There are too many moving parts/branching subplots related to fetishes and characters in the game, regardless of what those fetishes might be. Although given the existence of a certain loud and obnoxious type of poster on this site, I understand why you'd think I was fetish shaming. Not my intention at all, I'll fap to whatever gets me off and I'm usually not offended by depictions of the things that don't.
Well like I said events don't seem to track the context of where Shani is with her quest. Examples off top of head -
>Ain's quality time triggers before Ain asks you to do it (after Shani leaves).
>Idk if the Rabiah visit is supposed to happen before or after but it happened after for me. Plus the narrative incongruity of being concerned for the landgirl going away then gallivanting around town while she's gone.
>In general, quite a few events that happen before Shani's departure detract from it's urgency. Most of them should in fact happen after she has returned. The departure period should be dedicated to main plot faction quests etc. like the elfs.
ah. that.. yes.. so it's not so much a mistake (we had a few things that were knocked out of order on the pre-release and we fixed them afterwards, hence my confusion/question).. as a structural pacing choice.
the game is fairly sandboxy in the way you can play certain events pretty much on the same day/rest cycle, whereas others are gated.. this does create for different orders in which you can play things and not always the order is optimal in terms of pacing... or rather, it will never satisfy everyone.
as for Shani being in the zone and everybody else sort of having to sit on their thumbs and wait for her return with bathed breath.. we did consider that path (I did, Z not so much)... but given the nature of the Zone itself and given how time works in there (and finally also given the size and complexity of the zone production wise) we have decided against going that path... based fundamentally on 2 considerations:
1) in game: the world keeps moving and doesn't stand still, events still go on. On top of that, the whole family has been preparing for some time and this apocalyptic setting is sort of grounded on the notion that you do your best to pursue your goals and that what happens once things are out of your hands is best not to dwell on. Are the characters worried about Shani? most certainly, but it is expected... also, offgame...
2) off game if we did focus on Shani, you would get anywhere from 2 to maybe even 4 updates dedicated to Shani, exclusively with very little wancakes, and almost no screen time for anybody else... on top of that, many a player has expressed how they will simply skip the content that is from her POV and rather wait for it to be recapped when she is back... that is of course their prerogative, but it does mean that we would have a substantial drop in interest in the game by a rather large number of the players. for at least a couple of updates...
That could potentially kill the game in terms of sustainability for Z, who is basically paying rent through it.
So we are going to move the rest of the plots along, side by side with Shani's content. Once that whole chapter is done and dusted, we can always retroactively gate things in a specific order (or let the player chose what he wants to progress first)... To do so in medias res when we don't have a 100% defined list of scenes that go in each update and we don't have a clear picture of what needs to be gated behind what, would not be workable.
This may indeed give an odd vibe of characters ignoring Shani's situation (actually the queen at one point asks about it).. but it's the best we can do, for now.
