From the same interview to Roadwarden's Aureus I've been talking about these past few emails:
Have players surprised you in any way since the full game launched?
Some players grew attached to the tribes a bit more than I expected. They’d like to have an opportunity to abandon their main quest for good and simply stay in the peninsula, betraying the city and helping the Northerners maintain their way of living.
This is an example of what I usually say with let them eat cake.
Aureus defends the position that the player cannot abandon their main role to join the tribes.
I believe that if a reasonable number of players want this, it would be deserving of an update if it wasn't captured in playtesting before.
I'm a firm believer in expanding the possibilities of narrative instead of listening to our own's storyteller ego.
The interesting thing is that later in the interview, Aureus supports this (edited for clarity):
I think some video game writers hope to give themselves a chance to shine, striving to astonish others with their fantastic ideas, but they fail to leave any space for the player to carve their own way.
So I'm a bit confused.
On another topic:
I also didn’t expect so many people to start the second playthrough right after they finish the first one. It makes sense considering most players fail to complete many of the quests, even the major ones, during their first journey, and therefore some of the world’s mysteries remain uncovered. Still, I expected them to wait for a few months, or maybe a year or two, before riding back north. I wish there would be a “second playthrough” option that could cut the familiar introductions and description by half, or even completely, reducing the time spent with repeating text.
This, in my opinion, is a consequence of not having done enough playtesting.
Achieving replayability during playtesting sessions of a 30-hour game is complicated, I get it.
But still, replayability, in the modern video game industry, is one of the first things to take into account.
Apparently, Aureus did a great job with rhizomatic foreshadowing.
But he failed in the design of the experience by not considering that people need tools to navigate the rhizome without having to go through the same text over and over again.
Slay the Princess hides the options that you have already chosen in a previous loop, for example, to help you navigate through new paths.
It is essential that we design the replayability experience before launching our game , there is no doubt about this.
PS: I'll take the next week off. I'll resume the daily emails on January 1st. Happy Holidays! <3
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