This has been on and off my mind for some time now, so I'll just let it out now:
Chapter 4, as a whole, feels lacking. I mean, the story and events are great. But they feel too spread out and there's nothing to do in between.
By that point, the player likely has already dosed everyone to the fullest (sans MCS-X). They have access to basically infinite money. They have already seen most every repeatable scene dozens of times. And there's entire weeks of no story progression and no task to complete. The entire chapter feels like mindless grind waiting for the next event followed by more grind.
In the early game, you feel a bit rushed to get everything set up and get everyone started on the path you want them on. All the way up to the end of chapter 3, there's a good flow and incentive to keep playing. Then chapter 4 comes around and it's mostly just "skip to night, sleep sequence, skip to night" ad absurdum until you reach Thanksgiving and play through that sequence of events, then more "skip to night" grinding with the rare exception where story events happen entire weeks apart just waiting for the end where you can play around with MCS-X. This won't get any better in the future unless the problem is directly addressed as the player will just end up doing the same thing waiting for chapter 5 to start, whatever events that will bring.
As far as solutions are concerned: I honestly don't know. The addition of an MCS-4 would be amazing but that's a massive task that I won't even begin to request. Shortening the chapter could work but the holiday events introduce problems on that front. Maybe tossing in some interesting events to fill the voids in the chapter could help. The bottom line is that chapter 4, as it stands, is emersion breaking in the sense that it stops feeling interactive and starts feeling like a tedious slog of clicking and waiting for content to be spoonfed to you. The game already "feels" over.
/rant
Chapter 4, as a whole, feels lacking. I mean, the story and events are great. But they feel too spread out and there's nothing to do in between.
By that point, the player likely has already dosed everyone to the fullest (sans MCS-X). They have access to basically infinite money. They have already seen most every repeatable scene dozens of times. And there's entire weeks of no story progression and no task to complete. The entire chapter feels like mindless grind waiting for the next event followed by more grind.
In the early game, you feel a bit rushed to get everything set up and get everyone started on the path you want them on. All the way up to the end of chapter 3, there's a good flow and incentive to keep playing. Then chapter 4 comes around and it's mostly just "skip to night, sleep sequence, skip to night" ad absurdum until you reach Thanksgiving and play through that sequence of events, then more "skip to night" grinding with the rare exception where story events happen entire weeks apart just waiting for the end where you can play around with MCS-X. This won't get any better in the future unless the problem is directly addressed as the player will just end up doing the same thing waiting for chapter 5 to start, whatever events that will bring.
As far as solutions are concerned: I honestly don't know. The addition of an MCS-4 would be amazing but that's a massive task that I won't even begin to request. Shortening the chapter could work but the holiday events introduce problems on that front. Maybe tossing in some interesting events to fill the voids in the chapter could help. The bottom line is that chapter 4, as it stands, is emersion breaking in the sense that it stops feeling interactive and starts feeling like a tedious slog of clicking and waiting for content to be spoonfed to you. The game already "feels" over.
/rant
