Okay, non-topic related question. Is there a game tag-genre for games that have you manually play the game, like Treasure of Nadia, Evenicle 1, The Awakening, those types of games with maps, that you have to find clues and move in stupid mazes and temples, I'd like to avoid these kind of games at all costs. [IMPORTANT] I am not talking about free-roam, as BADIK has, tho.
I think "Sandbox" comes closest, but even that is a bit imprecise.
I can't take people seriously when they say they are not going to skip the update. You know you are going to download it. You are going to boot it up. Just soon as you hear that first guitar riff from Punk Rock Flu you are gonna be on board. If for no other reason than to bitch about it here on the board.
Eh, maybe. Normally I'd agree, but this time I sort of see their argument. From what we know (which is admittedly very little) this is an very self-contained chapter. It won't really give us a lot of insight into the rest of the game, so putting it off for a while has relatively low impact if you aren't eager to see Zoey.
I do plan to play the Interlude tomorrow (unless CoBD releases as well), but I certainly don't feel the anticipation I normally would. If there were other demands on my time this wouldn't be a particularly high priority.
I just don't get it.
- Did people skip the mc introducing his dad and his family situation at the beginning of episode 1? Who cares about Neil anyway!
- Did they bail on the scene with Jade and Stephen fighting at the beginning of episode 3? I mean who wants to see domestic issues between a husband and a wife!
- Did they completely ignore the camping scene with Maya, Josey, Derek and Lynn that made up the episode 4 prologue? I mean, why introduce Lynn, we'll probably never see her again!
- What about the episode 5 prologue where Rusty & Tommy form the DIKs and we get to see Vinny and Nick joining up? Was that too much to endure? The mc hasn't even met Vinny, so what's the point?
- Then there was episode 6's prologue where we got an insight into Rox and Buddy, did people want to skip that the first time too? Rox is dead, and Buddy is just a low life drug dealer, why bother?
- Then in episode 7's prologue we got to meet Lana. Did people just fast forward through that scene? I mean Lana's dead, we can't fuck her right?
- And most recently, the library scene with Bella and James made up the prologue for episode 8. Did it kill people to sit through that? I mean fuck James!
Sure, but size matters. Those prologues didn't take an hour to play through. If we had to sit through 60 minutes of James and Bella delicately avoiding any actual information about their marriage while playing a book sorting mini-game, I would have been a lot harsher in my critique of Episode 8.
The Interlude is just another one of these prologues, giving us a back story for a character we know of, but don't know much about.
The thing is, the mc knows her very well, but we the player, hardly know her at all. If she showed up on the mc's doorstep, he'd be all kinds of things, thrilled to see his close/only friend from years back, maybe scared that he still has feelings for her while having (mildly) committed himself to another girl, maybe horny because she was indeed a good lay.
I mean the mc is gonna have a complex reaction to her return because she means a lot to him. But this, "Fuck her, I'm not interested in her" attitude means some players have failed to understand there is a story here.
I understand the story just fine, thank you. The problem is, you can't make me care about a character by subjecting me to her for a prolonged period of time. You need to interest me in the character
first, otherwise the experience will at best be a tedious chore.
I know who Zoey is and why she's important to the MC, but I still don't care about her. The MC has spent the whole of Season 2 (allegedly) developing a relationship with the LIs and reached the point where he felt one was serious enough to commit to. IMHO, that means the new girl(s) must be at least as serious as it ever was with Zoey, since that's the only conceivable metric by which the MC could reach such a decision.
Unfortunately, that leaves Zoey out in the cold, and I don't see any way the Interlude could change that - short of retconning the game or including scenes with Zoey and the main cast interacting in the present. The former is (hopefully) ridiculous, and the latter seems impractical. Hence my concern over the direction of the story.
We're slowly learning about the people in the mc's life:
- His new acquaintances (the gang at B&R),
- His old acquaintances (Zoey, Neil),
- People he hasn't met yet (Vinny, Buddy); and
- People he missed out on meeting all together (Rox, Lynette).
DPC has a story to tell here. Each character is part of the story. If you don't let him tell the story, the story is gonna be fucked up.
The most ironic thing here is we're getting the episode 9 prologue much sooner in the development cycle than any of the other prologues were released. Definitely a reason to be whining like little bitches...
Indeed, but the emphasis should be on
slowly. The characters you mentioned have been explored at the pace of the overall story. We didn't need a special episode to learn Quinn's tragic origins, and I don't think Episode 6 would have been better if we got one anyway.
DPC had plenty of time to establish Zoey more gradually, but he put it off until now. That ups the Twist(tm), but it also ups our expectations AND increases the degree of difficulty. Hopefully he'll be up to the task and will pull this off anyway, but based on his track record I'm not feeling all that optimistic. DPC tends to struggle with big twists.
