- Mar 26, 2020
- 409
- 1,505
And this, you little trolls, is how you do constructive criticism.My two cents are the following. If you want to criticise Eva for the development of ORS, you should criticise her for the decisions she has made regarding the scope of the game - not for milking her patrons, or for purposefully slowing down the release of new chapters.
While the game certainly takes much longer to develop, it is not like the updates don't come with any additional content, that corresponds to the additional time taken. Generally, the average chapter of ORS contains more scenes and more images than the average episode of GGGB, so the additional development is clearly used to pack more into each update. Therefore, I don't think that you can say that she is milking her patrons, as that would mean the updates are constantly being delayed without any output to show for it.
Instead, it is abundantly clear to me that the reason why this game takes so long to develop nowadays, is because she has taken on twice the amount of work. Assuming that you want to keep the content per MC roughly the same as in GGGB, adding an additional MC immediately implies that you would need to double the work you do, even if you wouldn't intertwine their stories at all. However, their stories are intertwined, which means that you must now consider not only how each MC relates to their own closest group of characters, but also how each MC relates to the other MC's closest group of characters. Naturally, this makes the game increasingly complicated to develop, with longer times between updates as a consequence.
Both of these are caused by Eva herself, though, which makes me less sympathetic to her development struggles, and less accepting of the increased development time. Literally anyone could have predicated that this was going to happen when she announced that the game was going to have to MCs, which makes you wonder how Eva decided to move forward with that idea. Likely, all of the problems could have been solved by just keeping the scope at a reasonable level, something that Eva is solely responsible for. For this, I think you have every right to criticise her, and express dissatisfaction at how long the game is taking to develop.
Further, the development tendencies aren't great either. Looking back, the game was actually released relatively frequently for the first five (or so) chapters, after which it has slowed down tremendously. It feels as if every status update contains some comment about how the week wasn't as productive as she would have liked, or how she is struggling with the writing. Clearly, this is a worrying trend, because it suggest that the development is unlikely to speed up, and that, if anything, it will probably slow down, which is once again a consequence of the decisions that she has made regarding the cope of the game.
Personally, I also feel quite annoyed with how Eva seems to have completely accepted that this is now a game that takes five months to develop, and is making no effort to find ways to reduce this time. As long as this doesn't impact her patron numbers, she isn't really incentivized to do so either, which adds to the impression that this game is more likely to slow down in development, rather than speed up, and that Eva really hasn't managed this in the best way possible.
Overall, then, I think that you can criticise Eva for several things when it comes to the development of ORS. Milking, is not one of them. Mismanaging the scope and development, though, is something that I do think Eva has made herself guilty of. It is just unfortunate that it has come to this, because at the end of the day, we all just want as many updates as possible. And while five months can be a huge update for a 3D game, a 2D game does't really compare in this regard...
This I can agree with. And I share some of those worries.
My main criticism of Eva's way of doing it is her obvious lack of planning. With a project of this scope, "gardening writing" (aka "I'mma wing it as it goes" in my book) only goes so far. And I know and understand that it's the best way for her to feel like she can create at all, but it's frustrating to see her hit the same walls time and again.
I think "ideal timeframe of updating" for such a project would be 3 to 4 months. Of course, following and supporting a fair amount of devs with ambitious ones, I've come to realized this only holds for so long and there's a point in the story where, lest they burn themselves out, it's unsustainable and it keeps growing further. This is what happened with ORS, but I'm sure part of it is due to her workflow. Can she work on it and change for the better ? That's a real, hard question. I know Oceandev seemingly went through this not long ago, and apparently is now much more efficient and faster because he changed the way he works and plans (that's his own words though, we'll have to see for ourselves if updates of his two games indeed come out faster than they used to).
In the end, it's not gonna stop me from supporting her though. Because she still delivers what is in my opinion the best updates around, with an insane amount of replayability, and a story that I actually enjoy discovering and revisiting. ORS being what it is, one of the most ambitious VNs around here, makes it both a pain to develop and wait for, and a pleasure to play when it's out. That is its curse.