Hey
Antillar , thanks for the review!
Few things that you pointed out are a very valid points, especially parts regarding Mei and Widowmaker's stories. I'll revisit them to address some of those issues:
- Widow's route will be updated, more specifically the part where you spy on her with Chris. Player will get a choice of eavesdropping or straight up spying. Depending on the choice, you'll see either full scene, that includes her and Chris, or just the part where Widow featured solo. Picking option that will include Chris is also will be accompanied by "trigger warning" explaining the contents of the scene. This scene is relevant in her overall plot, but as of right now, while her story is not fully finished, it just sticks out as some kind of NTR focused element, which it not really supposed to be.
- Mei's route will be revisited to add more substance to her as a character, because as you pointed out, it focuses a little too much on the meteorology, rather than her personality. It won't be a complete overhaul, rather an addition to discuss her looming lack of male figure in life.
Tracer and Mercy are the first routes to be featured in our game, and they didn't really age very well, that's why they are getting a complete rework in upcoming overhaul update, to bring them closer to what we did with Sombra and DVa.
Brigitte, in my opinion, is good as is. Yea, bondage might not be for everyone, but there's a solid chunk of our player base who loves her story. Reworking it to be more appealing to masses feels wrong. Also, speaking about Andre, her character has been introduced as a "test of waters" to see whether our players will be interested in content not featuring Overwatch girls, and she turned out to be one of the most fan favorites elements of the game. We don't want to stick to OW like parasites forever, and wanted to make sure we can do good stuff without using someone else's work as a foundation. That's also the reason why her story is rather short and clunky, because we didn't want to take too much time to make update that people might not want to see. In future, when we'll get more time, I'll add more of an actual story to her.
In regard of our setting: This is our first experience making a game, and I'm gonna be honest, when we just started we didn't expect it to go anywhere. We were almost adamant that it will just be a short dating-sim kind of game with couple of characters, just so we can gain some kind of experience in this sphere. We used OW characters to gain attention, so it will be easier to get feedback on what we did right and what we did wrong. It's too late to change the setting now, so we're just looking for ways to make it work.
Gameplay-wise, it will remain a dating sim, but we'll try to add some meat on top of this premise to make it more engaging to stroll around the Academy.
Grind, yea, it sucks, and we're working on possible solutions to turn most of it into idle-like progression where we can, and the rest will be spiced with random events. If you have any ideas what could work in our case, feel free to drop them here, because honestly we need them.
Again, thank you for honest review. We're doing our best to turn this game into something worth both your and our time, because we don't really want our first game to be unfinished and lackluster piece of porn. If we can't make even this right, it's too early to think of real and bigger projects for sure.