- Feb 14, 2018
- 260
- 517
Yay for the addition of the hubby being in the running for breeding, yay for that change! Even if it (likely) gets quietly funneled into the regular paths that's totally fine. Very happy for that.
And the updates / writing / art / concept, always super hot.
But..... going to back the call for maybe enabling a cheat-mode that disables the stats. (Maybe in the background just keep track of paths some other way). Or loosens them a lot. When it was just the one tricky choice in the beginning of how to get to soft-NTR.. that's cool, it didn't take long to reach it, it was just one thing. Now coming up on the 'how to deal with the very bad critical situation' and 3/4 paths require VERY specific stat choices.. The idea of going back and replaying to find one spot to move body->intelligence or whatever...
Ok, here's my two cents of game design study and experience. Stats are ideally used to:
* reflect a user's play style (the game reacting to stats by going 'woo look at the dude's muscles, his strength is over 9000!' or 'that dude just feels Evil!'),
* help the game match a player's style ('you're a bard? ok, give me a seduction roll for the dragon..' or 'the player has a high kick-kitten score, let's make the boss-monster a giant cat'),
* soft-gate a player into an area until they're ready to move to the next one, so they spend more time with each area's content ('I killed two dwarves in the morning, I killed two dwarves at night, I killed two dwarves in the afternoon and then I feel alright..' or 'you need to be this tall to ride this next ride, go back to the rack')
It is risky to use stats as hard guardrails because..
* it can funnel people down a path they can't escape later ('Look, at level 1 I picked a hammer, so every plate of noodles now looks like a nail')
* it can decrease detachment to a character ('What do you mean why did my nun-character kick the orphan, I need 13 strength for the next quest and the orphan gave me +1 strength')
* it can hard-lock areas, more and more, if someone didn't pick the exact perfect combination by that point, especially if a game is linear instead of letting you go back to grind / re-spec ('you were playing a stealth character? yea.. you're locked in an open warehouse with the boss-monster and bright lighting, get wrecked son!')
This particular game doesn't seem to be well-served by its stats, and its coming to a head with this latest choice.
Two paths require 9 charisma / 9 intelligence, even though there is zero hint up until then that you'd want to keep a perfect balance
One path requires 13/11/11 (how do you even get that? I have 8/10/10, did I miss an offramp?)
And the last one is 'well.. guess she's screwed'.
That's... not great.
(PS. The 'saveeditonline.com' stat editor worked fine for me. Been avoiding it but seems required to continue. So there are workaround to avoid rage-quitting through this. Just feels like if people start moving to third-party stat-editing that's a design feature that could be improved upon)
And the updates / writing / art / concept, always super hot.
But..... going to back the call for maybe enabling a cheat-mode that disables the stats. (Maybe in the background just keep track of paths some other way). Or loosens them a lot. When it was just the one tricky choice in the beginning of how to get to soft-NTR.. that's cool, it didn't take long to reach it, it was just one thing. Now coming up on the 'how to deal with the very bad critical situation' and 3/4 paths require VERY specific stat choices.. The idea of going back and replaying to find one spot to move body->intelligence or whatever...
Ok, here's my two cents of game design study and experience. Stats are ideally used to:
* reflect a user's play style (the game reacting to stats by going 'woo look at the dude's muscles, his strength is over 9000!' or 'that dude just feels Evil!'),
* help the game match a player's style ('you're a bard? ok, give me a seduction roll for the dragon..' or 'the player has a high kick-kitten score, let's make the boss-monster a giant cat'),
* soft-gate a player into an area until they're ready to move to the next one, so they spend more time with each area's content ('I killed two dwarves in the morning, I killed two dwarves at night, I killed two dwarves in the afternoon and then I feel alright..' or 'you need to be this tall to ride this next ride, go back to the rack')
It is risky to use stats as hard guardrails because..
* it can funnel people down a path they can't escape later ('Look, at level 1 I picked a hammer, so every plate of noodles now looks like a nail')
* it can decrease detachment to a character ('What do you mean why did my nun-character kick the orphan, I need 13 strength for the next quest and the orphan gave me +1 strength')
* it can hard-lock areas, more and more, if someone didn't pick the exact perfect combination by that point, especially if a game is linear instead of letting you go back to grind / re-spec ('you were playing a stealth character? yea.. you're locked in an open warehouse with the boss-monster and bright lighting, get wrecked son!')
This particular game doesn't seem to be well-served by its stats, and its coming to a head with this latest choice.
Two paths require 9 charisma / 9 intelligence, even though there is zero hint up until then that you'd want to keep a perfect balance
One path requires 13/11/11 (how do you even get that? I have 8/10/10, did I miss an offramp?)
And the last one is 'well.. guess she's screwed'.
That's... not great.
(PS. The 'saveeditonline.com' stat editor worked fine for me. Been avoiding it but seems required to continue. So there are workaround to avoid rage-quitting through this. Just feels like if people start moving to third-party stat-editing that's a design feature that could be improved upon)
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