I had to get this off my chest. Firstly, I've been a long term fan and player of the game, so it's not that I turned up from hibernation to unload my negativity. I do read the theories and the responses from the devs about the game but 2 years and 19 episodes in an adult VN, there are some glaring issues I couldn't miss.
- Story -- Let's start with the elephant in the room itself, the story. It started with a great yet simple premise of an MC trying to find his footing with his surrogate family, with which sparks that began a while ago start to rekindle with the intensity of a bonfire. Over time, we were introduced to a larger, supporting cast and importantly, a mystery person who may or may not have been seen by a barista as the computer from which the email was sent was in the cafe. While this was interesting when it appeared when the episodes were in single digits, for me at least, it has lost all the suspense to the point that I hardly care. The key of a great suspense plot is to constantly feed the viewer/reader/player into it and all the characters would have a minor plot to play in the big picture. Even till end of Ep19, we're nowhere near to any solid leads but we go from one bombshell in one update to a cluster of them in another, with the main plot getting convoluted.
This is reflected in the dev's delays as the technical backend of so many characters and so many choices leads to a plethora of combinations, that it becomes intractable and infeasible. I believe this was because of lack of vision of what the end should have been for this game. It has got to the point that no matter how you "win", as a player who played 20+ episodes, you won't be satisfied as the devs seem to show a fatigue of plot progression.
- Choices -- Stemming from the point above, too many choices for anyone's liking and as a player, hard to determine the impact of a choice because in my view, the more choices you have per character interaction, the impact of that choice diminishes like a temperature cooling Newton curve. Why not have more choices with OG characters/characters that influence the main plot rather than every random character that pops up every 2-3 update? Wouldn't that make the dev's workload manageable and keep long-lasting players like me happy?
- Considerations -- The above critique may sound harsh but if I remember correctly, Cheeky became a father, there were couple of instances the staff was reduced and Covid hit. These are beyond anyone's realm of control and because the team have kept the lines of communications wide open like a German Autobahn, players like me have been loyal. Even with these considerations, I believe some oversight and end point of a game with multiple endings is the very least loyal players like us deserve. With that I think the team have got their work cut out. I've deliberately avoided mentioning any character names, as I'm sure I'll be pounced on by hardcore character fans for being biased.
I hope acewinz and CheekyGimp take my points in the right spirit and address it to some extent. Looking fwd for Ep20. Cheers!
No offense taken. We have always listened to critique and it goes a long way to helping us make the game better. You also have plenty of validity to your points. We too are worried about story fatigue as it were.
All I can say from my pov is that first there has never been any doubt where the story is going. Cheeky had it laid out before he even started, we are making up the details as we go, but the main story is set in stone.
Second this update will see a major story development so hopefully that will go a ways to keeping people on board the main plot driver.
Third which ties somewhat into your choices bullet... I think the greatest failing, but also the greatest strength of WTHI which separates it from most others is the actual impact of your choices. It's one thing to have multiple "paths" that determine interactions between the main character and another on an individual basis, but Cheeky went the extra 100 yards to make all our relationships interconnected with each other character in their respective grouping and to some degree overall, and they react to it. We don't keep a huge ongoing variable list for nothing, people who have tried to do walkthroughs for our game generally go mad, and I can pretty much guarantee that unless you keep a journal of your choices, no two games are going to play out exactly the same even if you dated the same girls.
The weakness of all this is an exponential amount of overhead which slows us down some. As Cheeky mentioned in one of his last post, the morning after with the girls at the beach house was several thousands lines of dialog and code, but most people won't even see a third of that in a single playthrough because of all the different variations based on choices. As you say this is a pita for us, but we are committed and don't plan to cut back on that aspect before we finish this game (next game may be a different story). The good news is that the beach house was probably our hardest scene to deal with from that perspective, with it's wrap up this EP some of the worst divergences of pathing have been wrangled, and also some arcs that are not central to the story will finish up soon enough and you won't see much more from them till the endings. We also have no plans to introduce any new characters. Even Mabel's intro was sort of a fluke because Cheeky thought that EP was too milfy (I agreed reluctantly).
As for our problems expanding the team reliably, that is just par for the course really. These types of games are more labors of love than a real source of income honestly save for a lucky few. Sort of makes the incentive for newcomers underwhelming.
As for the future of the game, we just keep on trucking. We are coming up to the top of the roller-coaster now and I hope that all the updates going forward will be to some degree plot driven until the end, but no promises as usual. Thanks for all the fish and praise though. It's why we keep at it.