless closely related to his character and therefore I believe will be placed side by side with his counter as an indicator of Sophia's advancements toward Zac.
Probably the same thing will happen with the variables you mentioned in this last update, and L&P will use them, as an index of the progressive humiliation Sophia has suffered toward Aiden, in future dialogue scenes between the two.